Little Town of Bethlehem: No Longer Still and Peaceful

BETHLEHEM – It’s the Christmas season, but instead of decorations, tourists and holiday cheer in the city of Jesus’ birth, the city is rife with harassment of Christians and even threats by Islamic extremists to ruin the holiday.

Christians feel increasingly estranged from their own turf with the increasing Muslim population squeezing out the diminishing Christian minority.

“They shoot at us, they look at us as if we’re foreigners ... we’re in a big jail right now,” Ra’ed Haddad said. “The last five years, they fight like it’s the intifada, but it looks like the mafia.”

Bethlehem’s Christian population has dwindled to 26 percent of the population (about 20,000 of the city’s 130,000 residents), a drastic drop from 60 percent in 1967. In the rest of the Palestinian Authority (PA), the percentage is even lower: Christians comprise about 1.7 percent of the total population.  

Basically, the Christians are suffering, or they are leaving.

“They are arrested repeatedly, threatened, beaten, faced with false legal charges,” said human rights lawyer Justus Weiner. “They are offered a good job in the PA if they renounce Christianity and turn in other Christians.”

According to Wiener’s eight years of research, the majority of Palestinian Christians today live abroad, particularly in Central and Latin America and are fleeing for religious, political and economic reasons.

While Muslim converts to Christianity are persecuted most severely, Weiner said Christians who are born Christian “are viewed in a derogatory manner.” Evangelicals, with their association with the west rather than traditional Eastern religions, are persecuted more.

“They are seen as being from a foreign culture and as having immoral ways to a predominantly Muslim society,” he said.

Weiner, who is raising awareness of this situation through research and conferences, was rebuffed by a US State Department official who told him not to expect the US government to deal with the issue.

But lately, Christians in Palestinian territories have been taking their lonely stand without the backing of any government. Haddad, 30, is one of them.
 
“I am staying here to defend my church,” he said. “I was born here, it’s my country. I have to stay here.”

Haddad’s own life follows the statistics. He said 70 percent of his friends live overseas and have invited him to join them for a chance at a better job and more opportunities.

Muslim families are large and they Haddad told how his friend’s father was killed when he refused to pay bribe money to keep his shop open.

“I’m not scared of them. They treat us very badly, they try to put us in jail,” he said. “But the guns cause people to fear.”

One man who preferred not to be named, said the attacks are particularly bad against women, who are often kidnapped and forced to marry Muslims or raped so they will be considered unfit for marriage. 

The “Islamicization” of Bethlehem began in earnest in the 1970’s when Muslim groups gave mortgages to Palestinians to move to Bethlehem as an alternative to Jerusalem. Bethlehem, just a few miles from Jerusalem downtown once boasted a booming tourist trade and easy access to jobs in Jerusalem. Now unemployment is high and access to and from the city is limited by security concerns.

In 1967 only about a dozen mosques existed in Bethlehem. Now the number is 84 compared to 40 churches, most of them traditional eastern Orthodox and Catholic churches. The number of churches has remained relatively unchanged over the centuries.

This will be the first Christmas with representatives of Hamas and Islamic Jihad—both on the US State Department’s list of terrorist organizations—on the city council. Muslims have seven of the 15 seats while Christians have eight.

Also, a terrorist threat has been circulating on the Internet threatening to attack the Greek patriarch as he travels from Jerusalem to Bethlehem on Christmas Eve.

“Bethlehem has become the city of Mohammed,” said Roni Shaked, Israeli expert on Arab affairs. “Bethlehem is the symbol of the Christian people, therefore it is being targeted.”