Mansour now feeds his family using ration cards distributed by the International Committee of the Red Cross, and he cleans the basilica to avoid being evicted by his landlord, the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate. With his business bankrupt and his hopes for a breatkthrough in the peace process dashed, he’s preparing for what was once unthinkable. Next week, Mansour, 36, will immigrate to Italy in search of work. “I’ll send for my wife and five kids as soon as I find something,” he says.
These are bleak times for the Palestinian Authority’s tiny Christian minority. Beset by high unemployment, the humiliations of Israeli occupation, the spread of radical Islam and an alleged campaign of illegal land seizures by the Muslim majority, many of them see no future in the land of their birth.
Nowhere is that feeling more acute than in Bethlehem and the adjacent villages of Beit Jala and Beit Sahur, as I discovered while researching “A Season in Bethlehem: Unholy War in a Sacred Place” (304 pages.Free Press). In these Biblical towns studded with grottoes, where early Christian saints dwelled, more than 1,200 Christians have fled abroad since the uprising began in September 2000. All told, the Christian population in the occupied territories has declined from 110,000 in 1948 to 50,000 today. About 30,000 of those live in the Bethlehem area. Some Christian leaders fear that the community could disappear in a generation. “We’re witnessing an emigration like the one a century ago,” says Hannah Nasser, mayor of Bethlehem, referring to the last days of the Ottoman Empire, when thousands fled to Latin America to escape being drafted into the sultan’s Army.
Palestinian Christians have long occupied a precarious middle ground between Israelis and Palestinian Muslims. The influx of thousands of Muslim refugees to the Bethlehem area after the 1948 war, coupled with the low Christian birthrate and continued emigration, sapped their numbers and their clout. Israel targeted them during the occupation: after the Six Day War, Israeli authorities seized 11,000 acres of olive groves from Christian landowners in Beit Jala to build the Jewish settlement of Gilo, and later grabbed large tracts of Christian property to construct a highway linking settlements south of Bethlehem to Jerusalem. With the coming to power of the Palestinian Authority in 1994, Christians began to feel threatened by their Muslim- dominated government. Though Yasir Arafat had a policy of protecting Christians, lower-ranking officials seized the property of absentee Christian landlords who had moved abroad, and hired Muslims to replace Christian officials who held key positions under Israeli occupation.
Even some Christian militants who had battled the Israeli occupation now say they wonder what they were fighting for. As a leader of the Beit Jala chapter of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Khader Abu Abbara, 46, threw stones and firebombs alongside Fatah fighters during the first intifada in the 1980s. But during the second uprising, Muslim gunmen entered Beit Jala to fire from the sanctuary of Christian homes on Gilo, located on a hillside just across a gorge. Retaliatory shelling by Israel damaged dozens of houses and killed three Christian residents of Beit Jala. Abu Abbara was appalled by the gunmen’s tactics–and went through an “awakening,” he says, while under administrative detention in an Israeli prison in the Negev Desert. He was mortified at the spread of radical Islam among his fellow inmates: of the 78 prisoners in his compound, he says, he was the only one who wasn’t a follower of Hamas. Released a year ago, he denounced the Palestinian Authority and the militarization of the intifada and resigned from the Popular Front. He says the Palestinians now face a choice between a corrupt secular government “and an Islamic state.”
Christians say that a wave of land seizures by Muslims exemplifies Palestinian lawlessness. Six weeks ago Tony Sabella, a tour guide, found three men squatting on the 600-square-meter plot of Bethlehem farmland that his family has owned for 25 years. They proffered documents Sabella insists were forged and refused to leave. “We have enough occupation [from the Israelis],” says Sabella, whose case is dragging through Bethlehem’s chaotic courts. “We don’t need Muslims to occupy our land, too.” Muslims wielding an allegedly falsified bill of sale also seized the multimillion-dollar property of Samir Asfour, a wealthy Bethlehem doctor. According to Asfour, the people who seized his land presented as evidence of ownership a 1970 document sealed with a Jordanian stamp, even though the Israelis captured the territory from Jordan in 1967. Arafat himself has promised to investigate, but the case still hasn’t been resolved. One leading Christian businessman in Beit Sahur claims he is aware of 34 cases of illegal seizures of land and property from Christians in the Bethlehem area during the past two months. “There is a determination to Islamicize Bethlehem,” says Father Peter Madros, an official of the Latin Patriarchate and teacher at Bethlehem University.
Madros claims that local Muslims are seeking to change the name of Manger Square–the plaza in front of the Church of the Nativity–to Omar Square, after Omar Ibn al-Khatab, the Arabian caliph who conquered the Holy Land in A.D. 638. Bethlehem Mayor Nasser calls the report untrue, but some Muslims I spoke with insist that the name change is long overdue. Convinced their days are numbered inside the Palestinian Authority, several Christians in Beit Jala have begun to advocate a radical step: their village, they say privately, should be annexed to Israel, and the security fence extended around its borders to keep the Muslims out. Yet the Israelis aren’t eager to include them, either.
