It’s Christmas in the Holy Land, but it doesn’t seem like it. In the West Bank, all Christmas celebrations have been suspended. In Bethlehem the birth of the baby Jesus looks at Gaza surrounded by rubble and concertinas. And, no matter where you look and who you ask, the war in the strip occupies everything and it does not take long to feel the fear that the conflict in the Palestinian enclave will spread.
The West Bank lives in mourning, but also with nerves about what might happen to them.
And Bethlehem is already suffering.
Used to be overflowing with tourists during the Christmas holidays, this year the groups of tourists who visited on such a special day as December 24 could be counted on the fingers of one hand.
“Since the 7th [because of the attack by Hamas on Israel and the beginning of the war] there is no one there anymore”, complained a tourist guide at the gates of the Church of the Nativity, built where, according to the Christian tradition, Jesus was born.
The central Plaça del Pessebre, with the Church of the Nativity on one side and the Mosque of Omar ibn al-Khattab on the opposite corner, has always been an anthill for visitors, the epicenter of Christmas celebrations. But not this year.
The consequence is that “it is no longer possible”, say one and the other. The tourist street of artisan shops seems empty. The premises are closed and barred. The souvenir shops have no one to sell the gifts to. The few tourists there are actually locals and they don’t shop. Queues don’t exist.
But even then, it’s hard to get to Bethlehem on a day as special as Christmas. It’s only half an hour by bus from Jerusalem, it barely costs the equivalent of just over one euro for the trip, but almost no one goes there because the delays abound, and when one crosses the desolate Israeli checkpoint more taxi drivers and less customers.
One received two Italian parishioners, Maria and Maria Chiara, and also repeated his fear that, after Gaza, a conflict would break out in Lebanon and, after Lebanon, the West Bank would break out. “From the 7th everything is more expensive”, implored one of his colleagues. The faces, the gestures, the absences of the rest of those who were there while he spoke insisted on the feeling of having nothing to celebrate. “This doesn’t come from the 7th, it comes from before”, Maria and Maria Chiara confided later. The same would be repeated by others in Plaça del Pessebre.
On Christmas Day in Bethlehem, barely any journalists and a few Palestinians gathered. The Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem did not fail in tradition and completed the walk to the Church of the Nativity. He did it without music and mostly surrounded by police. He called for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza. “Because violence only begets violence”, he defended.
His last message coincided, on the other hand, with the sending of a press release from the Israeli Government in which these words of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu were repeated: “Let me be clear: this will be a long war”.
Bethlehem today has no one to visit it for Christmas. Bethlehem today breathes tension because of a war between Israel and Hamas that has already killed 20,000 Palestinians in the enclave, according to the Gazan Ministry of Health, but which also closes the border crossings with the West Bank and which are the usual place of passage for workers who they can no longer pass. Bethlehem, today, moreover, no longer has the oxygen that allowed it to breathe, tourism.
These days in the West Bank nothing goes well. There are no tourists. There are no celebrations. There are no alternatives. In fact, the weather doesn’t even cooperate: it rains in torrents at times, it’s cold, the wind blows and the gray sky predominates.
