Bethlehem's Christian population is trying hard this year to bring the Christmas atmosphere back to its streets.
For the first time in the last five years of Israeli-Palestinian fighting, the town's municipality has organized a week-long Christmas market.
The town hall has also once again decorated one of the tall pine trees on Manger Square and installed Christmas lighting in the historic city center -- something it refrained from doing in the earlier years of the intifada when the uprising was at its height.
PHOTO: AP
But the decorations are modest -- Parish Priest Amjad Sabbara cites lack of funding as the main reason -- and the market, which with no more than a dozen stands looks rather sober, attracts few visitors.
The Christmas spirit still seems poignantly absent in Bethlehem, and the birth place of Jesus would need a miracle to bring it back in time for Christmas Eve.
Bethlehem houses one of the holiest shrines in Christianity -- the Church of the Nativity, built on the spot where, Christian tradition has it, stood the stable in which Jesus was born.
But while tourists and pilgrims are slowly beginning to return to the West Bank town after the intifada lost much of its ferocity, they are still a fraction of the peak numbers of the year 2000, when millions visited Bethlehem to mark two millenia since the birth of Jesus.
The rush accompanying Muslim holidays, of people buying groceries and other essentials, is also lacking, as today only one third of Bethlehem's 30,000 residents are Christians, who live among a faster growing Muslim population.
Nevertheless, says Bethlehem's Roman Catholic priest, Father Sabarra, when asked about the Christmas cheer, "I feel it better this year."
"We have tried our best to make people feel that this year is different" by organizing a series of festivities, including the Christmas market, the Franciscan says.
The decorations along Star Street, through which Latin Patriarch Michel Sabbah is to lead the traditional Christmas Eve procession from Jerusalem to Bethlehem, are simple mainly because of a lack of money, he explains.
Bethlehem Mayor Victor Batarseh complained in a news conference last week that Bethlehem -- which with some 35 percent of its population making a living from tourism has been hard hit by the past five years of mutual Israeli-Palestinian violence -- was not receiving any financial assistance from the Christian world, nor was it getting sufficient funding from the Palestinian Authority.
But the town is slowly recovering. This holiday season it is expecting 30,000 tourists, as opposed to 18,000 last winter.
"This year is better than the last four years," says Nabil Hirmas, 52, a Palestinian guide who gives tours of the Church of the Nativity in English, French and German.
"Yesterday we had 150 tourists. It depends on the day, sometimes there are 500, sometimes 400," he says, adding "it's not like in 2000. In 2000 we had 5,000 per day."
At the Christmas market, on a small square off Star Street at about a 10-minute walk from the Church of the Nativity, a Palestinian tries to sell olive wood statues from his wood carving factory for what he says are wholesale prices.
No one queues up to buy the items, but in a reminder of the holiday season, the strains of Jingle Bells in Arabic come wafting from a nearby music and gift shop on the largely empty square.
Also see stories:
‘UNUSUAL EVENT’: The Australian defense minister said that the Chinese navy task group was entitled to be where it was, but Australia would be watching it closely The Australian and New Zealand militaries were monitoring three Chinese warships moving unusually far south along Australia’s east coast on an unknown mission, officials said yesterday. The Australian government a week ago said that the warships had traveled through Southeast Asia and the Coral Sea, and were approaching northeast Australia. Australian Minister for Defence Richard Marles yesterday said that the Chinese ships — the Hengyang naval frigate, the Zunyi cruiser and the Weishanhu replenishment vessel — were “off the east coast of Australia.” Defense officials did not respond to a request for comment on a Financial Times report that the task group from
DEFENSE UPHEAVAL: Trump was also to remove the first woman to lead a military service, as well as the judge advocates general for the army, navy and air force US President Donald Trump on Friday fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown, and pushed out five other admirals and generals in an unprecedented shake-up of US military leadership. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that he would nominate former lieutenant general Dan “Razin” Caine to succeed Brown, breaking with tradition by pulling someone out of retirement for the first time to become the top military officer. The president would also replace the head of the US Navy, a position held by Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead a military service,
Four decades after they were forced apart, US-raised Adamary Garcia and her birth mother on Saturday fell into each other’s arms at the airport in Santiago, Chile. Without speaking, they embraced tearfully: A rare reunification for one the thousands of Chileans taken from their mothers as babies and given up for adoption abroad. “The worst is over,” Edita Bizama, 64, said as she beheld her daughter for the first time since her birth 41 years ago. Garcia had flown to Santiago with four other women born in Chile and adopted in the US. Reports have estimated there were 20,000 such cases from 1950 to
CONFIDENT ON DEAL: ‘Ukraine wants a seat at the table, but wouldn’t the people of Ukraine have a say? It’s been a long time since an election, the US president said US President Donald Trump on Tuesday criticized Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and added that he was more confident of a deal to end the war after US-Russia talks. Trump increased pressure on Zelenskiy to hold elections and chided him for complaining about being frozen out of talks in Saudi Arabia. The US president also suggested that he could meet Russian President Vladimir Putin before the end of the month as Washington overhauls its stance toward Russia. “I’m very disappointed, I hear that they’re upset about not having a seat,” Trump told reporters at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida when asked about the Ukrainian