Bethlehem in the crosshairs: as Christians around the world sing of Bethlehem, the city of Jesus' birth is locked in the chokehold of virtual house arrest: first in a two-part series - Christmas

National Catholic Reporter, Dec 20, 2002 by Pat Morrison

BROTHER Jerome Sullivan decided to walk down the hill to attend Mass on the second Sunday of Advent. Normally, strolling to church on a Sunday morning is not a major event. But in the biblical city of Bethlehem, as for much of the West Bank, nothing is normal.

A few blocks from Bethlehem University, which his order sponsors and staffs, Sullivan was stopped by a soldier of the Israeli Defense Forces. The entire city of Bethlehem was under curfew, with residents forbidden to travel or even be out on the streets.

"He stopped me, asked to see my documents, examined my passport, and then let me go ahead," Sullivan said in a Dec. 8 telephone interview with NCR. "But ff I had been a Palestinian, I'm sure I would have been turned back--or worse."

The brothers at Bethlehem University have a unique vantage point for viewing the endless cycle of killing and retribution in Bethlehem.

The endless debate hardly needs rehearsing. The Israeli argument is that suicide bombings of innocent civilians bring the retribution. The Palestinians respond, of course, that the retaliation is all out of proportion and directed against an already oppressed people driven to extremes by their situation.

Whatever view one takes, the unrelenting reality--and irony--is that in Bethlehem this Christmas the entire population is under a total, citywide lockdown.

A native New Yorker and former head of the De La Salle Christian Brothers' New York province, Sullivan is the university's vice president for development. Previously a teacher and administrator at several of the order's high schools in the New York area, he is no stranger to challenges. But he and the faculty at Bethlehem University admit that the past year has been the most difficult in their tenure and probably in the university's 28-year history. He and his confreres--one from Great Britain, one native Palestinian and seven other Americans--are struggling to hold a major university together and keep it functioning while the Israelis continue to lock much of the West Bank, and Bethlehem in particular, in virtual house arrest that began in the spring.

Br. Neil Kieffe, the university's vice president for academic affairs, recited a litany of woes that would have driven many other universities to hang a "CLOSED" sign on the door and send students elsewhere. The university's newest construction project, a multi-million dollar complex named Millennium Hall, was dedicated in February, featuring state-of-the-art classrooms, labs, an auditorium and office building. In March, Israeli anti-tank missiles slammed into the new buildings, clearly targeting their support columns--a common maneuver the Israeli forces usually reserve for civilian dwellings, to ensure that they are too badly damaged to repair. More than 100 Israeli soldiers commandeered the campus for their barracks in April, despite the fact that as a religious and educational institution the university should be protected from military incursion by international law. In October, Kieffe said, "every building on the campus was damaged by the Israeli invasion," with an estimated repair bill well over $100,000.

Worrying about human toll

But the brothers worry about the human toll on faculty and students as well as loss of learning more than damage to the buildings. "We lost over 100 class days due to the total lockdown," Kieffe said. When students weren't turned back at IDF roadblocks or locked in their homes by the curfew, they sometimes risked their lives to get to class. Because of the frequent road closures, one taxi cannot make the entire trip, "which means that students sometimes have to take five or six taxis to get to the university. And when they do, they may discover their instructors weren't able to get in."

The university lost two faculty members this past year, both to emigration, Kieffe said. "It was just too much stress" for them. They both lived fairly close, "but sometimes it took all day to make a trip that should be a half hour, and then when they'd get to campus, there were no students."

Fadi Kattan is one person who's committed to staying, but he shares the frustration of his colleagues and his students. Kattan, a Roman Catholic who is a lifelong resident of Bethlehem, is dean of Bethlehem University's College of Business Administration.

Kattan, 36, has seen most of his extended family emigrate to the United States and South America in the past two years. "They wanted to remain--this is their homeland, this is a sacred place they come from--but they couldn't survive anymore. The parents are willing to make sacrifices themselves, but they want something better than this for their children. They want more than constant fighting and killing. So those who can, leave," Kattan told NCR in a telephone interview.

As an educator, he feels the frustration of seeing young people not able to live up to their potential because the education has been so erratic. "It's like trying to teach normally when you're in a war zone," he said. "By the time they come to university, what they learned before was very poor, because school happens in between constant fighting. They lose weeks of school, the teachers can't follow a decent curriculum. Then, when they do come here, we can't really ask too much of these kids. They can't study because they haven't slept in weeks, they hear gunfire all night, they have nightmares. Or they're depressed--all of them have lost someone to death, a relative, a friend. I can't assign them any field work, because they can't get around, they can't travel outside their community to do it."