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

Strategic isolation

Today Har Homa is a pre-fab concrete giant, poorly designed and ugly, looming over historic Bethlehem. But more than its lack of aesthetics worries its Palestinian neighbors. The settlement is ready for occupancy, with 50,000 apartments available tax-free for Jews coming to Israel from all over the world, especially Eastern Europe and the United States. Many settlements are dominated by U.S. Jews, with Brooklyn accents sprinkled among the Hebrew and Russian one hears in the West Bank.

Har Homa is expected to bring environmental disaster to the beleaguered region, generating millions of tons of waste that will probably end up polluting the severely limited Palestinian water supplies. Israel is already in breach of numerous provisions of the Oslo Accords, which prohibit confiscation of or use of Palestinian water sources and aquifers. Currently 65 percent of Palestine's water is illegally being siphoned off and going to 45,000 Jewish settlers, with only 35 percent of Palestine's water left for 1.2 million Palestinians.

Each settlement also means dozens of access roads--built with U.S. taxpayer dollars as economic aid to Israel--and totally off limits to the Palestinian people whose land they bisect.

As the settlements continue to strategically ring the West Bank, they form a noose suffocating Palestinian movement, their roads cutting off Palestinians from their land, slicing between houses and farmland or terraces. In the case of Har Homa, the access roads have effectively paralyzed several small villages around Bethlehem, the inhabitants now stranded on virtual islands, totally surrounded by Israeli settlements and unable to move freely to schools, churches, mosques and work outside their communities.

"The roads are deliberately designed to crisscross the landscape, so that little Palestinian areas are isolated by Israeli roads," Kieffe said. "Squeeze them until you kill them off."

"Listen to Sharon and he talks about `transfer' of the Palestinians from the region. That's code for ethnic cleansing, and the settlements are effectively doing that. That's why instead of stopping them, as Israel committed to doing, he's going full steam ahead--and neither the United States nor the United Nations is willing to slap his hand."

Reem Gedeon is not a politician. But she knows from painful firsthand experience what the strangling of Bethlehem means. The 19-year-old honors student at Bethlehem University lives halfway between the university and Manger Square with its 1,600-year-old Church of the Nativity.

Like most Palestinian young people, she lives at home with her parents, sisters and brother--in her case a total of five siblings. With lack of jobs, no money for rent, and the impossibility of buying or building homes of their own, young Palestinians often live in their parental home into their 30s, with newlyweds sharing space with extended family for years. And like most of her Bethlehem neighbors, her family has had no source of income for months.