Christmas Carols: O Little Town of Bethlehem

Every shopping experience in Manila since mid-November has involved Christmas carols and to my surprise most of them have been carols as opposed to Christmas songs like Jingle Bells and Frosty the Snowman. Joy to the World and Hark the Herald Angels seem to head the charts.

O little town of Bethlehem
How still we see thee lie
Above thy deep and dreamless sleep
The silent stars go by
Yet in thy dark streets shineth
The everlasting Light
The hopes and fears of all the years
Are met in thee tonight

I had the privilege to visit Bethlehem earlier this year to see the town where Christ was born, but to do that I had to pass through military checkpoints since the Israeli's through fear have encircled the town with a 30 foot high wall.

For Christ is born of Mary
And gathered all above
While mortals sleep, the angels keep
Their watch of wondering love
O morning stars together
Proclaim the holy birth
And praises sing to God the King
And Peace to men on earth

Needless to say the experience for tourists is surprising but fairly straightforward, however for the few Palestinians who have a permit to leave Bethlehem the experience is far different, like entering and leaving the "open-air" prison that they are subject to. The young Israeli soldiers who man the checkpoints and towers on the wall do not "watch with wondering love" the people of Christ's birth community.

How silently, how silently
The wondrous gift is given!
So God imparts to human hearts
The blessings of His heaven.
No ear may hear His coming,
But in this world of sin,
Where meek souls will receive him still,
The dear Christ enters in.

Palestinian Christians point out that if Jesus were born now the military restrictions would mean that Mary and Joseph could not make the journey from Nazareth (in Israel) to Bethlehem (in the West Bank). Fear is real and injustices many in the Holy Land and yet God is not disconnected from this pain, grief and anger. Jesus entered a world of sin, along with occupation and injustice. He did not enter because he had to, he entered because his love gave him no alternative. He was born in Bethlehem due to the occupying powers decree for a census for taxation. 

O holy Child of Bethlehem
Descend to us, we pray
Cast out our sin and enter in
Be born to us today
We hear the Christmas angels
The great glad tidings tell
O come to us, abide with us
Our Lord Emmanuel  

Pain of Reconciliation

It is only in the last month that I heard the word "Naqba" (spelt with q or k in the Anglisized form). It is an Arabic word which means "catastrophe". Palestinians use the word to describe May 15, 1948 when the state of Israel was created and many thousands of Palestinians were forced from their homes and not allowed to return, many others were killed in this period. It is a sad part of Palestinian history which their people remember in the same way that the Holocaust was a hideous time in Jewish history that Jews and many others remember or that people in New York remember 9/11. I do not want to compare these horrors and indicate one was worse than other, no doubt far more people were systematically killed in the Holocaust especially in comparison with 9/11, but that does not make the disaster any different in scale for those effected.

In March 2011 the Israeli government passed the "Nakba Law" in which any organisation that marks Nakba Day, even a school, will lose any government funding. Since 20% of the population in Israel (not including the Occupied Territories) is Arab, this has a huge effect on how this community's history can be taught.

On the way out of Tel Aviv on June 3 I bought a copy of the International Herald Tribune: Jerusalem Edition, inside was included Haaretz, an Israeli newspaper for a predominantly Israeli audience with a version in English that caught my eye since it seemed to have what I would have thought were lots of controversial articles. One article was called "Port in a Storm" by Shay Fogelman and the introduction of the article read as follows:

"The mass flight of Haifa's Arabs remains one of the most contested events of the 1948 war. Yet despite strong evidence to support Arab claims, Israeli historians remain economical with the truth."

The article focuses mainly on the events of April 22, 1948 when, during ongoing ceasefire negotiations between Jews and Arabs of Haifa, members of Haganah (the army of Palestinian Jews prior to Israeli independence) started shelling Arab citizens gathered in the market square and how that caused the final fleeing of the Arabs from the city. The final paragraph of the article refers to a conversation with a small group of older Arab men who still live in the city of Haifa as they reflect on their memories of Nakba.

"They take great pride in the deep, friendly relations they maintain with their Jewish neighbours; a few of them say they have been involved over the years in attempts to draw Jews and Arabs closer together. From their viewpoint, the Nakba is a historical fact which needs no confirmation or legislation. Nor, in their view, need it frighten or threaten the Jewish presence in the country. As Awda al-Shehab says, "Only after we recognize mutually the suffering that was endured by the two peoples will we be able to create a common future. That is the true key to coexistence. Without it, each side will continue to live in the past.""

As I have been thinking over how solutions are reached to seemingly intransigent problems I have been heartened to be reading "God Has a Dream: A Vision of Hope for Our Time" by Desmond Tutu, a man who has lived through and personally heard in so much detail the terrible things that man can do and yet has a vibrant faith and seems full of fun. I am old enough to recall that as a teenager, so many people were almost resigned to the idea that change from apartheid would only happen in South Africa through a blood bath. It seemed ridiculous to envisage Nelson Mandela being released from prison, let alone being the President of the nation and standing to welcome people as South Africa first hosted the Rugby World Cup and then later the Football World Cup.

Of course I am aware that very many factors influenced the situation in South Africa or other events like the falling of the Iron Curtain/Berlin Wall in those years. But still I remember the huge surge of excitement and hope I felt waking up to the news the Berlin Wall had been breached in my first month as a university student or searching out televisions at lunch time during work site visits to watch all races of South Africans queue to cast their votes in the elections of 1994 and my utter shock at a colleague who had no idea what the news story was about. There can be change and occasions of good news and healing even after so much pain and conflict.

Sadly in that same year of 1994, 800,000 Rwandan's were brutally killed by their neighbours and while one part of the human family celebrates another part wounds or grieves. Yet even there, as many people's ability to hate was manipulated for terrible purposes there were those who were willing to die themselves to try and defend their neighbours of a different tribe.

Human beings do painful and unjust things to one another, as well as loving and kind things. Reconciliation can only happen when a relationship is broken and we can admit it is broken and reconciliation is painful, the process of healing itself is normally painful.

Desmond Tutu writes in his chapter "God Loves Your Enemies" the following:

"Forgiving and being reconciled to our enemies or our loved ones is not about pretending that things are other than they are. It is not about patting one another on the back and turning a blind eye to the wrong. True reconciliation exposes the awfulness, the abuse, the pain, the hurt, the truth. It could even sometimes make things worse. It is a risky undertaking, but in the end it is worthwhile, because in the end dealing with the real situation helps to bring real healing. Superficial reconciliation can bring only superficial healing."

Graffiti on Israel's Separation Barrier in Bethlehem

Bethlehem's Pressures

Having visited Bethlehem earlier in this month in my first ever visit to Israel and Palestine, I was surprised to catch on BBC iPlayer last week an interview given by the Archbishop of Canterbury on "World at One" where he mentioned the pressure that Christians were under in Bethlehem as part of general comments on the difficulties Christians face in the Middle East. His rationale was that the Christian population was reducing due to migration partly for economic reasons and also as a result of the pressure that they felt due to the movement of more Muslims into the area as they in turn escaped the pressures of other towns like Hebron. Archbishop of Canterbury on World at One 14 June 2011

Not once in the interview did the Archbishop mention the words "Israel" or "occupation". Whatever one's views of the Israel/Palestinian problem it is not possible to talk about the situation of Christians in Bethlehem or any other part of the West Bank without mentioning Israel. Hearing the interview reminded me of an article I'd read in The Guardian the week before I went to Israel on the bias in the BBC's reporting on Israel and Palestine and the strength of the pro-Israel lobby in challenging anything reported which they could see as negative about their actions in Israel or the Occupied Territories. Had the Archbishop been told he couldn't mention Israel? And why would he comply with such a comment? Dr Rowan Williams seems a highly intelligent man with a desire for justice, why would he so misrepresent the situation? Certainly Christians in Bethlehem were not pleased with his comments. Letter from Kairos Palestine. It is important to be able to speak out against Israeli state policy or unjust incidents, without being afraid of the challenge of being anti-Semitic. If for example I were to speak out against the war in Iraq and British policy there it does not make me anti-British, simply opposed to a policy.

During our 5 days in Bethlehem as a church group we had the privilege of meeting a number of Palestinian Christians of different denominations, all of whom under difficult circumstances believed in non-violent means of attaining justice and peace for Palestine. Not one of them mentioned pressure from an increased Muslim population in the town, all be it that there has been an increase. Instead they mentioned the oppression of the 9m high wall which surrounds the town and most of the West Bank, including large areas that the UN in 1948 allocated to Palestine. Only about 5% of the Bethlehem population have permits to go into Israel on the other side of the wall and the few that can go to work in Jerusalem only 6 miles away have to queue for at least 2 hours each morning to get through the security checkpoints at the one exit Palestinians are allowed to use. The wall and it's watchtowers dominate the town and as in all the West Bank divide people from their land or their customers.  As a couple of Bethlehem residents commented wryly, if Jesus were to be born these days, the wall and checkpoints would prevent Mary and Joseph from reaching Bethlehem from Nazareth. Worse still are the checkpoints within the West Bank which limit the movement of Palestinians from one town to another that are supposedly under their control as part of the Oslo Accord.

What I did learn during my 7 days in the Holy Land is far more than I can fit in a few blog posts, but despite the fact I thought I was a person with an above average grasp of world affairs I realised more than anything how little I really knew, how difficult solutions are but how unsustainable the current oppression of Palestinians is and how difficult Israeli policy makes it for everyday Israelis and Palestinians to get to know one another. Israel, however is certainly not alone in this world, in taking the natural shock and fear related to acts of violence which have been perpetuated against their people (as well as the Palestinians) and using it to breed a culture of fear and of the idea of having a superior claim to righteousness in one's cause. Sadly over the last century a far greater number of Jews have lost their lives at the hands of Europeans than of Arabs.

I suspect reflections on my trip will constitute the main part of the next few posts I make, but for now I'll end commenting on how surprised I was with the warmth of the welcome we felt from the people we met in Bethlehem, not only our guides and special guests, but people working in shops and wedding guests awaiting the exit of the bride and groom at the Church of the Nativity. I could walk alone on the streets without feeling the unease you can in some other parts of the world.