Photos

Advent in Bethlehem 2 – Smoke and Mirrors

Bethlehem by day and Bethlehem by night like anywhere else presents very different feelings – so busy by day and so empty by night – sometimes it’s fine to be visible and to encounter what happens on the streets….at other times it feels somehow a lot riskier……mostly just a feeling….. The vision blurs and then becomes clear and then blurs again to make you the viewer, invisible in your own imagination. But you are not…you are highly visible……people have three guesses why you’re here and they are probably all right.

Is this really the place it says it is……did the things you think happened here really happen in this town……..how is it after all these years that it has come to be like this?.........It’s a place as a visitor you find yourself willing for a better future, a better outlook…….but it’s all smoke and mirrors…… the damage of war, the presence of the Wall, the Church of the Nativity, the goodwill of communities around the world focused and represented in this place, the containment and the separation of a people and of a thousand years of families building their history of land use, commerce, trade and religion…….home of the Prince of Peace…yet the reality is of a place under siege…it’s economy tattered by the lack of tourists and pilgrims………movement between the town and outlying areas increasingly restricted……the rural hinterland overtaken by settlements built like fortresses and the size of small towns, dominating the high ground, taking the water and places of amenity, my friends wonder how they will see their family members once they become the next part of Palestine to be annexed into Israel….travel across these barriers is not an option for so many Arabs…….and sadly because of the situation not so easy for many more moderate Israelis either…….there is justifiable fear at what might happen in the heartland of the ‘other’.

If only the use of violence could be curtailed – the smoke and mirrors which obscures the eradication of Palestine as any kind of entity might be more obvious…..blindingly, noonday sun obvious…….as it is you just have to be there……but most of us aren’t and never will be……..