Beit Jala, part 1

The entrance to the West Bank as at an opening on the Israeli security gate on what I'm told was one of the main roads between Jerusalem's Old City and Bethlehem. We were meeting with officials from the Holy Land Christian Ecumenical Foundation at the offices of the General Administration of Schools in the Latin Patriarchate in Beit Jala, a "neighborhood" within Bethlehem, which in turn is something of a suburb of Jerusalem, although that definition doesn't quit fit. The distance as the crow flies from our hotel, just outside the Old City, to the checkpoint between Israel and the Palestinian-controlled West Bank city of Bethlehem is only about 15 minutes when traffic is light.
There has been an uneasiness between our guide and us as we've worked out the details to go into the West Bank. The trip, which is being sponsored by the government of Israel, seeks to show us all the important Christian holy sites, and there is no escaping the importance of Bethlehem. And yet, in spite of all the care we've been given thus far, we have been strangely jettisoned here on this leg. The Ministry for Tourism has on the itinerary a simple note that this part of the trip is optional; our guide tells us we will have to take cabs to Manger Square at the Church of the Nativity. So when I advised her that I had a way for us to get transportation for our entire entourage with the HCEF, I sensed more than just indifference. There was some real foot-dragging going on. My gut tells me that we would have been worked on about the difficulties of the crossing, hoping that we would shrug and say that it wasn't worth the trouble. I had been emailing and talking to George Ghouttas of HCEF's Israel office for the past couple days, and finally the day before the departure, our guide asked how we planned to proceed. I advised her that all was in place; we would be picked up a 9 a.m. at the checkpoint. Interestingly, when it came down to brass tacks and we were engaged in the process of the "exchange," Rivka discovered that we would not have been allowed into the West Bank by the Palestinian Authority unless we had a contact person. So, if left to our own devises otherwise -- that is, if we had expected to take taxis into the holy city -- we would have been denied access. Was that the plan all along?
The checkpoint was strangely nondescript in one sense: there was no discernible buffer zone or "no man's land" between the Jerusalem neighborhood and the opening in the wall. We simply made a slight jog in the road, and there looming ahead was the massive concrete barrier, snaking away from the checkpoint in an outwardly-moving "V" from the entrance, a parking lot that was situated between Israeli soldiers and members of the Palestinian Authority security force. This was where our "exchange" would take place. We arrived about five minutes early, and we had a chance to look around. A couple of us whipped out our cameras to take photos: there was a tunnel made of fencing that Palestinians wanting to gain access to Jerusalem to work had to pass through. We couldn't see the area where Israeli police would interview people crossing the border, but I spied a woman at the gate who'd already gone through the security check who now was being grilled by a soldier at the gate. A glance to our guide and driver provided no information, so I figured she was getting the once over one more time before heading to town. At first Rivka told us to stand right by our van; don't move, she'd said. But after calling our contact, Ramzy from HCEF, and finding that he would be a few minutes, we were able to explore a little more. I recalled my days back in the late 70s patrolling the old East-West German border checkpoint areas. It was -- and is -- all deadly serious stuff. The guard tower here on the road to Bethlehem was very similar to the East German watch towers of the Cold War days. Soldiers manning the tower looked at the activities below. You knew there was someone who could man a weapon at the ready, if they weren't already. I thought we would have to go through some screening process, but because we were members of the American media, we were spared that process altogether. We had only to wait for Rimzy to pick us up and whisk us away.
Finally, Ramzy and the administrative manager for the HCEF Beit Jala office, Alena, arrived with a van and driver, a huge Chevrolet diesel equipped to hold 10 people or so; just a big more than we needed, but certainly plenty to do the job. We worked out the details with Rivka: we would be out until about 12:30 or 1 p.m.; if we went later, we'd call her. And off we went.
George Ghouttas was out of the country, in Jordan, and he'd given the task of giving us the really, really quick tour of Bethlehem to Rimzy, a thin, 20-something fellow who was George's No. 2 man in Beit Jala. I had made contact with HCEF by way of Father Rob Waller, pastor of St. Andrew/St. Elizabeth Ann Seton Parish in Milford, Ohio, part of the Archdiocese of Cincinnati. Father Rob was intrinsically involved in working with the HCEF and had been the keystone player in the states in creating a program that linked children in the Latin Patriarchate in Israel with students in the states, and students from Milford and Beit Jala were in the midst of the pilot program.
We drove on winding, hilltop roads through Bethlehem, and soon Rimzy pointed out that we were in Beit Jala; I wouldn't have known the difference unless he would have mentioned it. Everything blended together, and we still were very close to Jerusalem. We pulled into a narrow driveway where there was a squat, one-story concrete block building. Behind that building there was a schoolyard, and we had arrived just in time to hear th children playing and running around. Turns out these were kindergartners in a program that had just recently been launched. We didn't see them, but we could hear them: to me it sounded like the voices of blissful joy, of little children who probably don't fully appreciate the situation into which they've been born.
We met Father Majdi al Siryani, a citizen of Jordan who had spent several years in Dearborn, Mich. He looked to be in his mid-to-late 40s, exuding a kind of forceful energy gained from working out. Father Majdi is a Christian Arab, one of the 30,000 or so Christians living in the Bethlehem region, where Christians make up perhaps 40 percent of the overall population. Bethlehem, Beit Jala and Beit Sahour make up three townships nearby where there was a concentration of Christians. Christians in the West Bank also live in Ramala and Nablus; and, of course, Nazareth is the largest Christian city in Israel. It all seems very strange that in the land where Jesus ministered, died and raised up from the dead that His followers are a tiny minority today. We're told overall that Christians make up less than 3 percent of the population here. So it is critical for the Church to insure that the diaspora of Christians doesn't worsen. The work of Father Majdi, the HCEF and every other Church-related initiative here remain critically important for that mission.
"We are a tiny minority here," Father Majdi said. "But this is a terribly important Christian community." When you look at the region from the outside, "every nation recognizes and understands the importance of the Arab presence here," and the Christian Arab community has been in the region since the time of Jesus. "Arabs are not aliens," he said. "We've been here for thousands of years."
Father Majdi explained that from the beginning of the papacy of Pope Pius IX, there has been a ministry to Christian children in the Holy Land, and from that era, the Latin Patriarchate for Schools emerged. The idea, quite simply, is to insure wherever there is a parish in the patriarchate, there also is a school. "It's the place for a good education, but it's also how we catechize the kids."
He had logged some time as a parish priest in Los Angeles, and he noted that the parish-school package here was the same you'll find in the states. The exception is that these schools receive virtually all their funding from outside sources, much (perhaps the lion's share) from the United States. The differences lie in the importance the Church plays in the lives of these Arab Christians. "Essentially, the parish takes care of those things in life that the government doesn't," and with the limitations of the Palestinian Authority to do much, that means that often health care, education, housing for the elderly and the other functions that you might expect the state to provide are addressed by the Church.
"The extended family, the tribe, also takes care of the people," he said. So there is the family, the tribe and the Church all at work in this supporting role. And it leads to a mutually supporting atmosphere that he said is not visible to people on the outside. In fact, sometimes people believe there are conflicts galore. "Because Bethlehem is Christian and the surrounding communities are Muslim, there is a perception that there are conflicts between us. But that is not true. We all get along..."