Saturday, Sep 6, 2008
After 11 days of siege, the Israelis have left behind ruins and broken families in the Palestinian city.
Oct 31, 2001 | On a small brown desk right on the sidewalk of Manger Street, Walid Abu Snour has laid out dollar bills and other currencies in neat stacks held down with pebbles and rocks. Israeli bulldozers completely tore down his money changing office, which until a few days ago was located just a few yards behind. Its mangled metal shutters lie on the ground next to concrete blocks, part of the rubble from a strip of shops systematically destroyed by the Israeli army during 11 days of unprecedented fighting in Bethlehem earlier this month.
"Sharon has taken me back 2,000 years. I'm in the Stone Age now!" jokes Abu Snour. "I believe they destroyed my shop just to break my will, but you see, I'm still here."
Under intense American pressure, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon ordered his troops to pull out of Bethlehem and the adjoining village of Beit Jala. The withdrawal, delayed several times by continuing gunfights between Israeli soldiers and Palestinian gunmen, took place Sunday night and early Monday morning.
When the last tank had vanished north in the direction of Jerusalem, Bethlehem residents came out of their homes for the first time in days. Children went back to school, women went shopping; others simply milled around in a daze, gawking at the damage done by 11 days of siege. More than 20 people from the Bethlehem area were killed, including at least seven noncombatants -- a heavy count for a sleepy town used to Christmas carols and busloads of happy tourists. But long after the funerals, the atmosphere in Bethlehem will remain poisoned by the memory of the recent Israeli military raid.
Elderly Bethlemites say last week's fighting was the most serious they can remember and that nothing has ever matched this level of destruction, not even the 1948 and 1967 wars. The reminders of mayhem are everywhere: A tall shopping center and a hotel are now charcoal-black eyesores. The elegant, white-stone facades of Bethlehem University and the hospital of the Holy Family are thoroughly pockmarked. A dozen houses torched by missiles or gutted by tank fire spill their wrecked furniture onto the Bethlehem sidewalks.
Years from now, observant tourists may be able to detect the traces of bullets on several buildings on Manger Square: one crashed through the windows of the Church of St Catherine's, the Catholic annex to the Church of the Nativity that Christians traditionally associate with the spot where Jesus was born.
"When you see the ruins here you should expect three times more ruins on the Israeli side. It's in the nature of things," says Hisham Ahmed, a refugee and a professor of political science sitting next to his friend Abu Snour, the roofless money changer. By brutally reoccupying Bethlehem, "Sharon has rendered Israel more vulnerable and under threat than ever before."
On the day after the storm, the look on the faces of many Bethlemites is one of steely determination. Not strident rage, just calm anger. The anger is particularly chilling in silent young men whose faces look so similar to those of dead Palestinians -- some innocent, some not -- already plastered on posters or stenciled on the walls.
"With trust in God, we'll overcome this," says Ibrahim al-Atrash, a member of the family who owns the Paradise Hotel, a six-story building that was taken over by the Israeli army and ravaged by fire. Stepping over blackened bedcovers in sooty corridors, he says his family spent more than a million dollars in renovations in 1999 to accommodate a wave of millennium tourists and pilgrims that never came. When the Intifada started last fall, Hotel Paradise, like other hotels, was closed for lack of business.
Its doors were closed for 13 months until an Israeli tank crashed its way through the back gate two weeks ago and soldiers took over double bedrooms with street views and clear sniping access to al-Azzah refugee camp, a pocket-size warren of narrow alleys and cinderblock houses that's home to 2,300 refugees.
"For sure, we're going to rename it Hell Hotel," says al-Atrash. But it is not the physical wreckage that worries him most; it is the appetite for revenge that wanton destruction will sow in future generations of Palestinians.
"I'm a peace man," he says. "I want us to live in two countries, Israel and Palestine, in peace. But Israel is destroying any chance of peace between our people and the future of our relationship. If students of Bethlehem University go to school and see their university destroyed, how can peace happen in this world? The people of al-Azzah camp already lost everything in 1948 [when Palestinians were forced out of their villages during Israel's War of Independence]. Now they have lost everything anew. Will they forget everything so soon?"
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