c. 2006 Religion News Service

BETHLEHEM, West Bank _ Riham Salsaa, a 21-year-old English-language student at Bethlehem University, remembers the day, several years ago,that she and other members of her Palestinian-Christian youth group visited Jerusalem during Holy Week.

“It was before the second intifada,” Salsaa, a Catholic, said of the Palestinian uprising that began in late 2000 and lasted four years.

“We walked in a parade tracing the path Jesus took. It’s an ancient tradition and I loved taking part in it.”

Sitting in a flowering campus courtyard on a warm afternoon, Salsaa said she has not visited Jerusalem since, and will not be able to see the sites of Christ’s life and death this Easter, either.

Salsaa is part of a Christian minority of about 30 percent living in this city, the birthplace of Christ, now under the governance of the Palestinian Authority. As Palestinian Christians prepare for this Easter, a holiday of hope and new birth, their future appears as anxious and uncertain as ever, thanks to the dramatic political events of this year.

A Jan. 25 Palestinian election gave power to the opposition Hamas party, labeled a terrorist organization by Israel, the U.S. and the European Union, a party that has called for the destruction of Israel.

Then, on March 28, Israel’s centrist Kadima Party scored a narrow victory in national elections. The next day, Christian leaders from large churches in the Holy Land issued a statement. It urged the soon-to-be-formed government “to demonstrate courage and wisdom by resuming the peace process with the Palestinians.”

The Christian leaders urged Hamas to pursue peace rather than violence to ensure a better future for all people of the region. Hamas has stated it might agree to a 15-year “ceasefire” with Israel, but has not recognized the Jewish state’s right to exist.

Adding to the political tension this Easter is the recent completion of Israel’s 15-foot-high cement wall around Bethlehem.

Daniel Seaman, an Israeli government spokesman, said that the barrier was built because the Palestinian people “didn’t do a thing to prevent the penetration of murderers into Israel.”

Since the barrier was erected between Bethlehem and Jerusalem, Seaman said,“there has not been a successful suicide attack in Jerusalem.

With all the sympathy I feel for `the Palestinians’ discomfort, the lives of our children are tantamount.”

Palestinian Christians say the barrier has become a border they never agreed to.

“It’s turned the West Bank into a big prison,” asserts Fuad Bannoura, a chemistry professor from adjacent Beit Sahour. “It looks peaceful here, but this isn’t peace,” Bannoura, a 54-year-old Greek Orthodox Christian, said of the calm that has returned to the Bethlehem area since the intifada ended a year and a half ago.

Bannoura said he hasn’t been to Jerusalem, which is just three miles and a checkpoint away, for more than 10 years.

“I won’t apply for a permit to go to a place I used to drive to in 10 minutes. It’s humiliating,” he said.

The father of four said his community’s young people feel “strangled” by their inability to travel to even the closest towns and cities, and by the shortage of jobs in the West Bank, and that both problems are fueling an alarming exodus of Christians from the West Bank and Gaza.

In part, because their relative wealth and high level of education enable them to procure residency visas to the U.S., Europe and elsewhere, Christians have been leaving the West Bank and Gaza.

“It’s easier to go abroad to study than to go next door to Israel,” Bannoura said. “Entire families that lived here for generations have disappeared.”

Amir Bannoura, the professor’s 20-year-old nephew and a computer student at Bethlehem University, acknowledged that despite a recent lack of violence between Israel and the Palestinians, he still planned to move abroad to earn a master’s degree after graduation.

“Physically, I feel a lot safer since the shooting stopped,” Amir said, looking around at his fellow students chatting in the university courtyard.

He recalled how in 2002 when Palestinian militants took refuge in the Church of the Nativity and the Israeli army surrounded the church and nearby neighborhoods, “we weren’t allowed to leave our houses.”

Though curfews are a thing of the past, “there aren’t a lot of opportunities for us after they leave university. In most fields, If you want a master’s or a doctorate, you have to leave, at least temporarily.”

Despite concerns for the future, local Christians say they are trying to make this Easter as festive as possible, for themselves and visiting pilgrims.

Visitors to the town of Jesus’s birth can expect to find a safe, clean municipality patrolled by Palestinian police trained to assist tourists.

Dozens of shops selling postcards and locally crafted olivewood crosses and Nativity scenes will be open, a contrast to the intifada years, when most were shuttered tight.

Unlike individual tourists, who must walk through a formidable terminal with rotating gates to travel between Jerusalem and Bethlehem, pilgrims on organized tours “will in most cases be able to go through the checkpoint in their buses,” said Majed Ishaq, director of promotion at the Palestinian Ministry of Tourism.

Ishaq stressed that the security wall “makes it harder for Palestinians to leave than for tourists to enter.”

The tourism official noted that 80 percent of the Palestinian-run hotels in east Jerusalem, Bethlehem and Jericho are booked for the Easter holiday. At the height of the violence in 2002, virtually no one visited the town.

As gratified as they are to see tour buses in the parking lot adjoining Manger Square, the merchants of smaller shops fear that visitors will rush through the town without spending much money.

“The tour guides and the drivers take their groups to the big souvenir shops and take a 35 percent commission,” says John Shahin, the Christian owner of a small souvenir shop a block away from Manger Square.

“They give the impression that Bethlehem isn’t safe and won’t let the tourists walk around the town at their leisure.”

Seated on a low stool outside his empty store, Shahin, a 45- year-old Assyrian Christian, said that many of his relatives have left the West Bank in recent years and settled in the United States.

“It’s ironic,” Shahin said, looking at uniformed school children teasing each other on their way home.

“Honestly, it’s much safer here than in a city like New York.”

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