Matt Rees's Blog - Posts Tagged "christians"

ST. GEORGE’S MONASTERY, West Bank — Gathered in the chapel of this outpost in the Judean Desert last week, the Orthodox priests chanted “Lord, have mercy” in Greek, in a service of blessing for a new road that makes the venerable building accessible to the growing number of tourists willing to dare a visit to the troubled Holy Land.

As far as the Palestinian Authority is concerned, the priests may as well have been speaking, well, Greek. Because the road was built by Israel over land the Palestinians consider their own, officials in Ramallah condemned the priests’ participation in the road’s inauguration ceremony.

Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad “expressed surprise” that the Orthodox priests joined the director-general of the Israeli Tourism Ministry Tuesday at the monastery, which clings to a cliff side over Wadi Qelt, a deep canyon running down to the Jordan Valley. Another Palestinian minister said the monks’ presence “gave a deceiving impression” about the status of the land around St. George’s.

Like other stretches on the rocky road that still clings to the misnomer “peace process,” the Palestinian protest will fade like a mirage in the desert surrounding St. George’s. More important in the end is the (literally) concrete path laid out for pilgrims to visit one of the most important and most beguilingly beautiful sacred sites in the Holy Land.

Archbishop Aristarchos, the secretary of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate in Jerusalem and the leader of the brief prayer service, was diplomatic in his comments, when asked about Palestinian complaints over the road.

“This is a monastery of prayer for peace in our region, for peace in the Holy Land,” Aristarchos said. “The road brings full access for pilgrims who are messengers of peace to the Holy Land.”

The $500,000 road cuts over from the main Jerusalem-Jericho highway in front of the entrance to an Israeli settlement. It snakes around dusty dunes and dry wadis. To the east, the view is hazy down over the Jordan Valley to the mountains rising in the Hashemite Kingdom. After a 10-minute drive, visitors arrive at a parking lot.

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For the first time in years, the people of Bethlehem have something more to celebrate at Christmas than the recollection of an important birth in their town 2,000 years ago.

After the city’s economy was devastated by the Palestinian intifada over the last decade, Bethlehem’s economic recovery has picked up pace in the last year with gross domestic product rising by 9 percent. This Christmas the city’s streets are packed with tourists and pilgrims, and if the holy family were to arrive today they would, once more, discover that there’s no room at the inn — Bethlehem’s hotels are filled to capacity.

Locals see this as an important marker on their road back to normality. “Tourists are coming. Things are all right in Bethlehem,” said Walid Zawahra, a taxi driver.

Zawahra stood beside his yellow Mercedes cab, watching tourists pour through the massive gate in Israel’s security wall around Bethlehem. The gate is opened only once a year, for Christmas, so that the Roman Catholic Patriarch can enter in procession with his entourage from Jerusalem. The rest of the year, visitors must pass through a smaller entrance at the nearby checkpoint.

Security remains a factor, however. The streets beyond the gate were closed to traffic. Palestinian security forces were out in force on the roads around Rachel’s Tomb, which Jews believe to be the site of the burial of the biblical matriarch and where Israeli soldiers still stand guard. The tomb, which has taken on the dimensions of a fortress in the last decade, is a frequent point of friction between the soldiers and Palestinian rioters, and the authorities don’t want Christmas marred by any violence.


The Church of the Nativity, which stands over the site of Jesus’s birth, opened Friday after a 24-hour security closure, as police swept it for bombs before the Patriarch’s arrival for Midnight Mass.

In Manger Square, outside the church, two new cafes have been doing a bumper business, hosting local families and tourists late into the night. A stage built against the buttresses of the Armenian monastery at the front of the church hosted live musical performances in the evening.

The Bethlehem area also has something novel to entertain its young people — namely, something to do after dark. Until recently, youngsters in Bethlehem complained that their city shut down at twilight. Two night clubs opened in the last few months in the largely Christian district of Beit Jala. One of them is named Taboo, because it serves pork and, therefore, contravenes the proscriptions of Islam by which most West Bank restaurants operate.

Read the rest of this post on my blog The Man of Twists and Turns.