"O (?) Town of Bethlehem"

I'm rethinking the title of the traditional Christmas song.

Take Tijuana, Mexico, grey the landscape out to make it a little less colorful and festive, making it look more like East Germany ca. 1970, and then take it and set it on the hills of San Francisco. You’ve got Bethlehem. Just eight miles south of Jerusalem (think, as Bloomington is to Minneapolis……), and in many ways, a world away.

Verses of “Away in a Manger” are not the first thing that come to mind when you drive through the first security checkpoint you must pass through when entering the city. Cars and people pass through the thirty foot tall grey “security wall”/”defensive wall”/”retaining wall” on the way into the West Bank city given over by Israel to be controlled by the Palestinian Authority. Bethlehem comes across initially as rather depressing, and it doesn’t improve much as you drive through the city. Empty lots with burning garbage give way to littered streets and buildings with peeling paint and shuttered windows.

The hometown of the Old Testament figure King David and the site of Jesus’ birth was apparently a quaint little village at one time. Supposedly there were only a few hundred people living here at the time of Mary and Jesus coming to town. It is a much larger city now, but lacking in any pastoral beauty in most parts of the town. It will be harder to sing "O Little Town of Bethlehem" and think of it in the same way.

One of the major problems it faces today is that it is almost an island unto itself, walled in and sealed off by the State of Israel, creating hardships aplenty. The Israeli-Palestinian issue is problematic here for the people, in many of the same ways it is for the people in Gaza. (I will try and write more about this later.) The population is almost exclusively Arab Palestinian Muslims, who find their lives and activities often restricted to within the walled compound of the city. Economic challenges abound. There is a resiliency in the population they say, but they might have said the same thing about the East Germans for many years as well. One can only hope that the world can more quickly find a way to create a fair and just solution that guarantees safety and opportunity to everyone in this country.

I’ll share a few pictures, and hope I don’t burst too many bubbles for those of you that picture a cute little country town with nice little wood and straw mangers off if fields not far from the sides of the road. It just isn’t that way. I will also write a few more blogs with explanations.