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occupied west bank
Bethlehem Betrays God
How could the Holy Land be considered the holiest of places if its rulers perpetuate violence and injustice?
Jun 22, 2025
As I first arrived in the Palestinian city of Bethlehem, I couldn’t help but feel trapped by the gigantic separation wall. Now, every time that I walk through the dreaded checkpoint cutting Bethlehem off from Jerusalem, I feel intimidated by the look of disgust and inhumanity on the faces of many Israeli soldiers that I encounter. Still, my experiences don’t compare to the horrific ordeals that many Palestinians go through on a daily basis at the checkpoints.
Even as someone who doesn’t currently possess the deepest connection to Christianity or any other religion, I acknowledge that there’s something special about the little town of Bethlehem. When visiting the Church of the Nativity, it’s impossible not to be overcome by awe. As the alleged birthplace of Jesus Christ, many people consider Bethlehem to be one of the most important cities in the world. Yet, instead of being a city characterized by peaceful worship, Bethlehem has been devastated by the Israeli occupation. The Israeli occupation has stripped Bethlehem of the holiness that would otherwise define the city.
News coverage is typically diverted toward Palestinian cities either in the Gaza Strip or in other parts of the West Bank, such as Jenin, Tulkarem, and Hebron. True, Bethlehem was covered by major news outlets last Christmas, which highlighted the absence of Christmas festivities and the resulting damage to the city’s economy. However, little attention is paid to Bethlehem’s current status. Last month, several Palestinians had their homes vandalized and were themselves assaulted by Israeli forces in the Kisan wilderness, which is east of Bethlehem. Recently, Israeli forces arrested and raided the homes of two Palestinian brothers in Beit Sahour, a neighboring town. To understand Bethlehem’s current status, I interviewed activists and locals.
“Year after year, the situation [in Bethlehem] has gotten worse and worse,” said Mazin Qumsiyeh, a Palestinian scientist, internationally recognized human rights activist, and 2025 Nobel Peace Prize nominee. When I initially entered the Palestine Institute for Biodiversity and Sustainability, which Qumsiyeh founded and currently directs, I was greeted by a variety of Palestinian historical artifacts. Qumsiyeh both told me about the centrality of Palestinian society to agricultural development and lamented Israeli colonization. When I asked him about the changes that Bethlehem has been subject to, Qumsiyeh, specifically referring to the last 20 years, stated that the city’s situation has deteriorated rapidly due to “the wall building, the restriction of movement, and the inability for us to even go to Jerusalem.”
The 270,000 Palestinians that live in the Bethlehem Governorate (including around 70,000 refugees), Qumsiyeh went on to state, are limited “to only 15% of the land of Bethlehem, [which is] increasingly surrounded by walls and refugee centers.” Furthermore, Qumsiyeh acknowledged the degradation of Bethlehem’s environment due to Israeli oppression. “There’s increased desertification that’s coming from the area of the Jordan Valley toward here because of Israel’s actions and climate change, which, of course, Israel contributes to climate change because the military produces more greenhouse gases from jet fuel flying to bomb Gaza, Lebanon, and so forth” compared to other countries. Overall, “we have been devastated here,” said Qumsiyeh.
It’s impossible to miss the Christmas House shop on the way to Bethlehem’s Milk Grotto Church, especially since beautiful olive wood carvings are prominently on display. When I asked Jack Giacaman, the shop’s sales/production manager, about life in Bethlehem, he said the following: “The first thing is that you are in a big siege, a big prison called Bethlehem [that is] surrounded by checkpoints and a wall. The feeling that you cannot move itself is a dangerous feeling.” While less common compared to other areas of the West Bank, Giacaman also highlighted the presence of settler violence in the area around Bethlehem. For instance, since the separation wall isn’t completely finished toward the west of Bethlehem, “the settlers are taking the land and preventing people from reaching their farming land.”
In addition, Bethlehem suffers from economic challenges. Outside of the Church of the Nativity, tour guide and retired police officer Ahmad Tannanhe is commonly found. When I asked him about how the city of Bethlehem was doing, Tannanhe responded by stating that while many tourists previously came to the city from around the globe, “because of the war in Gaza, the tourists are afraid to come.” Since Bethlehem’s economy relies on tourism, the city has been devastated. Furthermore, Tannanhe went on, “many workers are also not allowed to work inside of Israel.” Since the beginning of Israel’s genocide within the Gaza Strip, Israel has revoked the work permits of more than 150,000 Palestinians, obliterating their source of income.
When I asked Qumsiyeh how he maintains the strength to continually advocate for Palestinian rights amidst Israeli oppression, he explained to me that resistance isn’t a choice. “You don’t have a choice. It’s not a matter of choice. It’s a matter of what you have to do, what you are born to do because your country is colonized by ruthless, racist colonizers who don’t want you on this land. So, everything you do is a form of resistance. Even being born here is resistance. Resistance is not an option. It’s a way of life.”
Importantly, the suffocation that Palestinians experience due to the Israeli occupation is maintained by American support. Recently, Israeli ministers approved 22 new West Bank settlements, which is the largest expansion in decades. In addition, the Israeli government has both expanded roads going through the West Bank and attempted to legalize isolated outposts, which are illegal under current Israeli law. The American government hasn’t penalized Israel, and it's very likely they won’t. For Giacaman, the United States’ reluctance to punish Israel isn’t surprising. “America is not a free country. It’s a country under the control of Zionists,” said Giacaman.
U.S. President Donald Trump allies himself with radical Christian Zionists and apparently considers himself a “non-denominational Christian.” Yet, if Trump sincerely believed in the teachings of the Bible, he wouldn’t support the manufactured suffering of a city that God entrusted with the birth of Jesus Christ. Furthermore, if Trump truly believed in Jesus Christ’s peaceful teachings, he wouldn’t be complicit with both the genocide that is being carried out by Israel in the Gaza Strip and the oppression of the Palestinian people in general. While God is certainly connected with the people of Bethlehem, current Israeli policy guarantees Bethlehem’s betrayal of God by ensuring that the city no longer exists as a fountain of peace. Instead, Bethlehem is stained by suffering, violence, and oppression.
Ironically, the Holy Land may be undergoing a crisis of holiness. How could the Holy Land be considered the holiest of places if its rulers perpetuate violence and injustice? When I asked about the future, Giacaman issued a pessimistic vision: “I don’t see a future in the Holy Land for any people, [whether they’re] Christian, Muslim, or Jewish…This place is changing into a place of hate, a place of separation. There are no bridges between people. A new crazy Zionist youth is growing. In the beginning, I thought there was an Islamic hatred of Jews, but I now see that Zionists are more dangerous to the Jews than any other thing because [Zionism blinds them]. They are away from God.”
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Settling With Violence in the West Bank
From the very start, violence has accompanied the proliferation of settlements.
Jul 16, 2024
In 1979, I made the first of what would turn out to be decades of periodic visits to Israel and the West Bank. I traveled there for the New York alternative publication The Village Voice to investigate Israel’s growing settler movement, Gush Emunim (or the Bloc of the Faithful). The English-language Israeli newspaper, The Jerusalem Post, then reported that settlers from Kiryat Arba, a Jewish West Bank outpost, had murdered two Palestinian teenagers from the village of Halhoul. There, in one of the earliest West Bank settlements established by Gush Emunim, a distant cousin of my husband had two acquaintances. Under cover of being a Jew in search of enlightenment, I spent several days and nights with them.
Gush Emunim: The Origin of the Settlement Movement
Zvi and Hannah Eidels, my hosts, lived in a four-room apartment in the settlement, which jutted out of an otherwise lovely Mediterranean landscape dotted with stone terraces, olive trees, fruit groves, and grape vines. Kiryat Arba flanked the Palestinian city of Hebron and was an eight-minute car drive from Halhoul on which I wrote a separate article about the murder of those two teens.
My initial evening with the Eidels happened to be on the holy day of shabat.
The rush to finish cooking ended just before sundown and 32-year-old Hannah, very pregnant with her sixth child, turned to me. “Do you light?” she asked. For a moment I thought she was asking how I coped with power failures in the American economic twilight. She took me to the 10-by-12-foot living room. Just above a photograph of the spiritual father of Gush Emunim, Rabbi Avraham Kook, a bearded man with a fur-trimmed hat and heavy-lidded eyes, stood a row of candles on a tiny shelf. I suddenly recalled Friday evenings in my grandmother’s apartment in Philadelphia and was unnerved to find myself, an assimilated Jew — an atheist, no less — standing in Kiryat Arba, once again brushing up against Orthodoxy. I nonetheless took the matchbox, lit the candles, and stood there quietly for what I hoped was a decent interval.
Later, Hannah filled me in on her theory of Jewish superiority: all of creation, she assured me, is suspended in a great chain of being. On the bottom: inanimate non-living things. A link farther up: animate vegetation. Then, non-human animal life. Next, animate non-Jews. On the top, of course, were the Jews. “This may shock you,” she said, “but I don’t really believe in democracy. We believe,” she faltered for a moment, glancing at Zvi who was sitting quietly beside us cracking sunflower seeds and spitting the husks expertly onto a plate, “in theocracy. Right, Zvi?” “Not exactly,” said Zvi. “Not a theocracy. The government of God.”
Gush Emunim was both religious and militant. In a curious blend of ultra-Orthodoxy and historically secular Zionism, “the Faithful” claimed as their own some of the territories conquered in the Six-Day War, the 1967 conflict Israel fought against a coalition of Arab states, during which it took the West Bank, which its leaders called “Judea and Samaria.”
“Here began our first place,” one movement leader told me, “in Schechem [Nablus], where Jacob bought a plot of land. Here is the true world of Judaism.”
“Some people think the goal of Zionism was peace,” another Gush activist explained. “That is ridiculous. The goal of Zionism is to construct a people on its land.” But, he continued, “there were moral problems. There were Arabs living here. By what right did we throw them out? And we did throw them out… All the stuff about socialism, about national redemption, may be true, but that’s only one part. The fact is, we returned here because the Eternal gave us the land. It’s ridiculous, stupid, simplistic, but that’s what it is. All the rest is superficial. We came back here because we belong.”
And so began the settler movement, which, to this day, has never ended or stopped taking land from the Palestinians.
The Alon Plan
Even before that Jewish supremacist incursion, Yigal Alon, Yitzhak Rabin’s deputy prime minister, drafted a plan calling for settlements that would extend Israel’s political boundaries to the Jordan River. Such new Jewish settlements would ring Palestinian villages and towns and separate them from one another. In 1979, when I interviewed the mayor of Halhoul, where those two teens had been murdered, he took me to a hilltop, pointed to Kiryat Arba, and said all too prophetically: “The settlements are a cancer in our midst. A cancer can kill one man. But this cancer can kill a whole people.”
Following the Six-Day War, leaders of the Faithful supplied the shock troops for those growing settlements. It was common wisdom then that the situation “on the ground” was changing from month to month in favor of the Israelis. When I first started reporting there, a trip between East Jerusalem and Ramallah took about 20 minutes. However, once settler-only highways had been built and checkpoints put in place for Palestinians, the trip became at least twice as long. Initially, just soldiers posted on the roads, such checkpoints would later be industrialized with footpaths, tunnels, and turnstiles that looked like the ones in the subway system of New York where I later lived. Palestinians were then often forced to wait, sometimes for hours, before being allowed — or not — to proceed to their destinations.
The Israel-U.S. Peace Process
In 1993, a “peace process” was launched in — yes, you could hardly get farther away — Oslo, Norway. It “changed the modalities of the occupation,” as Noam Chomsky put it, “but not the basic concept… [H]istorian Shlomo Ben-Ami wrote that ‘the Oslo agreements were founded on a neo-colonialist basis, on a life of dependence of one on the other forever.’” The U.S.-Israeli proposals at Camp David in 2000 only strengthened that colonialist urge. Palestinians were to be confined to 200 scattered areas. President Bill Clinton and Prime Minister Ehud Barak proposed the consolidation of the Palestinian population into three cantons under Israeli control, separated from one another and from East Jerusalem.
From then on, Israel only continued its relentless occupation of Palestinian land. In 2002, it started erecting an enormous barrier wall along the Green Line and parts of the West Bank. At its most dramatic, that wall is a series of 25-foot-high concrete slabs punctuated by militarized watch towers, supplemented by electronically monitored electrified fences stretching over vast distances.
After 1979, every time I traveled to the West Bank I saw new Jewish settlements in formation, with their characteristic red-tiled roofs and white walls. Meanwhile, the Israelis restricted Palestinians from building new homes or even additions to current ones. In the West Bank city of Ramallah, that prohibitive situation has resulted in an uglified city center with ever taller buildings. Today, in photos of Ramallah’s contemporary downtown I can’t even recognize the place I last visited in 2009.
Violence
From the very start, violence has accompanied the proliferation of settlements. In 1979, settlers and soldiers were already terrorizing residents of the Palestinian village of Halhoul and committing violence elsewhere. “A rash of civilian acts of vandalism occurred last spring,” I wrote that year. “Settlers… uprooted several acres of grapevines belonging to farmers from Hebron… Kiryat Arba residents also broke into several Arab houses in Hebron and wrecked them.” A four-year-old boy slipped out of his house during one of the curfews (levied by the Israelis on Halhoul, but not, of course, on Kiryat Arba). That child was then stoned by Israeli soldiers. Five months later, I reported speaking with his mother. She “thrust the child toward me and pointed at a scar that still showed on his forehead. ‘What can we do?’ she implored me. ‘We have no weapons. We are helpless. We can’t defend ourselves.’”
In 1994, an American extremist settler, Baruch Goldstein, murdered 29 Palestinian worshipers at the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron and wounded another 125 of them. He was a supporter of the extremist Kach (Thus) movement founded by American rabbi Meir Kahane. In 1988, that movement and a split-off from it called Kahane Chai (Long Live Kahane) were declared to be “terrorist” in character by the Israeli government. It mattered little, however, since terrorism against Palestinians continued to flourish.
Too Little, Too Late
Forty-five years after my first report on the settlements, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote that a farmer in his seventies living in the West Bank village of Qusra, Abdel-Majeed Hassan, had shown him “the blackened ground where his car had been set on fire, the latest of four cars belonging to his family that he said [Israeli] settlers had destroyed.” Six residents of Qusra had been killed in such attacks, Kristof reported, between October 2023 and late June 2024. Israel’s government responded to the October 7th Hamas assault in Gaza by endorsing “more checkpoints, more raids, more Israeli settlements.” Almost duplicating the agonized statement of that Palestinian interviewee of mine in 1979, another Palestinian, an American engineer who had returned to the West Bank, told Kristof, “I’m an American citizen, but if they attack me here, what can I do? They can break my gate; they can kill me.”
His article was entitled “We Are Coming to Horrible Days.” Coming? The horror began over half a century ago. Had the New York Times run similar articles, starting in the late 1970s; had successive American governments not turned a blind eye to what was happening; had Washington not continued funding Israel’s crimes with some $3 billion a year in aid, that country’s land thefts and other crimes on the West Bank could never have continued. In 1979, Israel was already confiscating water from Halhoul and other Palestinian villages, while in the ensuing years you could see swimming pools and lush lawns in the Jewish settlements there, even as Palestinian villages and towns were left to collect rainwater in barrels on housetops.
Twenty-three years after I made my first trip, the Israeli human rights organization B’tselem reported that, in “the first decade following the occupation, the left-leaning ‘Alignment’ governments followed the Alon Plan.” It advocated settling areas “perceived as having security importance” and sparse in Palestinian populations. Later, governments under the far more conservative Likud Party began establishing settlements across the West Bank, not just based on security considerations but ideological ones.
Jewish Supremacy
A word about the attitudes of Israeli Jews. In 1982, I interviewed a group of Israeli teenagers, one of whom, the daughter of Israeli leftist acquaintances of mine, told me that each new generation in her country was more right-wing than that of its parents. On one of several trips to Hebron in those years, I read this graffiti on a wall: “ARABS TO GAS CHAMBERS.” It certainly caught the mood of both that moment and those that followed to this day. For decades, in fact, the cry “Death to Arabs!” could be heard at some Israeli demonstrations. By the time Israel began its genocidal campaign in Gaza in 2023, you could watch videos of Israeli soldiers dancing and chanting “Death to Amalek! (The name Amalek refers to ancient biblical enemies of the Jews.)
Kristof writes that “Israel’s ‘state-backed settler violence,’ as Amnesty International describes it, is enforced by American weapons provided to Israel. When armed settlers terrorize Palestinians and force them off their land — as has happened to 18 communities since October [2023] — they sometimes carry American M16 rifles. Sometimes they are escorted by Israeli troops…The United States is already in the thick of the West Bank conflict… Many settlers have American accents and draw financial support from donors in the United States.”
But keep in mind that this is nothing new. Baruch Goldstein, that infamous mass murderer of 1994, was an American and it was very clear even then that American Jews were among the most rabid of the settlers.
In 2021, fulfilling the prophecy of the very first Israeli settler I ever visited, Zvi Eidels, the Israeli regime established what the human rights organization B’tselem called “a recognition of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.”
It feels bitter indeed to me to be able to say, “I told you so.” My accounts were largely ignored in those decades when I periodically reported from the West Bank. After all, I wrote for The Village Voice and other non-mainstream publications. The New York Times was largely silent on the subject then and Kristof’s recent telling observations sadly come decades too late. Even as I was finishing this article, Israeli forces were bombing densely populated neighborhoods in the Nur Shams and Tulkarem refugee camps in the northern West Bank. (The Nur Shams brigade, which was an Israeli target, is an armed resistance group affiliated, according to Mondoweiss, with the military wing of Palestinian Islamic Jihad.)
Raja Shehadeh, one of Palestine’s greatest writers, recently let me know that even he – whom Israeli forces once recognized as an illustrious person and allowed to travel in relative freedom — fears venturing outside since the settlers are “all over” the West Bank. In a recent Guardian article he wrote: “I spent the last 50 years of my life getting used to the loss of the Palestine of my parents; and… I might spend the remaining years of my life trying to get used to the loss of Palestine in its entirety.”
I’ve known Shehadeh since 1982 and never in all those years had I seen him despair. It’s unbelievably depressing to find him writing this now. All I could write back was: “I’m afraid you may be right.” Sometimes evil does triumph. Israel has now become a largely fascist country with a deeply fascist government and it has been transformed into that, at least in significant part, because my country has profusely underwritten the most malignant developments there, which are still ongoing.
Just as I was finishing this article, in fact, the Associated Press reported that “Israel has approved the largest seizure of land in the occupied West Bank in over three decades.” That land grab, its account added, “reflects the settler community’s strong influence in the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the most religious and nationalist in the country’s history.” Thus have the prophecies of the religious-nationalist Gush Emunim been fulfilled.
[Author’s Note: I am forever indebted to Noam Chomsky, with whom I first became friends in 1964, and whose 1974 book, Peace in the Middle East?, taught me about the realities of Israel’s subjugation of the Palestinians. For my first trip, he provided me with the name of a person of great influence, the incomparable Dr. Israel Shahak, as well as of other holocaust survivors opposing Israel’s occupation. Noam Chomsky launched me on the long trajectory of my writing about Palestine from 1979 to this very moment. He is now 95 years old and in Brazil with his wife Valeria, recovering from a stroke. May he be blessed through the ages.]
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Palestinians and the 2024 Democratic Party Platform
Amid the unimaginable suffering in both Gaza and the Occupied West Bank, here's what I told the Platform Committee.
Jul 15, 2024
This week, I submitted testimony on Israel/Palestine to the Democratic Party’s Platform Committee. This is my 11th convention and the ninth time I’ve been engaged in discussions regarding the platform, either as a member of the drafting committee, negotiating language with the campaigns, or simply presenting testimony, as I am doing this year.
During these many interventions, I’ve seen some changes made, but all too few on how the platforms address the issue of Palestinian rights. Friends often ask me why I keep coming back—like Sisyphus.
I do so for two reasons. In the first place, it is because Palestinian rights continue to be ignored. Despite the language in our last platform regarding the equal worth of Israeli and Palestinian lives, we continue to demonstrate that we do not see them as equal at all—and so their suffering continues.
Secondly, it is because I want Democrats to win. And what I am seeing is that unless Democrats change direction in the way they deal with Palestinian rights, they are risking losing a sufficient enough number of their voters that it could cost them victory in November.
It is important to consider today’s fraught political environment. The magnitude of the suffering Israel has inflicted on Gaza is horrifying: 38,000 dead, 70% of buildings demolished, infrastructure and medical facilities gone, famine looming, and an entire generation of children traumatized.
We are also seeing mass intersectional mobilization of what are largely Democratic voters who are deeply opposed to the Biden administration’s policies on this issue—this includes a substantial number of Arab Americans and a not inconsequential number of young people, progressive Jews, Blacks, Asians, and Latinos.
Most Americans, and actually most Democrats, never read the platform. However, this year the constituent groups noted above will be watching what language the party puts forward in the platform. In this context it is vitally important to consider their concerns and the consequences of failing to do so.
With this as a backdrop and knowing the process as I do, I offered a few recommendations for language changes as guidance for the platform drafters:
I’m sure the platform will speak about our ironclad commitment to Israel’s security and will be passionate in our condemnation of Hamas terror. But you will fail if you do not passionately acknowledge the immense suffering experienced by Palestinians and our role in fostering Israel’s sense of impunity as they continue to grind up Palestinian hopes and lives and property.
I urge you to recognize the urgency of the moment and the rawness of the feelings of those deeply pained by this tragedy, I ask you to avoid language that seeks to placate without substance—in other words, don’t say things you don’t mean, as you did in 2020 when you included the following quotes in the platform:
- Democrats recognize the worth of every Israeli and Palestinian,’ or
- ‘We support a negotiated two-state solution,’ or
- ‘We oppose any unilateral steps by either side’ (including annexation and settlement expansion).
The same platform that said these things went on to support Jerusalem as the undivided capital of Israel (when it has been annexed and is a unilateral action; is home to over 200,000 settlers; and is the site in which there continues to be confiscation and demolition, and blocks the creation of a viable Palestinian state).
If you oppose something, it’s important that you mean it. And if you state that something mustn’t be done, there should be consequences when it happens. When red lines are crossed, settlements get built, hospitals get bombed, humanitarian aid is blocked, and our response is nil, we look weak and insincere.
And if we say we want aid to reach Palestinians but then block aid to UNWRA, the only entity that can efficiently administer, protect, and deliver the aid—then we have failed.
With all this in mind, here are some suggestions: be firm in calling for an immediate permanent ceasefire, but add real consequences if either party violates its terms; demand the unimpeded delivery of aid to Gaza; demand an end to settlement expansion, and an immediate end to settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, with consequences if they continue; and if you are going to condemn Palestinian incitement and terror, you must also condemn Israeli incitement and terror— whether perpetrated by individuals or the state.
One final note: I first engaged in these platform discussions 40 years ago. At that time, I was warned that the “P” word (meaning Palestinians) couldn’t be in the platform. During the next three decades I tried to get opposition to settlements in the platform.
Well, the “P” word made it a decade later and the 2020 platform for the first-time mentioned our opposition to settlements.
So here’s my challenge for 2024’s platform: call for an end to the occupation; for the adoption of President Clinton’s language “the right of the Palestinian people to live free and independent on their own land”; and make clear that there will be consequences for Israel’s continued violations of Palestinian human rights and international law and conventions.
Those were my suggestions. The ball is now in their court.
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