Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation by Saree Makdisi

Author:Saree Makdisi [Makdisi, Saree]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, azw3, epub, pdf
Tags: General, Middle East, History
ISBN: 9780393069969
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2010-04-12T23:54:16.296155+00:00

Bethlehem as seen from the north. Photo by author.

As is the case elsewhere in the West Bank, the Israeli wall, and the dozens of other obstacles, run along the very edge of built-up Palestinian communities. Not only are Bethlehem and its sister towns cut off from Jerusalem as well as their agricultural land (whose subsequent lack of development will now provide for even more expansion of the Jewish settlements), they have lost all their open green space, and hence any capacity for future growth. The combination of physical closure and the curfew system (Israel imposed 156 days of 24-hour curfew on Bethlehem in 2002, for example) has devastated the area’s social fabric. Hundreds of Palestinians have been forced to leave—10 percent of Bethlehem’s Christian population has emigrated in the past few years alone, which has affected the multisectarian social fabric of the city where Christ was born. The once-thriving area immediately around Rachel’s Tomb, at the northern edge of Bethlehem, has been particularly hard hit. Of the eighty Palestinian businesses open there in 2002, only 10 percent survive today. Bethlehem’s tourist industry has also been devastated: almost 100,000 tourists used to visit the city each month before 2000. Since the tightening of the occupation, that number has plunged to barely 7,000. “Once a bustling cultural and spiritual centre hosting tourists and pilgrims from around the world,” the UN report concludes, “Bethlehem has become an isolated town, with boarded-up shops and abandoned development projects.”

OCCUPATION BY THE NUMBERS

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