c. 1999 Religion News Service
BETHLEHEM, Palestinian Authority _ When Khalil Shokeh attended last weekend’s inauguration of this ancient city’s Bethlehem 2000 millennium festivities, he noticed that he was seeing his city in a light that was unfamiliar even to him, a native son.”Now, for the first time, thanks to all of this cleaning and plastering of buildings, I am seeing the real old town as it might have looked hundreds of years ago,”said the director general of the Bethlehem Chamber of Commerce.”It’s really a hopeful sign, a sign of peace.” After months of furious preparations, the Palestinian Authority is beginning to showcase the results of its $160 million millennium redevelopment project, known as Bethlehem 2000.
Two years in the making, the project has provided the city with a much-needed face lift for the coming year. The hope is it has also laid the groundwork for making Bethlehem a more pilgrimage-friendly destination for years to come.
Manger Square, once a dusty, lackluster parking lot in front of the famous Church of the Nativity, where tradition holds that Jesus was born, is now a broad, stone-paved plaza graced with trees and benches. Similarly, the narrow, winding streets that weave from the square through Bethlehem’s old city markets have been restored to handsome pedestrian walkways, with freshly painted blue storefronts. For years, these same storefronts were blocked by traffic and blackened by car fumes.
Last Saturday (Dec. 4), Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat lit up an enormous Christmas tree in Manger Square to mark the formal start of Bethlehem 2000 festivities. Alongside the square, where an Israeli military headquarters once stood, the former Palestinian guerrilla leader also dedicated an attractive, Swedish-funded peace center designed to host conferences and cultural events for the millennium.”The Palestinian Authority … worked day and night so that Bethlehem could be ready for this fabulous occasion,”said Arafat’s top aide, Tayeb Abdel Rahim, speaking on behalf of the Palestinian leader, who sat at a table flanked by Jerusalem’s Latin (Roman Catholic) and Greek Orthodox patriarchs.”We worked under a very difficult situation, a lack of infrastructure, continued (Jewish) settlement activity and the suffocation of this city”under Israeli control.
That’s not to say that the work is finished. In the days before and after the Saturday kickoff, tourists approaching Bethlehem’s holy sites were still forced to dodge an obstacle course of roadworks as new sewage, water and electric lines are laid throughout the city _ in some cases for the first time in this century.
Most of the construction work on the key road arteries should be completed by the summer of 2000, promised Mariam Shahin, a spokeswoman for the Palestinian Authority’s Bethlehem 2000 project. But elsewhere, she said, the development work will continue for up to five more years, as Palestinians seek to maximize the long-term economic benefit from the millennial project, funded by the World Bank, the European Union and the United States.
That time frame, Shahin maintains, is not unreasonable.”The average city in Europe took about seven years to rebuild after World War II,”she observed.”Bethlehem wasn’t destroyed in a war, but it was a victim of gross neglect for decades.” On the outskirts of Bethlehem, new tourism projects are getting under way even now that could draw the benefits of Bethlehem 2000 out to the perimeter of the rapidly growing city of more than 40,000 people.
South of the city, a massive new conference center and five-star hotel complex is rising up in the orchards and grassy knolls around Solomon’s pools. The ancient reservoir was part of a Roman-era pipeline system to Jerusalem and sits in a mountainous setting that retains something of the look and feel of the classical biblical landscape of shepherds and vineyards.
The complex, which should be nearly complete by summer, will house a 5,000-seat auditorium, the largest in the Palestinian Authority territory, said Shahin.
Just north of the city, on the main road to Jerusalem, an elegant old Palestinian mansion known as Jacir’s Palace has been transformed into the facade of a five-star Intercontinental Hotel. The hotel is due to open next summer with 250 rooms _ a significant boost in lodgings for a city that has only 1,300 hotel rooms today.
Along with the infrastructure projects, Bethlehem 2000 is promoting a long list of millennial musical and cultural events, as well as new walking and hiking tours in the city and environs to encourage tourists to extend their stay in the district.
Tourists to Bethlehem today typically spend less than an hour in the city before rushing back to their hotels in Jerusalem, Palestinian officials say.”Our aim is to create circumstances in which they can spend more time here, maybe eat a meal, spend a night and have more human interaction rather than just interaction between people and stone,”said Shahin.
One example of the new promotional tactics was evident Saturday when a group of about 20 tourists, including a young American couple garbed as a pregnant Mary and Joseph, arrived in the city by donkey, ending a 12-day trek from the Galilee city of Nazareth.
The route followed the trail the Holy Family is believed to have traveled centuries ago on the eve of Jesus’ birth to register for a Roman census in Joseph’s hometown. Similar”Nativity”tours will be offered six times by the Bethlehem 2000 project throughout the year, along with weekly nature treks through the Bethlehem area.”We have the raw material, in terms of Bethlehem and its holy sites,”said Shahin.”But we also have historic and cultural areas around Bethlehem and the West Bank that we want to link to this project.” Bethlehem’s Chamber of Commerce also is working to improve the nightlife in the city for both locals and tourists.”We want our merchants to think about opening small attractions that might draw business in the evenings, such as musical performances and new restaurants,”said Shokeh.
During this holiday season, in which Palestinian Muslims will celebrate the fast of Ramadan while Christians celebrate Christmas, shopkeepers have been asked to keep their stores open late in the evenings. That, said Shokeh, will help draw local residents into the streets after the Ramadan fast breaks for the evening _ a crucial change in a town that once rolled up its sidewalks at sunset.”We want to create a nightlife for Bethlehem,”he said,”a sense of celebration.” Already, tourism appears to be on the upswing as the renewal of the peace process lures wary travelers back to the Middle East again after years of bus bombings and political standoff.
In 1999, some 700,000 tourists visited the city _ a 14 percent upswing compared to 1998. But that increase is small in comparison to next year’s numbers, when some 2 million tourists are expected.
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The projected increase in tourism will ideally be translated into an economic boom for Bethlehem’s shopkeepers and merchants, who have suffered repeated economic setbacks _ first from the Palestinian”intifada,”or uprising, and later from the dislocations imposed by the infrastructure work around the city.
Palestinians, however, still are dependent on Israel to realize those projections. Not only will the continuation of the peace process be an important factor for tourism next year, but cooperation at the local and regional level will be essential in smoothing the flow of tourists between Jerusalem and Bethlehem, officials note.
Currently, the Israeli army checkpoint between the two cities poses a potential bottleneck that could deter even hardy tour operators from venturing through the blockade, which is sometimes closed in times of acute security tensions.
But Yossi Noy, director general of Israel’s Year 2000 Authority, said that the crossing is now being expanded and checkpoint procedures are being revamped to permit Palestinian- and Israeli-operated tours to cross without even stopping for a routine check.
Not only will Palestinian and Israeli tour buses and taxis be able to pass unhindered directly between Bethlehem and Jerusalem, but other Israeli access points to Bethlehem from the eastern and southern sides of the city will be opened to tour operators, he promised. Those access points should ease traffic pressures during peak holiday times.
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