Originally published on The New Republic on Dec. 24, 2023.
Bethlehem is usually brimming with cheer—and tourists—this time of year. But the war in Gaza has turned it into a “ghost town.”
Every year at Christmas, the hilltop town of Bethlehem comes alive with holiday cheer. Parades light up the cobblestone alleyways around the Church of the Nativity, built over the grotto where Jesus is said to have been born. Restaurants fill with locals and tourists as revelers toast Jesus’s birth with araq, a Levantine anise liquor, and Arabic Christmas songs by Lebanese singer Fairuz resound through the streets.
But not this year.
“Bethlehem is a ghost town,” said Zarzar, who works in the tourism industry, told me in a telephone interview earlier this month. “Normally, Christians and Muslims from across Palestine come here to celebrate Christmas, along with American and European tourists. But they all evacuated when the war started. Since then, we’ve been under Israeli military blockade. We are completely cut off.”
Since Hamas’s attack on October 7, Israel’s military has limited movement for Palestinians across the West Bank, where Bethlehem is located, and conducted daily raids. At last count, 281 Palestinians in the territory have been killed by Israeli forces, and eight have been killed by Israeli settlers. More than 1,000 have fled their homes.
Last month, in response to Israel’s merciless devastation of Gaza, Palestinian church leaders canceled Christmas celebrations. At Bethlehem’s Lutheran church, Pastor Munther Isaac has erected a Nativity scene showing baby Jesus in a destroyed building. “If Jesus was born today, he’d be born as a child in Gaza under the rubble,” he explained in a recent sermon.
The Bethlehem area is home to around 100,000 people, a mix of Palestinian Christians and Muslims. Dotted by religious sites, it depends on pilgrims to survive; Zarzar estimates that three-quarters of its economy is linked to tourism. But these days, around one-quarter of locals are unemployed. Many of the Old City’s white limestone houses sit empty. Palestinian Christians are traditionally a majority, but many have emigrated due to the occupation’s economic effects: Bethlehem is surrounded by Israeli checkpoints and Jewish-only settlements, strangling opportunities for development.
“When people sing ‘O little town of Bethlehem,’ I think they’ve got it wrong,” said Zarzar, who was born and raised in Bethlehem’s Old City. “There is no Christmas for Bethlehem. I would sing instead: ‘O broken town of Bethlehem.’”
From the hills above town, you can see Gaza City only 50 miles away. Smoke from Israeli airstrikes is visible. Instead of Christmas carols, Bethlehem hears the thud of Israeli bombs.
Israel’s assault on Gaza has killed an estimated 25,000 Palestinians. These include many victims from the Palestinian Christian community, including more than a dozen who were killed when Israel bombed a historic Orthodox church where they were sheltering, as well as a mother and daughter shot dead by Israeli snipers in the courtyard of Gaza’s Catholic church just days before Christmas.
Isaac lamented that the United States, which gives billions in military aid to Israel every year, blocked a recent U.N. resolution calling for a cease-fire. “They celebrate Christmas in their land,” he said, “and wage war in our land.”
In the Christmas story, Mary and Joseph take shelter in Bethlehem as they flee Roman persecution. But Bethlehem’s role as a place of refuge is not just an ancient one. Just a stone’s throw from the Church of the Nativity sits the Syriac Quarter. The Syriacs are one of several Christian communities in the city, in addition to Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant, and Armenian; their ancestors spoke a form of Aramaic, like Jesus, and they arrived a century ago fleeing a genocide in the Ottoman Empire’s dying days.
Some of Bethlehem’s Syriacs have been displaced multiple times over. Joseph Khano was born in Bethlehem to Syriac parents who found refuge there after fleeing their home in what is now Turkey. He grew up in West Jerusalem. He told me that in 1948, his family was forced to flee, this time from the Nakba, the expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians from what is now Israel. In 1967, when Israel occupied the West Bank, they were displaced yet again.
On Bethlehem’s edges are three refugee camps founded after 1948. “My grandfather always remembered how they fled into the hills for safety, living in tents during the rain and freezing cold,” said Tamara Abu Laban, a professor at Bethlehem University, whose family is originally from Zakariyyah, a village around 10 miles away. “He told me how the people of Bethlehem helped them during those times, receiving them with love and compassion in the churches and monasteries.”
Over time, the tents were replaced by tin shacks and eventually cinderblock homes. Today, they have become apartment buildings stretching toward the sky even as the alleyways below follow the tight dimensions laid out when they were just footpaths. Dheisheh camp, where Abu Laban lives, is home to nearly 9,000 people, most of whom hope to one day return to their ancestral villages inside what is now Israel. When Abu Laban was growing up, Israel surrounded the camp with a fence, forcing residents to use a single checkpoint to enter or leave. Today, Israeli forces raid the area almost daily, and many young men here have done time in Israeli prison.