The shelves of Bethlehem’s tourist shops are filled with the gifts you might expect. There are countless carved olivewood crucifixes, angels and last suppers. But there are also Nativity scenes complete with Joseph, Mary, crib and Israeli concrete wall with military watchtower.
Israel’s separation barrier is at its most prominent around Bethlehem. Here it crosses into the occupied West Bank, runs up tight against the Palestinian city and cuts it off from much farmland. For Palestinians the wall has become one of the most striking symbols of Israel’s 42-year military occupation.
In some of the modern interpretations of the nativity, the wall divides the wise men and camels from the crib. At the Holy Land Arts Museum, on Manger Square, the Giacaman family sells a version carved to scale with three slices of wall and a looming watchtower. These made to order pieces are not cheap: the biggest, made from olive wood and with a cypress-wood watchtower nearly 50cm tall, sells for hundreds of dollars.
PHOTO: AFP
“It’s important that people see what is really happening here,” 27-year-old Elias Giacaman said. “We could have said the scale doesn’t matter, but I wanted it to be accurate to show the real image of the wall.”
Giacaman says most customers for the larger pieces are foreign journalists, aid workers and diplomats based in Jerusalem or tourists. His family, like many locally, lost farmland that is now on the other side of the barrier, where the expanding Israeli settlement of Har Homa sits.
“We can’t even get close to it,” he said.
Only slightly more than half the barrier’s 724km length has been completed, but Israel insists it has played a crucial role in preventing Palestinian bombings. It effectively attaches up to 10 percent of the West Bank to Israel and resembles a future border.
The International Court of Justice has ruled the barrier is illegal where it crosses into the West Bank and should be taken down.
There are other challenges. Although thousands of West Bank Christians will be given month-long Israeli permits to visit Jerusalem’s churches this Christmas, only 300 of Gaza’s 3,000 Christians will be allowed in.
The Christian Palestinian community has become more vocal in its criticism of the occupation. Prominent clergy issued a new call for civil disobedience and peaceful resistance, likening their effort to a summons by South African churches at the height of apartheid.
“Our connectedness to this land is a natural right. It is not an ideological or a theological question only. It is a matter of life and death,” they wrote in the Kairos Palestine document.
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