Israel to Split Christ's Birthplace with Barrier

Israel to Split Christ's Birthplace with Barrier

08-Feb-03
Mark Heinrich
Reuters

BETHLEHEM, West Bank (Reuters) - A senior Israeli army officer told Palestinians on Tuesday their neighborhood
in the town where Christ was born would be divided by a wall to safeguard Jews coming to pray at biblical
Rachel's Tomb.

A 25-foot high barrier will scoop part of the West Bank town revered by Christians as Jesus's birthplace into an
expanded security zone being built around nearby Jerusalem to seal it off from Palestinian suicide bombers and
gunmen.

Almost half of Bethlehem municipality's 140,000 people is Christian. The area around the tomb itself is mainly
Christian.

On Sunday, the Israeli army sent notices to Palestinians living in the vicinity of Rachel's Tomb telling them that
large chunks of their property would be requisitioned for the wall.

A colonel in the army's Civil Administration for Israeli-occupied areas of the West Bank arrived two days later to
explain a plan which local residents said would turn their once prosperous district into a ghetto.

"You will be able to come and go from your neighborhood with permits through checkpoints in a perfectly
respectable manner," Colonel Jamal Salman, an Israeli Druze speaking Arabic, told dozens of anxious residents
crowding around him.

"There will be no evacuation of residents. There will be no changes in your lives initially. I cannot tell you when
the work will begin but when it does a wall will be built," said Salman.

Guarded by flak-jacketed troops, Salman walked from the fortified entrance of Rachel's Tomb up Yasser Arafat
Road -- so named after Palestinian militants began fighting for statehood in September 2000 -- to brief everyone
within earshot.

DIALOGUE OF THE DEAF

But it was largely a dialogue of the deaf between the Israeli army and local Palestinians who blame it for the
demise of their livelihoods with stifling security measures they say are disproportionate to any threat to Rachel's
Tomb.

"We did not meet you to discuss this (security wall) but to say we oppose them in principle," Bethlehem Mayor
Hanna Nasser told Salman as merchants who fear the wall will kill their businesses shouted and gesticulated
around them.

Violence during the Palestinian revolt has already turned Bethlehem, which came under self-rule under a 1995
interim peace deal, into a tourist ghost town. Bethlehem and other West Bank cities have since been reoccupied
following suicide attacks.

Nasser said lawyers for the Bethlehem municipality would seek a temporary injunction in Israeli court against the
wall.

About 500 residents living on the northern edge of Bethlehem are expected to find themselves on the wrong side
of the Israeli barrier when it goes up.

"You are using the pretext of instability to expand the boundaries of Jerusalem at the expense of Palestinian
territory and hundreds of people will be in danger of falling into a ghetto behind concrete and barbed wire," the
mayor said.

Israeli Defense Forces Order 03/14T said 4.5 acres of property were "seized for military reasons" from eight
residents, including Nasser, as well as the local Islamic religious trust opposite the tomb as well as an Armenian
monastery.

The notice said the land seizure was "part of steps to prevent terrorist attacks."

Jad Issac, a Bethlehem research institute director, said: "Maybe no one will be evicted but they will all suffocate
economically and socially. Bethlehem will be strangled, denied space for future development."

He showed reporters satellite pictures attesting to proliferating Jewish settlements and bypass roads hemming in
Bethlehem and adjacent Palestinian villages.

"Eighteen thousand dunams have been confiscated around Bethlehem since 1967. The wall is part of this
(creeping) annexation," he said.

Israel denies this, saying barriers being erected are for security only and will not prejudge final borders.
(c) 2003 Reuters










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