Catholics sing as a priest enters a cathedral in the West Bank town of Bethlehem. Christians face serious challenges throughout the Middle East, experts say, including harassment and their relatively low birthrates.Mideast in Transition
Christians are leaving the town of Bethlehem
Palestinians among them grow tired of Israeli roadblocks, outbreaks of hostility.
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BETHLEHEM, West Bank -- From an office near the traditional birthplace of Christ, Mayor Hanna Nasser frets about the prospects for Christians in his slice of the Holy Land.
The outbreak of hostilities between Israel and the Palestinians more than four years ago has accelerated emigration by Palestinian Christians that began years earlier.
Researchers and officials say 3,000 Christians have left the Bethlehem area since 2000, heading for the United States, Australia and Latin America as the local economy fell victim to fighting, Israeli roadblocks and other restrictions, including a new barrier separating Bethlehem from Jerusalem.
Over the past decade, the Palestinian Christian population in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza Strip has declined about 10 percent, leaving about 45,000 remaining, said Bernard Sabella, a Bethlehem University sociologist who studies the issue.
Bethlehem's crucial tourism industry has been hit hard, forcing residents to look for work elsewhere. The 120,000 or so tourists who visited Bethlehem last year -- mostly in organized groups -- represent barely a tenth of the number before 2000, Nasser said.
Bethlehem witnessed fierce fighting in 2002 between Israeli troops and Palestinian militants, some of whom took cover for weeks inside the Church of the Nativity, built on the site where tradition says Christ was born.
Nasser, 68, who is Catholic and displays a photograph of himself shaking hands with Pope John Paul II, gestured toward the church and considered a gloomy future for Palestinian Christians, most of whom are Greek Orthodox. "I'm afraid we'll come and see nothing but stones here -- the stones of the churches, but no people," he said.
Christians face serious challenges throughout the Middle East, experts say, including harassment, their relatively low birthrates and the rise of Islamic fundamentalism. Guy Bechor, a Middle East specialist at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, north of Tel Aviv, said the late pope bears some blame by not acting forcefully in behalf of the Christian communities in the Arab world.
"The Vatican was perhaps the only element that could have united the Christian interests in the Middle East, but (it) just . . . abandoned its flock," Bechor wrote recently in the Israeli daily Yediot Aharonot.
Sabella said, though, that political and economic upheaval, rather than religious differences, were chiefly responsible for driving away Christians, who often are better educated and more affluent than other Arabs. "Turbulent times -- these are pushing people out," he said. "It's not religion."
About 4,500 Muslims also have left Bethlehem in recent years, for example, but their rate of departure has not been as high as Christians'.
According to Nasser, Bethlehem was more than 90 percent Christian in 1948, when Israel's war of independence made refugees of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, many of whom resettled in camps here.
The influx reduced the share of Christians in Bethlehem, and by some estimates, they now account for less than a quarter of Bethlehem's population of 30,000.
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The Detroit News.
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