Dwindling Christian Population Of Bethlehem
The shop owned by Aziz al Soos on the edge of Bethlehem is a modest, single-storey place lost among terraces of restaurants, ironmongers and general stores, but it has one special characteristic. It sells pork.
Fifty-year-old Mr al Soos is the third generation of his family to farm and butcher pigs. His grandfather started the business, selling pork to British troops stationed in Palestine during the 1930s, and its current status as the only pork butchery in the territories makes it a valuable place to gauge the plight of the Holy Land's dwindling Christian minority.
The issue will be in the headlines later this week, when Dr Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and Cardinal Cormac Murphy O'Connor, head of the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales, lead a joint delegation to Bethlehem to express solidarity with their beleaguered brethren.
No member of the local Muslim majority would dare enter Mr al Soos's shop, allowing him to be candid in his assessment as he thwacked a cleaver into a wooden chopping board covered with gore.
"It's not as if there is a single thing like this cleaver that cuts us Christians down," he said as he bagged up pork chops for a regular Christian customer. "It's more like a slow, steady pressure, which is slowly killing us off." In the run-up to Christmas, the once large Catholic community could have been expected to buy large amounts of pork for meals and celebrations. This year, he estimated, business was down by two thirds compared with a decade ago.
Bernard Bassil, 50, a water engineer and regular customer at the butchery, likened it to a slow, steady suffocation. "With the problems from the economy where Palestinians don't get any money from the government, there are no jobs to go round. And we know that, if a job becomes available, it will go to a Muslim, not a Christian." He said tension between the Christian minority and Muslim majority is a daily feature of life. It rarely flares into violence or spectacular acts of cruelty, but it steadily corrodes the quality of life enjoyed by Christians.
"My son, Nazar, when he was just 13, used to come home from school and the Muslim boys of his age from the local refugee camp would run after him shouting 'Nazarene, Nazarene', which is a derogatory local term for Christian. Once they caught up and threatened to beat him unless he said Allah was his god and Mohammed his only prophet. We had to move house, but now my son has left university and cannot get a job, so every day he says we must leave."
In his office overlooking Manger Square in the centre of Bethlehem, Victor Batarseh, the town's mayor, said for decades local Christians have been voting with their feet.
"Before 1948, Christians were 90 per cent of the population of the town, but now they are just 35 per cent and that is not just because of the larger birth rate among Muslim families. It is because some families have decided that finding a new life elsewhere is the answer to tougher living conditions," he said.
"And it is easy to see why they want to leave. You just have to look at the Separation Barrier around Bethlehem, built by the Israelis, which has turned the town into a large prison." Visiting Bethlehem today from Jerusalem — just six miles away — is no longer straightforward. You have to pass through a 30ft wall built, so Israel says, to stop suicide bombers and negotiate your way past armed soldiers and concrete barriers.
Incongruously, the Israeli Ministry of Tourism has hung a large banner on the wall next to the main crossing point with the message "Peace Be With You". Graffiti on the Palestinian side of the wall is more insulting about Israel.
The election of the Hamas government this year raised fears of a fundamentalist crackdown on local Christians, but that has not happened. Perhaps the worst thing the government has done has been to break its promise to provide the mayor's office with £30,000 for Christmas decorations for central Bethlehem.
But the election added to fears among local Christians that nobody will listen to their complaints about drip-drip discrimination, condemning their community to continue its downward spiral.
The mayor had a rather long-winded explanation for what it will take to end the decline, saying: "If there is peace, and I mean real peace not just between Israelis and Palestinians but between Palestinian factions, then the Christians will come back."
One of the Christian customers at Mr al Soos's pork shop was more pithy. "It will take another miracle," she said. The source....
Fifty-year-old Mr al Soos is the third generation of his family to farm and butcher pigs. His grandfather started the business, selling pork to British troops stationed in Palestine during the 1930s, and its current status as the only pork butchery in the territories makes it a valuable place to gauge the plight of the Holy Land's dwindling Christian minority.
The issue will be in the headlines later this week, when Dr Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and Cardinal Cormac Murphy O'Connor, head of the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales, lead a joint delegation to Bethlehem to express solidarity with their beleaguered brethren.
No member of the local Muslim majority would dare enter Mr al Soos's shop, allowing him to be candid in his assessment as he thwacked a cleaver into a wooden chopping board covered with gore.
"It's not as if there is a single thing like this cleaver that cuts us Christians down," he said as he bagged up pork chops for a regular Christian customer. "It's more like a slow, steady pressure, which is slowly killing us off." In the run-up to Christmas, the once large Catholic community could have been expected to buy large amounts of pork for meals and celebrations. This year, he estimated, business was down by two thirds compared with a decade ago.
Bernard Bassil, 50, a water engineer and regular customer at the butchery, likened it to a slow, steady suffocation. "With the problems from the economy where Palestinians don't get any money from the government, there are no jobs to go round. And we know that, if a job becomes available, it will go to a Muslim, not a Christian." He said tension between the Christian minority and Muslim majority is a daily feature of life. It rarely flares into violence or spectacular acts of cruelty, but it steadily corrodes the quality of life enjoyed by Christians.
"My son, Nazar, when he was just 13, used to come home from school and the Muslim boys of his age from the local refugee camp would run after him shouting 'Nazarene, Nazarene', which is a derogatory local term for Christian. Once they caught up and threatened to beat him unless he said Allah was his god and Mohammed his only prophet. We had to move house, but now my son has left university and cannot get a job, so every day he says we must leave."
In his office overlooking Manger Square in the centre of Bethlehem, Victor Batarseh, the town's mayor, said for decades local Christians have been voting with their feet.
"Before 1948, Christians were 90 per cent of the population of the town, but now they are just 35 per cent and that is not just because of the larger birth rate among Muslim families. It is because some families have decided that finding a new life elsewhere is the answer to tougher living conditions," he said.
"And it is easy to see why they want to leave. You just have to look at the Separation Barrier around Bethlehem, built by the Israelis, which has turned the town into a large prison." Visiting Bethlehem today from Jerusalem — just six miles away — is no longer straightforward. You have to pass through a 30ft wall built, so Israel says, to stop suicide bombers and negotiate your way past armed soldiers and concrete barriers.
Incongruously, the Israeli Ministry of Tourism has hung a large banner on the wall next to the main crossing point with the message "Peace Be With You". Graffiti on the Palestinian side of the wall is more insulting about Israel.
The election of the Hamas government this year raised fears of a fundamentalist crackdown on local Christians, but that has not happened. Perhaps the worst thing the government has done has been to break its promise to provide the mayor's office with £30,000 for Christmas decorations for central Bethlehem.
But the election added to fears among local Christians that nobody will listen to their complaints about drip-drip discrimination, condemning their community to continue its downward spiral.
The mayor had a rather long-winded explanation for what it will take to end the decline, saying: "If there is peace, and I mean real peace not just between Israelis and Palestinians but between Palestinian factions, then the Christians will come back."
One of the Christian customers at Mr al Soos's pork shop was more pithy. "It will take another miracle," she said. The source....
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