Every year around Christmas, the international media swoop down to the little town of Bethlehem, just south of Jerusalem, to see how Jesus’s birthplace is doing. And every year, the news is bad—the Christian population has in the last decade gone from a majority to a fairly small minority, and it is now a Muslim city. But as Aaron Klein writes in a moving op-ed on Ynet, the media seem convinced this is Israel’s fault, to be blamed on the security barrier Israel erected to prevent the infiltration of terrorists. (For an especially egregious example of this tendentious reading, see Newsweek editor Kenneth L. Woodward’s December 24th op-ed in The Wall Street Journal.) Klein rebuts this quite nicely:
Simple demographic facts will answer this question. Israel built the barrier five years ago. But Bethlehem’s Christian population started to drastically decline in 1995, the very year Arafat’s Palestinian Authority took over the holy Christian city in line with the U.S.-backed Oslo Accords…. As soon as he took over Bethlehem, Arafat unilaterally fired the city’s Christian politicians and replaced them with Muslim cronies. He appointed a Muslim governor, Muhammad Rashad A-Jabar and deposed of Bethlehem’s city council, which had nine Christians and two Muslims, reducing the number of Christians councilors to a 50-50 split. Arafat then converted a Greek Orthodox monastery next to the Church of Nativity, the believed birthplace of Jesus, into his official Bethlehem residence. Suddenly after the Palestinians gained the territory, reports of Christian intimidation by Muslims began to surface. Christian leaders and residents told me they face an atmosphere of regular hostility. They said Palestinian armed groups stir tension by holding militant demonstrations and marches in the streets. They spoke of instances in which Christian shopkeepers’ stores were ransacked and Christian homes attacked.
The result of this is the effective de-Christianization of Bethlehem:
Bethlehem consisted of upwards of 80 percent Christians when Israel was founded in 1948, but since Arafat got his grimy hands on it, the city’s Christian population dove to its current 23 percent. And that statistic is considered generous since it includes the satellite towns of Beit Sahour and Beit Jala. Some estimates place Bethlehem’s actual Christian population at as low as 12 percent, with hundreds of Christians emigrating per year.
What’s unclear about the media’s take on this front is what interest Israel could possibly have in turning Bethlehem into another Jenin, Nablus, or Ramallah. Read the whole thing.
