The little West Bank town of Bethlehem has cancelled all but religious observances this Christmas. The tall evergreen tree near the Church of the Nativity where tradition holds Jesus was born has not been strung with bright fairy lights. Manger Square wears no gay seasonal decorations. Last night’s mass at the St. Catherine’s Church was attended by local folk and some visitors but foreign tourists and pilgrims who normally flock to Bethlehem for the holidays are few and far between.

The streets of the Christian Quarter of Old City of Jerusalem are devoid of decorations and largely empty. Voices of visitors echo in the hallowed halls of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, built over the crypt where Jesus body was brought after his crucifixion by the Roman occupiers of Palestine.

Israel’s Gaza war has shut down Bethlehem and East Jerusalem. Churchmen, merchants, restaurant and hotel owners had hoped for a vibrant holiday season which stretches from early December until Orthodox Christmas on January 7th.

Last year, 120,000 pilgrims and tourists flocked to Bethlehem and East Jerusalem, hotels were fully booked, restaurants and cafes teemed with custom, and shops sold thousands of carved olive wood mementoes of the Holy Land.

Christmas may come once a year only, but seasonal business fuels the economies of Bethlehem and Jerusalem’s Old City for the entire year. Covid coveted the Christmases of 2020 and 2021. Palestinians were counting on a repeat of last year to sustain them until 2024.

My late husband Godfrey and I had a cheerful Christmas eve in Jerusalem in 1966. After checking in at the century-old American Colony hotel — which was still under the management of the founding Vesters – we walked around the bustling Old City. We dined with our friends Amin and Betty Majaj and Usama and Samia Khalidi at the Majaj flat in Augusta Victoria hospital on the Mount of Olives. At that time Amin, a physician, and Usama, a biochemist, were conducting research into health problems among Palestinian chidlren living in refugee camps. After dinner we went to Shepherds’ field near Bethlehem for Protestant carol singing in the chill night air. On Christmas morning we took a plane from Qalandia airport to our home in Beirut and had lunch with other friends in a Lebanese mountain village. In June 1967, Israel conquered, occupied, and began colonising East Jerusalem and the West Bank, which had been under peaceful Jordanian administration from 1948-1949.

I was in East Jerusalem on my own at Christmas 2002. It had been a harsh year for West Bank Palestinians because of the second intifada. The Beirut Arab League summit in March had adopted the Saudi peace plan which called for full Israeli withdrawal from Arab territory occupied in 1967 — East Jerusalem, the West Bank, Gaza, and the Syrian Golan — in exchange for full Arab normalisation with Israel. Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon — who rejected “land-for-peace” –responded promptly by reinvading the West Bank. Palestinian President Yasser Arafat was confined to his damaged headquarters in Ramallah.

I spent many weeks at the Christmas Hotel in East Jerusalem during Sharon’s rampage. We journalists used to go the Ambassador Hotel up the hill to meet Bahia, a young Palestinian woman, who arranged smuggling runs to places the Israelis did not want us to enter. We called this crossing the “Tora Bora.” We mistakenly thought the Tora Bora were Afghan mountains but they are, in fact, caves that hosted Osama Bin Laden, the author of the September 11th, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington. Bethlehem, Beit Sahour and Beit Jala, in the Jerusalem area were particularly sensitive because Bethlehem is widely known around the world. Beating up Bethlehem is not popular in the Western world. Besieged and blasted Jenin was forbidden until the Israelis had done their worst and withdrawn their troops. To intimidate smugglers and smuggled, the Israelis shot over the minivans carrying journalists, diplomats, and activists. The Israelis also arrested us from time to time but failed to scare us or close down the Tora Boras.

I was invited to dine that Christmas eve with the head of the Palestine branch of American Near East Refugee Aid (ANERA), Tom Neu and his wife Pat. They lived in a splendid flat in the Albright Institute of Archaeological Research on Salaheddin Street in East Jerusalem. After the traditional feast of Turkey and trimmings, we drove to Bethlehem for midnight mass at St. Catherine’s church.

Bethlehem had recovered from Sharon’s crackdown which had not stifled the intifada and celebrations were in full swing. The town was thronged with pilgrims and visitors from Palestine and the world over. The Christmas tree on the edge of Manger Square was festooned with bright coloured lights. Merchants welcomed window shoppers. Vendors sold roasted chestnuts and boiled corn on the cob. Pilgrims bowed to enter the low door to the Orthodox Church of the Nativity and lined up outside the steps to the grotto below the church where Jesus is said to have been born 2,000 years ago. The Palestinian Boy Scout band marched ahead of the procession of Christian clerics who paraded through Manger Square.

As the midnight hour drew near, Palestinian Christian and Muslim notables settled into the first row of chairs in St. Catherine’s church. A black and white kufiyah was draped on the chair of the missing Arafat who remained imprisoned in his Ramallah compound. He fell ill during his incarceration and died in a French military hospital before Christmas 2004.