This year, Bethlehem will not be able to celebrate Christmas as planned and there will be no Christmas Festival. The children will not have their gifts, the worshippers will be mourning and the pilgrims will be absent.

The importance of Christmas is doubly significant in Bethlehem. We celebrate a special occasion with the rest of the world but with a conscious pride that Jesus was born in our town and the message of love he brought with Him came out of Bethlehem. We also maintain a tradition of hospitality to pilgrims, which has been going on since the fourth century and which, unfortunately, will be interrupted this year.

Christmas 1995 was very special because for the very first time ever Palestinians could celebrate it in Bethlehem under the Palestinian flag. For the millennium celebrations, the Bethlehem 2000 Project, established by the Palestinian National Authority in 1998, has planned a special programme of events spanning a 16-month period from Christmas 1999 to Easter 2001. The highlight of this programme is, naturally, the Christmas Festival. Those who have been following up on events in Bethlehem, focus of world attention during this momentous occasion, would know of the success of last year’s Christmas Festival and of the thousands of people who came to attend the celebrations. The town was decked out with special decorations and celebrants adorned their homes and prepared gifts for their loved ones. Music was in the air and orchestras and choirs of international renown performed for the Inauguration, the four Sundays of Advent and on Christmas Eve. As two thousand white doves flew up in the sky, the crowds jamming Manger Square cheered in the New Year with a prayer of hope for the future.

But that was last year. This year we will be celebrating Christmas on a different wavelength.

At Bethlehem 2000 Project, we will see all our efforts of the last two years come to naught because of Israel’s continued aggression against Palestinians, children and civilian men and women alike, our infrastructures and our institutions. Our contribution has been, in addition to the restoration of the city of Bethlehem – infrastructure, rebuilding of the old city, rehabilitation of historical sites, tourism development, a major feat by itself- creating a whole cultural programme, with a special focus on Christmas, in order to raise the cultural life of Bethlehem and restore to it the dignity it had lost during thirty years of occupation. The driving principle of our project has been to transform Bethlehem into a vibrant cultural city and a centre of dialogue on major issues, including the issue of peace. This year, however, we will celebrate Christmas under the missiles of the Israeli forces and in the shadow of the loss of our loved ones. So far over 210 Palestinians have died and some 6000 have been wounded by Israeli shelling and live ammunition, with the escalation of the last few days more will die and still more will be wounded. Tens of families from Beit Sahour, whose homes have been destroyed by Israeli missiles, find themselves living in tents erected in the Shepherd’s Field. So how can we celebrate?

We had to cancel our Advent Concerts as well as the Thirteen Holy Nights programme. Our guest choirs from many parts of the world, including Russia, Ukraine, Benin and the U.S. will not be able to come for Christmas Eve and sing in our Star event, Choirs of the World on Manger Square. The Christmas Market will be forsaken and New Year’s Eve will be a moment of silence. Our intensive and extensive work of the last 2 years and the legacy we have committed ourselves to give to the people of Bethlehem and to all Palestinians, will have to be buried under the rubble of Israeli rockets.

I look out through my office window and see the hill of Abu Ghneim, alias Har Homa, right in front of me, one of the many Israeli settlements under construction in spite of the on-going negotiations of the peace process. Har Homa, however, is rather special: building this settlement started in parallel to the peace process, and you can view it from Manger Square, a sore in the harmonious beauty of the hills surrounding Bethlehem. With the constant threat of the settlers, who are trigger happy and armed to the teeth and who, at best, hate the Palestinians on whose lands they have built their homes, how can there be peace? How can Bethlehem celebrate Christmas when across Manger Square, this settlement is growing as an insult to peace and justice?

As our frustrated youth throw stones, Israeli tanks and aircraft shell the homes of civilians. While Israelis carry on with their lives, we have every aspect of our life disrupted, from electricity and water cuts, to food shortage, from medical services to communication between different areas and cities. Our olive groves have been raped by Israeli bulldozers and settler vandalism and our economy is suffering from irreversible damage.

Yet, like every year on December 24, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem will make his solemn entry into Bethlehem and the Nativity Church accompanied by church dignitaries and officials, and Midnight Mass will be scheduled as usual. But last year’s buzz and excitement will be something of the past. If children, teenagers and men and women from all walks will crowd into Manger Square, they will not be cheering, and the parade of uniformed scouts carrying flags will silently lead the Patriarchal procession through the streets of a beautifully restored but mourning city. Bethlehem’s legendary attributes have overshadowed the hard reality of its history. Presently, its day to day existence is witnessing the worst and the church steeples will look up silently to the skies this coming Christmas. No fireworks and certainly no doves flying into the night.

Yet again, we have established the Bethlehem Christmas Festival and we will continue to promote it to the world as an annual event. We sincerely hope that despite the prevailing grave conditions, there will still be some room for the people of Bethlehem, the land of peace and the birthplace of Jesus Christ, to celebrate Christmas in peace and away from gunfire and to be able to resume its tradition of hospitality to the world community.