Christians in Bethlehem face existential threat under Israel's occupation Submitted by Lubna Masarwa on Tue, 12/23/2025 - 10:18 Christmas should be the busiest time of the year for the shopkeepers of Manger Square, but the birthplace of Jesus is now a ghost town Christmas has been the beating heart of the Giacaman family’s Bethlehem business for generations. The Giacamans own Christmas House, one of the main shops on Manger Square selling Nativity figurines, festive ornaments, rosaries, crucifixes and other religious paraphernalia, all ornately carved in their nearby workshop from local olive wood. But for the past two years, the doors of Christmas House have remained closed, Jack Issa Giacaman told Middle East Eye. “You don’t see anybody around. Unfortunately during the last years Israel converted Bethlehem to be a big prison,” said Giacaman, who currently manages the company. Days before Christmas, Manger Square is almost deserted, with only a few locals taking photos of the star-topped Christmas tree decorated in red and gold baubles. Shops are shuttered and tour guides mill about, touting desperately for non-existent business in front of the Nativity Church. “Every Saturday a few Filipinas and Indians come - they work in Israel. But it’s not enough. Everything is closed,” said Asaad Jaqaman, the owner of another local souvenir shop. “Closed, because why would we open? There is no one coming in, no people, nothing. What are we going to do? Sometimes I open out of boredom. The situation is pitiful.” But the economic malaise that has gripped Bethlehem since the coronavirus pandemic is now accompanied by a graver threat. Pressed up hard against the separation wall between Israel and the occupied West Bank, corralled on surrounding hills by settlements, and choked by a network of dozens of checkpoints and security gates, Bethlehem’s Christian and Palestinian identities exist under an ever-tightening siege. Christians accounted for 85 percent of the population of Bethlehem governorate when Israel was created, but by 2017 that figure had collapsed to about 10 percent. The Israeli assault on Bethlehem has accelerated at a blistering rate since February 2023, when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu handed Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, head of the Jewish ultra-nationalist Religious Zionism party and a settler himself, authority over the West Bank. Most shops remained shuttered and padlocked on Manger Square this month, even at what is usually the busiest time of year (MEE) Since then, the situation has continued to deteriorate as the economic devastation of coronavirus was followed by the war in Gaza and the brutal Israeli crackdown in the West Bank that accompanied it. “We say goodbye to another family every other week or so,” Reverend Munther Isaac, for many years a prominent local pastor before his own move to Ramallah, told MEE. “Christian families are leaving. People have given up on the prospect of life with dignity in their homeland.” Shepherds' field seized by settlers This week brought foreboding news of a further land grab as Smotrich on Sunday announced the legalisation of 19 previously unauthorised settlements across the West Bank. “The people of Israel are returning to their land, building it and strengthening their hold on it,” Smotrich wrote on social media. What are Israeli settlements and why are they illegal under international law? Read More » These included Yatziv (which means ‘Stable’ in Hebrew), a few kilometres east of Bethlehem in the Palestinian village of Beit Sahour, one of only a few Christian communities left in the West Bank. Bulldozers arrived in Beit Sahour last month to prepare the ground, triggering panic and fear among local residents. “There is a sense of terror. A big spirit of sorrow and grief. The wound is still open. We are actively losing our land. We cannot conceive the idea,” said Dalia Qumsieh, a human rights activist and local resident who spoke to MEE before Sunday’s announcement. For anyone familiar with the Nativity story, Beit Sahour holds significance as the place where angels brought the news of Jesus’s birth to shepherds “keeping watch over their flock by night”. But every Palestinian knows what the arrival of settlers portends. The destruction of an ancient way of life. The building of new “Apartheid” roads that carve through the landscape and redraw the map. Farmers - and shepherds - driven off their land. The smashing of agricultural equipment. Settler pogroms and daily intimidation. An Israeli military gate blocks the road connecting the village of Dar Salah to Bethlehem (MEE) “The shepherds’ field is now situated between two settlements. We are trapped,” said Qumsieh. “Our ancient presence as indigenous people in this land is basically threatened,” she explained. “We have seen our family members emigrate one after another. And I’m careful when I say the word emigrate because they’re responding to a deliberately made coercive environment by the Israeli occupation. “It’s not immigration out of choice if you are living in a setting where there is no dignity, no safety, no freedom, no rights.” A Christmas tree but no tourists Earlier this month, crowds gathered in Manger Square as Bethlehem celebrated the traditional lighting of the Christmas tree for the first time since before the start of the Gaza war. The event drew international coverage and, speaking to MEE in his office, Bethlehem’s mayor, Maher Nicola Canawati, is still cheered by the occasion. “On that night, celebrating together, we felt the Christmas vibes that we missed for two years and definitely this is helping the local economy and giving the people hope,” he said. But Canawati’s warm words sit uncomfortably with his own recognition of the desperate situation facing his town and its people. Ten percent of Bethlehem’s population - 4,000 people - has left in the last two years, according to the mayor’s own reckoning. “Bethlehem is depending on tourism and since the war, tourism stopped and all the hotels and the industry was shut down completely. This resulted in many Bethlehemites selling their businesses and leaving Bethlehem,” he said. Bethlehem Mayor Maher Nicola Canawati says that 10 percent of the town's population have left in the last two years (MEE) Grim-faced shopkeepers and desolate streets confirm the bleak picture. Giacaman said his own brother was among those who had left the town and moved abroad. “The media try to give a different picture that everything is normal. They put up a Christmas tree but 80 percent, even 90 percent of the hotels are empty.” But it is not just tourists who are absent. Deterred by a dense ring of Israeli military checkpoints and security gates, often opened and closed at the whim of the soldiers stationed there, many Palestinians from nearby villages risk getting stuck overnight if they visit the town. Giacaman said: “Yesterday, a girl was telling her mum: ‘Hurry, hurry, they are going to close the gates. We have to get back to the village before they close the gates.’” Giacaman said that the main entrance to Bethlehem, known as Checkpoint 300, had remained closed for much of December, even though the month is the busiest time for the town’s businesses. “This is something illegal, killing the economy in Bethlehem completely.” Christians 'under attack' It's not just in Bethlehem where Christians are under threat. Israel’s occupation, and above all its building of the separation wall, has severed the umbilical cord which for almost 2,000 years linked Christians in Bethlehem and Jerusalem. Like Jerusalem’s other sacred spaces, Christianity’s holiest sites are located within the ancient walls of the Old City in occupied East Jerusalem. Here, Christians are targeted, assaulted - and frequently spat on by ultra-extreme settlers. The Religious Freedom Data Centre reports a surge of hate crimes against Christians, with the police taking little interest. Attacks on Jerusalem’s 3,000-strong Armenian Christian population have rocketed. Settlers regularly vandalise the area with graffiti, for instance, “Death to Arabs and their Armenian Friends”. Crucifixes and other Christian paraphernalia on sale in a souvenir shop in Bethlehem in December 2025 (MEE) Posters commemorating the Armenian genocide have been ripped down or defaced. One recent poster put up read: “The time has come to settle in Gaza.” Kegham Balian, a spokesman for Save the ArQ, a campaign to protect the Armenian quarter, told MEE how locals have been manning barricades for more than two years to prevent settler incursions after protests against a leasehold deal agreed by the Armenian Patriarchate. Balian recalled how “about 20 to 30 armed thugs came here with electric chainsaws, with batons, with full aggression trying to intimidate us to kick us off our land”. The Armenian presence in Jerusalem dates back at least 1,700 years. “The Christian presence in Jerusalem is under attack,” said Balian. “If we don't stand united we will lose it.” Christians are under threat everywhere in Jerusalem. At the Church of the Flagellation, located within the Muslim quarter, settlers attacked a statue of Jesus with a hammer. A threatening poster appears on a wall of the Anglican cathedral on Nablus Road. A shop worker in a Christian bookshop gets spat at. One leading Christian minister, speaking on condition of anonymity, told MEE that “everybody feels that we are on the absolute edge of our ability to exist here”. Pastors for Israel Christianity, in short, is under state-sponsored attack in the land of its birth. There’s a mystery about all this because Netanyahu loves to boast that Israel is the “guardian of Christianity” in the Middle East. Earlier this month, the largest ever delegation of Christian leaders arrived in Israel on a week-long trip. 'There is no protection for us, as Christians, from the Christian countries' - Jack Issa Giacaman All expenses were paid by the Israeli state, supervised by Israel’s foreign ministry and personally approved by Netanyahu himself. On their journey, they were addressed by President Isaac Herzog, Foreign Minister Gideon Saar, and the US ambassador Mike Huckabee. Huckabee urged the delegation to return home with “the fire of God burning in your bones”, so that they might be “ pro-Bible ” and therefore “pro-Israel”. Christian evangelicals have long been cherished political allies of the Israeli state. Yet the Christian heritage of Palestine is under just as much peril as its Muslim heritage. The Christian leaders were bussed deep into the West Bank to witness archaeological excavations at Shiloh, supposedly the Old Testament site of the Tabernacle and the Ark of the Covenant, the centre for worship for Israelites before the building of the first Temple in Jerusalem. They also visited Bethlehem. “I met with some of them,” said Canawati. “I think it is our duty to tell the just story of Palestine and to talk to people who may have been told different ideas by the Israelis.” He firmly rejects Netanyahu’s claim that Israel is the guardian of Christianity in the Middle East. Jack Issa Giacaman's family has owned a wood-carving business on Manger Square for generations (MEE) “That’s definitely a wrong statement. What drove the Christians out from Bethlehem is the occupation and all the hardships that we as Palestinians face, Christians and Muslims.” Giacaman is still unsure when Christmas House will reopen but, standing in the empty shop, he has more on his mind than the shelves of unsold figurines and icons of saints that stare back at him. “Everybody is crying about the Christians, but we are killed by the knife of the Christians of Europe and America. There is no protection for us, as Christians, from the Christian countries,” he said. “I don't see any hope or any future for the Christians in the Holy Land anymore. In the next 20 years, I think you will come and visit Bethlehem, maybe you will see one or two families left.” Occupation Peter Oborne News Post Date Override 0 Update Date Mon, 05/04/2020 - 21:28 Update Date Override 0