O Little Town of Bethlehem

I've never really been anywhere exotic. I've been to some odd places - I've been to Arkansas, which in some ways takes "odd" to a whole new level, and I once spent 3 days in Salzburg talking about lesbianism - but I've never been anywhere that's felt truly "foreign". So it was with a certain amount of excitement that I awoke at 5am to find that I'd been stirred from sleep not by students urinating against my window, which is normally the case, but by the sound of several minarets seemingly competing with each other for the faithful. I'd woken up in Bethlehem, and it doesn't get any more spine-tingling than that.

Bethlehem was so alien to me in many ways as to make Arkansas look vaguely normal. A city of massive contradictions, it isn't the Little Town still-lying under starry skies that you imagine from the hymns and charity cards. This image is even less appropriate these days, when the city is encircled by a huge, ugly concrete wall which the powers that be laughingly call, with a grasp of PR that would impress even Peter Mandelson, the "Peace Wall". This peace wall means that those residents who've even managed to get permits to allow them to leave need to queue for several hours daily at the checkpoints just to be allowed to go to work, so they can earn money to pay taxes, most of which the city never sees. Under the guise of peace, the army is stopping Palestinians from even accessing and thus being able to harvest the olive groves - one of Bethlehem's main sources of income given the products (oil, wood etc) that come from them. Much like the Berlin wall, the wall is gradually being daubed by all sorts of grafitti, from an original Banksy to the undecorated yet dryly witty "Can we have our ball back, please?"

At the same time, though, the wall afforded me one of my more poignant moments of the trip (the somewhat less than poignant I'll come to later.) We had kept silent - a whole bus of us - as we approached the checkpoint out of the city and into Jerusalem, a sort of act of prayerful solidarity with the Palestinians, for whom the queuing is the easy bit. Absorbed in a sort of easy "goody versus baddy" analysis of the whole situation I gazed out of the window, not looking at anything particular. A young soldier with a huge gun hung across his chest, who looked younger than most of my students, gazed back at me. He smiled. I smiled back. As we pulled away and through the gates, he waved. I waved back. A tiny gesture to relieve the monotony of his day, but a little human glimmer of hope in a deeply depressing situation. Of course, they have conscription here, and the kid must have been 18 or 19, and this whole state of affairs is not his fault.

Downtown Bethlehem isn't exactly kicking. A trip venturing out one evening found us heckled twice by shopkeepers who leapt from their front rooms-cum-storefronts as we moseyed past at nine in the evening. The first, who seemed to run some sort of corner shop from an easy chair, shouted after us "You English? You want beer?" We declined and walked a little further up the street, only to be heckled by another store owner who stood in the door of his souvenir shop brandishing an olive wood nativity scene and calling excitedly "You Irish? You want Virgin Mary?"

Our trip into the centre of town encountered little excitement, except an ominous chain cafe that on closer inspection turned out to be called "Stars and Bucks" (the West Bank is happily free from Americanisation, though possibly for the wrong reasons) and a huge Christmas shop that seemed to be open all night and sold the sort of articles you'd buy with a sense of irony even in the mid-70s. Disturbing and garish singing plastic Santas adorned the shop front, strobe lighting attacked the road in front, and a Disneyfied voice loudly rang out with the Twelve Days of Christmas. It was therefore with a certain amount of relief that we stumbled upon Afteem, just off Manger Square, a gloriuos family-run restaurant with no menu, where they bring you what happens to be going down that day. In our case this was real hummus, falafel, salad and lamb kofte to die for, washed down with genuine Palestinian beer (which against all expectation I'd highly recommend, despite the fact it's advertised by a bloke who looks like Borat) Afteem restored my faith in what had appeared during the day to be a sad, down-on-its-luck tourist trap which my inner-Marxist had been brooding on throughout the trip. It was friendly, cheerful, the food was awesome. Oh, and they have their own Facebook group. It seemed like one of many glimmers of optimism in a surprisingly optimistic city, one of the others being the Bethlehem Arab Society of Rehabiltation - an astounding organisation relying largely on outside aid but serving the local community, specialising in rehabilitation and training for disabled members of a society that often shuns them. The centre carries out operations, provides treatment, consultations, support, rehabilitation, training and work opportunities, day centres, nurseries, outreach and crisis internvention. In short, it's a shining miracle in what we shouldn't forget is this most holy of cities.

And so, onwards, through the checkpoint. We're leaving Bethlehem behind - counting our blessings that we're able to leave at all.