About Bethlehem:

Bethlehem is the place where Jesus Christ was born, and also King David or Daoud. Canaanite tribes first settled in Bethlehem three thousand years ago. It was then known as Beit Lahma after the Chaldean god of fertility.

Bethlehem is now a city of Palestine, located 10 kilometers south of Jerusalem. It is part of the West Bank, and under the government of the Palestinian National Authority. Considered as one of the main tourist places in Palestine, it is world-wide famous for its religious and historical value.

Bethlehem is also a center for olive wood carving, mother of pearl, and embroidery which all form an important part of its culture. As any Palestinian city it is known for the national Palestinian dance (dabkeh) and the traditional songs and trills that express the life of its people.

Palestine: Key periods in the conflict

1897: Official establishment of Zionism

In 1897 the journalist Theodor Herzl organized the first Zionist congress in Basel, Switzerland, and Zionism was formally established as a political movement. Reacting to centuries of discrimination against Jews in Europe, the congress proclaimed that Zionism was aimed to establish a national homeland in Palestine for Jews, without taking into account that Palestine was already inhabited by Arabs.

1917: The Balfour Declaration

During the First World War, the Ottoman Empire allied itself with the Prussian and Austro-Hungarian empires. In its war effort against the Ottomans, the British government enlisted the support of Arabs in Palestine with promises that they would be rewarded after the war with an independent Arab state in the area. In 1917, the British military won a decisive victory and the Ottomans capitulated. Some days later, Arthur James Balfour, the British Minister of Foreign Affairs, directed an open letter to Lord Rothschild, a prominent Zionist, in which the former declared support for the establishment of a national homeland for Jews in Palestine, adding that this homeland should not violate the civilian and religious freedoms of the “non-Jewish” population already living there. This letter became to be known as the Balfour Declaration.

In 1920, the British were rewarded at the peace negotiations with a mandate that gave them colonial control over Palestine.

After the Balfour Declaration and the institution of a British mandate in Palestine, Arabs felt betrayed. After all, the British government had previously promised to create an independent Arab state in exchange for the Arabs’ support in the struggle against the Ottomans.

1920-45: The British mandate and the second World War

From 1920 to 1940, Jewish immigration to Palestine continued and the British mandate allowed Jewish communities to take control over important areas of land in Palestine. The Arab population of Palestine reacted against the loss of their land by public meetings and confrontations, sometimes violent.

As a result, the British mandate authorities tried to limit Jewish migration to Palestine by imposing quotas, and later by issuing a White Paper that declared that after a period of five years, Jewish immigration would stop, “unless the Arabs of Palestine agreed to it." Nevertheless, Jewish immigration to Palestine continued.

After the Second World War, the number of immigrants grew. It became known that six million Jews had been exterminated by the Nazis, mainly in concentration camps. For many in the West, the holocaust came to justify the creation of a national homeland for Jews.

In the wake of the war, Zionists demanded the removal of the restrictions on immigration to Palestine. The British, unable to govern the area any longer, passed their mandate to the newly formed United Nations. In practice, the limitations on immigration disappeared.

1947: Partition plan

In 1947, the UN proposed a partition plan for Palestine that handed somewhat less than half of the land to the Palestinians, and a roughly similar part of the land to the Jews, while it proposed an international status for the Jerusalem area. The Zionist movement tactically accepted this plan. The Palestinians, the large majority of the population, refused it as all decisions over the future of their land were taken without their consultation and involvement, and without taking their interests into account.

1948: Nakba

On the 15 May 1948, the Zionist movement proclaimed the State of Israel. Neighboring Arab countries (Egypt, Syria and Jordan) sent in their relatively unequipped armies which were also not well coordinated. At the end of the war, in 1949, Israel occupied 78% of the original Palestinian territory.

During the war, around 762,000 Palestinians fled. After the news of a massacre in the Arab village of Deir Yassin near Jerusalem, in which over 100 civilians were killed, many Arabs decided to leave their homes temporarily, in the expectation to be able to return. There were several refugee waves, inside Palestine, especially to the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, and outside Palestine, to Syria, Lebanon and Jordan. At the end of the war, more than the half of the Palestinians had become refugees.

The UN called for a ceasefire and for the right of refugees to return. Israel refused to accept more than a small number, however. Provisional Israeli borders were established at the Armistice agreements of 1949. Although there were various peace overtures of Arab countries such as Jordan in the 1950s, Arab public opinion did not allow the Arab governments to normalize relations with Israel, and Arab regimes employed rhetoric against Israel to justify their stand and hide the embarrassment of the military defeat of 1948.

The Israeli “law of absent property” allowed Israeli state institutions to seize goods left behind by the refugees. Hundreds of deserted Palestinian villages were destroyed and their land redistributed among Jewish farm communities.

The 1948 war was called "Nakba" by the Palestinians, or "Catastrophe". There were several Arab attempts to regain national pride and take a stand against Israel and the western colonial powers, but such attempts were usually rhetoric only.

However, in Egypt, the nationalist president Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal in 1956, which led to the so-called Suez crisis, in which Britain, France and Israel jointly conducted a military operation against Egypt in old colonial style. At the end, the Suez crisis gave space to the United States to become the new leading political power in the Middle East.

The 1967 War

In the sixties, Israel started pumping water from the Sea of Galilee, which is also a source of water for Jordan, to irrigate the south of the country. This created tension. A new Palestinian national movement, the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization), called for unity of Palestinians, and a unified Arab struggle against Israel. Egyptian president Jamal Abdel Nasser and other leaders made warlike statements on the radio, even though it was not clear that the statements would be followed by action. On 5 June 1967 Israel attacked. The Israeli army conquered the Egyptian Sinai desert, the Golan Heights (in the South of Syria), the West Bank, including East-Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip. At the end of the war Israel controlled all of Palestine, enlarged the Jerusalem area and formally annexed it.

Due to the new defeat of the Arab armies, and the loss of credibility of the Arab states, Palestinian guerrilla movements started to spring up after 1967. Yasser Arafat became a popular nationalist leader, a symbol of Palestine. The discredited Arab governments could not do much else than support the Palestinian guerrilla groups, at least verbally.

However, during the 1970s, there were violent clashes between the different Palestinian groups, organized by the PLO, and the Jordanian and Lebanese governments. The Palestinian groups, such as Al-Fatah, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and others were seen as factors that could threaten the stability of the Arab governments. In 1976 a full-scale civil war broke out in Lebanon in which Palestinian groups sided with left-wing forces. Increasingly, the Middle East came under the influence of the new superpower the United States, who considered Israel an important ally in the region to protect Western interests. The US aimed to keep the stability of pro-western Arab regimes.

1987: Beginning of the first Intifada

In 1987 the first Intifada started in the Gaza Strip and West Bank. It was a Palestinian revolt from within Palestine. The PLO, although increasingly known as the representative of the Palestinians, was unable to create from outside Palestine a change in the situation on the ground. Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza Strip decided to respond on their own considering the inability of international politics to improve their situation. Besides Fatah and other secular groups, the Islamic organization Hamas emerged as an important group in the Palestinian political arena within the West Bank and Gaza.

Pictures of Palestinian youth throwing stones and facing Israeli tanks were seen all over the world. International sympathy for the Palestinian struggle rose. The first Intifada ended in the beginning of the 1990s. During that time first attempts to solve the conflict were made in the Madrid Conference in which both Israel and Arab countries participated, and, for the first time, a Palestinian delegation.

1993: beginning of the Oslo peace process

In 1993, secret negotiations were taking place between Israelis and Palestinians that culminated in the Oslo peace agreement. According to Oslo, Palestinians were allowed to create a Palestinian Authority that would govern the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. In return, the Palestinians would officially recognize the state of Israel. In the mid 1990s a legislative assembly was elected in Palestine, with Yasser Arafat as its head, though in practice the assembly controlled only 8% of Palestinian territory. The West Bank became divided into areas A (Palestinian towns, under full control of the Palestinian Authority), B (Palestinian villages, under Palestinian civil control and Israeli security control) and C (many Palestinian villages, Israeli settlements, military zones, parks and so-called state land, under complete Israeli control). Meanwhile, the Israeli government launched an intensive colonization process in the West Bank, creating especially more settlements around Jerusalem, and crushing protests with bloodshed and destruction of properties. Several militant operations took place in Israel, organized by nationalist groups, as a result of which Israeli civilians were killed. The peace process became stalled.

2000: beginning of the second Intifada

In 2000, negotiations were organized at Camp David in the United States, with the hope of reaching a final peace agreement. The Palestinian Authority asked for the right of return for Palestinian refugees, but Israelis feared it would create an Arab majority in Israel. Israelis wanted to annex some parts of Palestinian territories, leave most settlements untouched and give the Palestinian Authority a very limited degree of sovereignty. The talks led to nothing.

On September 28^th 2000, Ariel Sharon entered with his army the Haram al-Sharif or Temple Mount in Jerusalem, a holy place for Muslims, who took the move as a provocation. The day after, the first confrontations broke out and the second Intifada, also known also as the Al-Aqsa Intifada, began. In a period of one month, 200 Palestinians died. Following this violence the Intifada became an armed struggle. While the first Intifada was a mass uprising, the second Intifada was led by a minority, though it remained supported by most Palestinians. Israelis and Palestinians descended into a spiral of violence. Military operations were carried out in Israel, resulting in the death of also civilians. The cities of the West Bank were directly occupied. The infrastructure was to a great extent demolished. Refugee camps were bombed. The Israeli army imposed long curfews over Palestinian areas and the number of arrests, and houses and lands destroyed, rose.

The violence continues: the Israeli incursions into Palestinian territories and the Palestinian operations inside Israel cause the death of a significant number of civilians. At the same time, in 2002, Ariel Sharon's government began the construction of a wall that physically separated Palestinians and Israelis. This wall will keep the main Israeli settlements located in Palestinian territory in Israeli hands. When finished, the wall will run for hundreds of kilometers and practically annex large areas of Palestinian land. The separation wall cuts many Palestinians from their land, workplaces, schools, health care facilities, and families, and essentially leaves Palestinians in the Occupied Palestinian Territories imprisoned.

In 2004, Yasser Arafat died. In January 2005, Mahmoud Abbas was elected head of the Palestinian Authority. In August 2005, Israel withdrew its settlements from the Gaza Strip. In 2006, after a vascular attack, Ariel Sharon went into coma and Ehud Olmert became prime minister.

2006: victory of Hamas in the elections

In January 2006, Hamas won a major victory in the Palestinian parliamentary elections, and formed the government while Mahmoud Abbas remained president. Considering Hamas a “terrorist” organization, the international community refused to negotiate with the new government and suspended its assistance. This led to a grave financial crisis. Israel imprisoned many of the Hamas parliamentarians and ministers. Fighting between supporters of Hamas and Fatah started, causing dozens of deaths in the Gaza Strip. Finally, Hamas took over power in Gaza. Today the Palestinian Authority under the leadership of Fatah rules over the West Bank.