Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, January/February 1999, pages 28-30

Special Report

Countdown to Bethlehem 2000 Has International, Local Project Managers Scurrying to Completion

By Sr. Elaine Kelley

For Christians it is the place where the story begins, a real place to those who have made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, for others a mythical place recited in the songs and prayers of the season. The name calls to mind lovely pastoral scenes of lambs and shepherds, cozy cave-like dwellings, groves of olive trees and winding, narrow ways made for donkeys and prophets.

In reality, however, Bethlehem is a ghetto, a slum piled up with garbage, its ancient stone buildings crumbling under the weight of decades of strife and neglect. It is a town of shortages, deficient in water, housing and employment, but struggling to be reborn after Madrid and Oslo and Wye through a process of transformation called the Bethlehem 2000 Project, an ambitious development plan attracting millions of dollars from foreign governments and international development agencies. It is a marketing campaign targeting those among the world’s one billion Christians and others who might make the journey to Bethlehem during the first year of the new millennium.

The guiding vision of Bethlehem 2000 is to encourage millions of tourists and pilgrims to visit Bethlehem as history enters the third millennium of Christianity, to promote the town’s rich history and enhance economic development in Palestine, particularly the tourism industry. Since the summer of 1998, projects have been underway to rehabilitate Bethlehem town, to strengthen and improve its infrastructure of roads and utilities, provide more services for the anticipated legions of visitors, build new hotels to accommodate them, and to renovate the historic core of Bethlehem, its treasured old buildings and pedestrian walkways, most importantly the 1,700-year-old Nativity Church and Nativity Square.

For as long as most people can remember, Bethlehem has had extremely inadequate services, a dilapidated electrical grid causing regular power outages, leaky water pipes that contribute to severe water shortages, an inadequate sanitation and sewage system, and roads that have never been repaired. Neighboring communities, like Beit Sahour and Beit Jala, will also benefit from the rehabilitation effort with funds from the World Bank that will be used to restore key historic buildings.

The Bethlehem 2000 Project also includes a program of events beginning in December 1999 and continuing throughout the year 2000, concluding at Easter of 2001. The project was formed when peace seemed on the horizon and with the promise of international financial support.

Most agree that it was a group of faculty members at Bethlehem University who formed the Municipal Council for Bethlehem 2000 working group in 1995. That group consisted of Qustandi Shomali, Musa Darwish, Adnan Musallem, and Saleem Zoughbi, who volunteered their time and resources to raise awareness of the project.

Dr. Shomali, who with his wife, Sawsan Shomali, also on the faculty at BU, has published an information booklet called Bethlehem 2000, A Guide to Bethlehem and its Surroundings, said that he wrote a letter to Bethlehem’s Mayor Elias Freij in March 1996 to persuade him of “the importance of forming an independent committee for this event.”

Dr. Shomali and the other three on the committee also decided to organize an international conference with the support of UNESCO. That conference was held at Bethlehem University in June 1996.

Saleem Zoughbi, professor of computer science at Bethlehem University who also was one of the first four organizers, said that the late mayor of Bethlehem, Elias Freij became too ill to perform the functions of committee leader and the job was passed on to Hanan Ashrawi.

The Council developed a planning document calling for a global funding effort and met with Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat for the first time in August 1996, giving him their recommendation that it was time for the Palestinian Authority to establish a ministry-level committee. In March 1997 the Bethlehem 2000 Project was formed, headed by Arafat himself and with Minister Dr. Nabeel Kassis overseeing implementation of the project.

There now exists an international committee of heads of state and religious leaders, a Palestinian ministerial committee with members of the Legislative Council and other officials.

A Bethlehem 2000 Trust Fund was established as a vehicle for international fund-raising. Bethlehem 2000 assistant coordinator Munib Toukan said that the total cost of the rehabilitation plan is $212 million. As of November 1998, $80 million has been received, mostly from the governments of Japan, Germany, Sweden, Norway, Belgium, France, Spain, Italy, Austria, and Greece. Projects funded by these sources are implemented by the United Nations Development Program.

In May 1998 the Bethlehem 2000 Donor Conference in Brussels brought together the international religious sector to pledge support to Bethlehem 2000. In addition, the Vatican, the Lutheran World Federation, Christian Aid and the Jerusalem Inter-Church Committee (JICC 2000) have all expressed support and willingness to work on Bethlehem 2000 projects.

Those projects began in earnest last summer, when workers began the task of moving earth and stone to put into place the underlying systems and structures, repaving main roads, laying brick and doing landscaping. Bethlehem’s very first traffic signal was installed and awaits an electrical connection.

For several months the community experienced the inconvenience of traffic re-routing and major dust problems. The popular outdoor vegetable market in the historic center of Bethlehem remained open even in the midst of construction activity.

And at Nativity Square, once a large, unsightly and noisy parking lot for taxis and tourist buses, the entire landscape has been turned over for archaeological excavation and for digging of new wells and installation of water and elec-trical systems prior to its metamorphosis into a stone-scaped pedestrian park just outside the oldest church in the world.

Saleem Zoughbi described how tourism in Bethlehem suffered during the Israeli occupation. “Israelis bring tourists to Bethlehem for an hour to visit the Nativity and spend 15 minutes or so in the Square,” he said. “Buses bring their own water and soft drinks. Tourists are warned not to eat or drink in Bethlehem, so we wanted to create favorable conditions for tourists.”

Israeli tourism agencies plan group itineraries so that meals and overnight stays are scheduled in Israel, or Bethlehem is scheduled as a quick stop on the way to Jordan or Egypt. “Fifty new hotels are being built in Amman,” he said, “large shares owned by Israelis.”

Bethlehem restaurants, souvenir shops and hotels don’t get their fair share of business and, even with international marketing plans for Bethlehem 2000, there are fears that Israeli businesses are planning ways to take tourists away from Bethlehem. Nevertheless new hotels recently opened include the Bethlehem Hotel, the Bethlehem Inn, and the Nativity Hotel in neighboring Beit Jala. And a new five-star hotel is under construction behind the historic Jasser Palace, near Rachel’s Tomb in Bethlehem, which will be named the Inter-Continental Hotel.

Israeli tour agencies, however, are working with developers of the planned Har Homa settlement, or Jabal Abu Ghneim in Arabic, on the next hilltop east of Bethlehem.

“Har Homa is the Israeli version of Bethlehem 2000,” says Zoughbi, adding that infrastructure on the mountain has already been completed for souvenir shops, hotels, condos, restaurants, and that on the remains of a Byzantine church a miniature model of the Nativity Church is planned.

According to Zoughbi, Israel is pushing for a number of joint projects that will result in taking needed business away from the Bethlehem area. For example, the Israeli government lobbied the Vatican for a larger Bethlehem 2000 committee to further weaken local control. The Vatican refused.

Israel pushed the Bethlehem Municipality to form a twin-city arrangement with the Nazareth Municipality so that Israel would benefit from revenues drawn into Nazareth, a Palestinian town but under Israeli control. And at the Peres Peace Center, Israel persuaded participants to form a body paralleling the Bethlehem 2000 Donor Conference in Brussels to solicit international funding through the World Bank.

According to Zoughbi, an agreement was sponsored and signed by the World Bank creating the Bethlehem Fund for Peace and Technology, an alternate fund supporting joint Israeli/Palestinians projects, again giving Israel more leverage in profiting from Bethlehem 2000. However, no particular joint-project has yet been approved.

With the New Year of 1999 the countdown begins, and by all accounts the workers had better put in some overtime to make the deadline for completion of projects required for the ambitious schedule of events planned to begin in November 1999.

Assistant coordinator Toukan says that the Nativity Square will be finished first for Christmas 1998 and that by the end of 1998 25 percent of all infrastructure projects will be completed. He added that an international marketing company will be selected soon to begin worldwide advertising for Bethlehem 2000.

The 16-month program includes a variety of religious, informative and entertaining events. Some of the highlights are: a 24-hour multi-media event called “Catch the Star,” which will be broadcast live all over the world from Bethlehem on Christmas Eve 1999; an international music festival on the eve of the year 2000, with two thousand torches and a minute of silence to send a message of peace around the world; multiple centers of attraction, including one at Manger Square, and one in the center of the old city of Bethlehem.

There also will be concerts, music of the East and West, religious celebrations and processions, crúche exhibitions, conferences at Bethlehem University, hikes and walks through Bethlehem in the spring, picnics at convents and monasteries, public lectures on local history, a commemoration of the construction of the Church of the Nativity in 341 ad, a choral music festival, special pilgrimages to holy sites, an olive harvest sign-up in the fall with trips to the olive market in Beit Jala and an exhibition of olive wood carvings, a wine festival at the Creimesan Monastery and Winery, a Bethlehem twin-cities celebration with representatives from the cities of Chartres, Athens, Verona, Assisi, Cordoba, Lisbon and others, and much more.

More information on Bethlehem 2000 is available from the following sources:

• The Bethlehem 2000 Project Web site at www.bethlehem2000.org --

• E-mail: BL2000@palnet.com

• Mail: Bethlehem 2000 Project, P.O. Box 2000, Bethlehem, Palestine [via Israel].

• Bethlehem University/UNESCO at e-mail address: B2000@bethlehem.edu

• For copies of Bethlehem 2000, A Guide to Bethlehem and its Surroundings by Sawsan and Qustandi Shomali, e-mail sshomali@bethlehem.edu or write P.O. Box 100, Doha Street, Beit Sahour, Palestine [via Israel]. The book is available in English, French, German, Spanish, and soon in Italian and Arabic.