Little to cheer in Bethlehem as Omicron hits Christmas tourism

Only a month ago, Bethlehem gallery owner Rula Dughman was preparing for her busiest time of year: Christmas.

“In November everybody was busy cleaning, getting ready for the rebirth of Bethlehem for Christmas. Then came Omicron,” she sighed, looking over a deserted Manger Street, near where tradition says Jesus Christ was born.

Soon after the new coronavirus variant was discovered, Israel, which controls the borders of the occupied West Bank in which Bethlehem is located, shut down foreign travel to contain its spread.

Within Israel, the economic impact of successive lockdowns on the tourism industry has been mitigated by billions of shekels spent by the government on unemployment assistance and targeted aid to hotels and tour operators.

But the impoverished Palestinian Authority, which has limited self-rule, has had little aid to offer hoteliers and business people in Bethlehem.

Without tourists, Bethlehem’s economy has withered, and on its second Christmas under the pandemic, the duelling marching bands from local schools did little to lift the despondent air on Christmas Eve. “We are talking about a large number of economic institutions that faced epic failures,” said Anton Salman, mayor of Bethlehem.

The municipality of Bethlehem, where foreign tourists first brought the virus in March 2020, had just over 500 active coronavirus cases on Christmas Eve, out of about 20,000 since the pandemic began. Its population totals almost 100,000 people. About 250 of its residents have died from Covid-19, according to health officials.

Older residents recalled past Christmases under the first and second intifadas, or uprisings, in the 1980s and early 2000s as being less gloomy than this one. At least then, they said, the nearby Byzantine Church of the Nativity was open.

“We don’t have oil here — all we have is the church, and if the church is open, we make a living,” said Adnan Sobh, 51, a souvenir shopkeeper who was months behind on his rent for a shop off Manger Square. “I’ve sold my sheep, I sold my goats, and I had to sell my car just to survive, just to keep living.”

Unlike other cities within the West Bank, half of Bethlehem’s workforce is tied to Christian tourism, said Salman, as he watched over the dimmed celebrations from his office over Manger Square. Television cameras zoomed in tight to avoid the spectacle of an empty square, as marching bands greeted the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, the leading Catholic cleric, on a chilly Christmas Eve afternoon.

Salman counted 67 hotels, 125 souvenir shops and dozens of olive-wood workshops that have been left without work, affecting thousands of people. “People can’t pay back their loans to the bank — even we [the municipality] are facing financial difficulties,” said Salman.

The Bethlehem municipality is $10m in the red, he estimated, with revenues from tourism accounting for roughly half of Bethlehem’s overall income. The Palestinian Authority’s deficit swelled to $1.36bn in 2021, the World Bank estimated, as almost a third of households in the West Bank remained below the poverty threshold.

Eight in 10 of Bethlehem’s workers are unemployed, a city official estimated. The total gross domestic product of the occupied Palestinian territories is under $15bn, international organisations estimate, with the West Bank making up the vast majority of that.

Amani Juha spent $1.5m renovating an old building into a modern 56-room hotel in Bethlehem. She had reopened in November, hoping to bring back the 25 employees she had lost. “I have to look for a new window, something that has nothing to with tourism. We had a lot of reservations for 2022, but then there was Omicron,” she said.

Dughman pointed to shuttered shops, hotels with lights turned off and the small groups from Israel visiting sites that typically attract thousands of visitors.

At her café, she said her business had been saved by Palestinians of Israeli nationality, some of them Christians, coming to Bethlehem for the holidays after finding it difficult to fly abroad during the pandemic.

But keeping her gallery and café open during a time of deep impoverishment had made her feel guilty. “It felt terrible to open an art exhibition when people here are going through something so disastrous — they have no income, and I am telling them to come to enjoy some art,” she said.

At the entrance to the sixth-century church, Father Antonius Habib waited for the marching bands to lead the Patriarch to prayers, and counselled patience — both with the pandemic and with the Lord. Bethlehem’s Christians should take some comfort in reclaiming the city for their own private celebrations, rather than sharing them with tens of thousands of foreigners, he said.

And for the rest of the world’s Christians, the message stays the same. “Despite all the agony, we have to remember that the Lord came to save us,” he said. Then, he adjusted his mask, and joined a socially distanced welcoming queue for the Patriarch.