After a lifetime of being told who will rule them, Egyptians dived enthusiastically into the uncertainty of the Arab world’s first competitive presidential race Wednesday, wrestling with a polarizing choice between secularists rooted in HosniBETHLEHEM, West Bank – O come all ye faithful to Bethlehem’s first Christmas rock festival.
A young musician who grew up near Jesus’ traditional birthplace believes the old-fashioned way of marking the holiday – hanging around Manger Square and listening to carols – is a little dull.
So Emmanuel Fleckenstein has organized a three-day battle of the bands that he hopes will attract bigger crowds to Bethlehem. City elders, worried about putting off traditional pilgrims, are keeping the wailing electric guitars and pounding drums at a safe distance from the Church of the Nativity.
“We prefer that in Manger Square, we have the traditional music, the traditional choirs, the traditional Christmas carols,” Bethlehem Mayor Victor Batarseh said.
The festival’s nine foreign and four local acts are mostly performing on an outdoor stage at Bethlehem University. Here, said Fleckenstein, guitar player for the Austrian pop rock band Cardiac Move, “we can get as loud as we want.”
Tonight, though, Fleckenstein’s four-man band gets to play in the prime venue, Manger Square, and, in a nod to the occasion, will end its 45-minute set with a rendition of “Silent Night.”
The festival, modest in scale, is a sign of Bethlehem’s gradual revival as a tourist attraction, after gloomy years when the Israeli-Palestinian conflict all but shut down the city.
In 2009, about 2 million tourists visited the Palestinian territories, four times the 2007 figure, and 80 percent came to Bethlehem, said the Palestinian tourism minister, Khuloud Deibes. More Bethlehem hotels are being built, adding a thousand rooms to 3,000 by next year, she said.
The tourism boomlet is part of efforts by Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad to spur economic growth in the West Bank and restore a sense of normality, even as efforts to restart peace talks remain deadlocked.
In marketing Bethlehem, city officials seek to assure potential visitors that they are safe while not glossing over the hardships of life under Israeli military rule.
Bethlehem, a town of 32,000 just south of Jerusalem, is ringed on three sides by Israel’s West Bank separation barrier, portrayed by Israel as a shield against suicide bombers and by Palestinians as a land grab.
Israel has eased some movement restrictions in the West Bank and pledged to facilitate the influx of pilgrims to Bethlehem, but the towering barrier continues to disrupt the lives of many.
“We suffer from this wall of separation, ... but the tourists, they are safe, they are welcome every minute and every day in this city,” said Batarseh, who recently visited Indonesia and Bethlehem’s sister city, Joplin, Mo., to drum up business.
About 15,000 visitors are expected today, about the same as last year, said Tony Morcos, a city official. Regardless of the turnout, many souvenir shops and local artisans now sell many of their wares through the Internet, rather than to pilgrims.
But the global economic crisis put a damper on the demand for olive wood nativity scenes and Christmas ornaments, said Amani Juha of the Holy Land Christian Ecumenical Foundation, which helps market Bethlehem’s specialties in the United States.
