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Summary
Summary
"[ Bethlehem ] brings within reach 11,000 years of history, centering on the beloved town's unique place in the world. Blincoe's love of Bethlehem is compelling, even as he does not shy away from the complexities of its chronicle." -- President Jimmy Carter
Bethlehem is so suffused with history and myth that it feels like an unreal city even to those who call it home. For many, Bethlehem remains the little town at the edge of the desert described in Biblical accounts. Today, the city is hemmed in by a wall and surrounded by forty-one Israeli settlements and hostile settlers and soldiers.
Nicholas Blincoe tells the town's history through the visceral experience of living there, taking readers through its stone streets and desert wadis, its monasteries, aqueducts, and orchards to show the city from every angle and era. His portrait of Bethlehem sheds light on one of the world's most intractable political problems, and he maintains that if the long thread winding back to the city's ancient past is severed, the chances of an end to the Palestine-Israel conflict will be lost with it.
Author Notes
Nicholas Blincoe is an award-winning novelist, playwright, and screenwriter and the author of Bethlehem: Biography of a Town . He has co-produced two feature-length documentaries on the Palestine-Israel conflict, Jeremy Hardy vs. the Israeli Army and Open Bethlehem , both directed by filmmaker Leila Sansour. Blincoe divides his time between London and Bethlehem.
Reviews (4)
Guardian Review
Memories merge with history in this account of the little town that has become one of the most contested areas on Earth On Christmas Eve, thousands of Palestinian Christians and their co-religionists from all over the world will congregate on Bethlehems Manger Square beneath a giant Christmas tree to celebrate the birth of Christ at the very place tradition holds he was born. For many of the Palestinian worshippers at least, this is a bittersweet moment, the joy of marking the most important date in the Christian calendar offset by the siege-like atmosphere an eight-metre-high wall around the town, chainlink fences and mushrooming Israeli settlements in which it takes place. Few of us know much about the little town of Bethlehem beyond the Christmas carol beloved by English-speaking Christians and the fact that it is the birthplace of Christ. Fewer still, I suspect, realise that Bethlehem is under unprecedented threat from Israel. Hemmed in by 42 settlements, which are considered illegal under international law but which Israel regards as legitimate suburbs of Jerusalem, it has become, in Nicholas Blincoes melancholy closing verdict, an open-air prison. Blincoe, it should be said at the outset, is not your average historian. In fact, hes not an historian at all. A screenwriter, novelist and playwright, he is married to the Palestinian film-maker and activist Leila Sansour, whose family comes from Bethlehem. One of his documentary credits is the 2003 film Jeremy Hardy vs the Israeli Army, directed by his wife. All of which should give you a fairly clear idea of where he is coming from. Just as the author is no conventional historian or biographer, Bethlehem is no straightforward account of this extraordinary little town. Part history, part travelogue and memoir, it reads like an extended love letter to a place on the brink. While the chronology holds his narrative more or less together as we move from stone age settlement to contemporary Israeli settlements via Christian Rome, Byzantium, the era of Islamic conquest and the Crusaders, Mamluks, Ottomans and the British, he gives himself free rein to share memories, travels, interviews and assorted experiences along the way in a highly discursive, frequently amusing, often tragic but always accessible history. Settlement around Bethlehem dates back something like 11,000 years, but the town itself is comparatively recent, founded around 200 years before Christ. Its location in a water-rich area on the edge of the desert six miles from Jerusalem has long been its great advantage and simultaneously its fatal weakness. Since Jerusalem has always been dependent on its diminutive neighbour for its water supply, originally via an ancient aqueduct, since antiquity Bethlehem has been the key to controlling the larger city, as waves of incomers understood from the Seleucids in the fourth century BC to the British and Israelis in the 20th. Its earliest trade was in olive oil, hauled west across the desert by pack animals to the Nile. The terraced valleys around the town today, full of almonds, apricots, figs and grapes, recall Bethlehems position on the ancient spice route. By the middle ages, Bethlehem was prized by Venetian traders for its high-quality soap. This brought a measure of prosperity to the little town in addition to income generated by the pilgrim trade, centred around the Church of the Nativity originally consecrated by Constantine the Great and his mother Helena in 327, rebuilt in 565 by Justinian after its destruction in the sixth-century Samaritan revolts. Humour is one way to undercut the pervasive sense of a world closing in on Bethlehem. Writing about the Philistines and their sarcophagi decorated with meaningless Egyptian hieroglyphics simply for effect, Blincoe likens them to basketball players who misspell the words tattooed on their bodies. Discussing the recent Italian-led restoration of the Church of the Nativity, whose crypt marks the site of Christs birth, he confesses to alarm on watching a team ripping out ancient cedarwood beams with a crowbar. Much like laws and sausages, I guess it is better not to know how a sixth-century church is restored. While Jerusalem has long been the most contested city on Earth, the land around Bethlehem is no less fraught. Territory and its control here matters more than perhaps anywhere else on the planet. Blincoe cites the advisory opinion of the international court of justice in 2004 on Israels profoundly controversial wall, which the court argued was designed to create a fait accompli on the ground that could well become permanent tantamount to de facto annexation. At the flat-topped hill of Herodion known in Arabic as Jabal al-Fureidis, the Hill of Paradise and once home to the Empress Eudocia from her arrival in Bethlehem in 444 Blincoe is angered by the sites recent tenuous reinterpretation and reconstruction by the late Israeli archaeologist Ehud Netzer. For many Palestinian worshippers, the joy of Christmas is offset by the siege-like atmosphere in which it takes place The dig seemed like a metaphor for Israel: a tough-guy reading of Jewish history that obscured every other story or, worse, erased it entirely, he writes. At Herodion, Netzer had literally built over Paradise. If the Israelis are Blincoes main target, Britains colonial rule in Palestine is also in the line of fire. He argues that what stands out about British rule is its sheer destructive nature, both to the landscape and the people. It was the British who shut down the millennia-old market in Manger Square, forcibly moving the livestock traders to the foot of Wadi Maali and displacing the stallholders on to the ridge, where three blocks from the oldest surviving part of Bethlehem were pulled down to accommodate them. Blincoe is at his most bleak on the prospects for peace. Since Israeli rejectionists, for whom land can never be negotiated away, constitute part of the political mainstream, no Israeli leader will ever make a deal with the Palestinians. He does not mention rejectionists on the Palestinian side. Nor, he reminds us, should the world see Israeli settlements as a purely ideological movement. As the Israeli historian and onetime deputy mayor of Jerusalem Meron Benvenisti puts it, the settlements are a commercial real estate project that conscripts Zionist rhetoric for profit. The story of Jesus and the moneychangers somehow comes to mind. - Justin Marozzi.
Booklist Review
When Blincoe visits Bethlehem his in-laws' home he sees a place carrying a far more tangled history than most Christians realize when singing Christmas carols about that little town. Weaving up-close personal experience into an extensively researched narrative, Blincoe limns the developments that transformed Bethlehem from an agricultural region supporting Bronze Age olive-oil merchants to a bustling twenty-first-century city filled with tourist guides and quarry miners. In this winding chronicle, the politics of conquest loom large: readers see how its location at the edge of Jerusalem and in control of its water supply has exposed Bethlehem to assaults by a long list of invaders the Seleucids, the Crusaders, the Mamluks, the Ottomans, the British, and finally in 1967 the Israelis. As he peels away the layers of culture this succession of overlords has given Bethlehem, Blincoe illuminates the continuing relevance of each fascinating layer. Though some readers may resist Blincoe's sharp criticism of what he calls the Israeli occupation, all will leave these pages with a richer understanding of an iconic city.--Christensen, Bryce Copyright 2017 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
TELLING THE STORY of a city is a bold undertaking - an act, depending on the city, that entails parsing myth and historical accounts, archaeologicai digs and theological teachings, to distill the very essence of a place. Nicholas Blincoe takes on this mission with verve in his new book, "Bethlehem," unveiling the history of "the most famous little town in the world," a place whose associations have long existed in the sociocultural Zeitgeist. It is the supposed birthplace of Jesus; a town known for dissent in the face of invading forces; the site of much holiness and bloodshed. Blincoe's thoroughness is nothing short of impressive. The story of Bethlehem begins with an earthquake, forcing long-submerged land upward, some 20 million years ago. But it wasn't until a few millenniums ago that the city's inherent wealth became apparent: Olive oil, a byproduct of a geographical climate "where the wilderness meets civilization," put the town on the map, making it precious in terms of trade, a place worth conquering. In focusing on a single, prized city like Bethlehem, Blincoe is essentially telling the story of colonization. A combination of aqueducts and proximity to Jerusalem made Bethlehem "heavily militarized throughout antiquity." As Blincoe notes, "all it takes to conquer Jerusalem is to seize its water supply.... This is what every future invader did." Through these pages, we witness the town fall to crusaders and Ottomans, the British Army and Israeli forces, its streets brimming with soldiers and prophets and empresses. From ornamental shells dating to the eighth century B.C. all the way to the fatal Oslo accords, Blincoe offers a biography so vividly imagined that I jumped when my phone buzzed, interrupting my reverie of Nabataean temples. If at times the historical rundown feels dense, a bit rushed, the reward is in the lush prose and personal accounts. Blincoe is a joyful writer, well suited to the task of evoking place, with passages like this one transporting the reader with mouthwatering specificity: "The warren of streets that make up Beit Sahour's old town echo with Arab techno music, the clink of bottles of the local Taybeh beer, and thick clouds of metallic tasting smoke from shisha pipes." History humbles. It reminds us that even the most recognized stories aren't finished being written yet. The story of colonialism, for instance, is very much alive and well in Bethlehem to this day, a town administered by the Palestinian Authority but under the military occupation of Israel, with the additional strain - impacting access to everything from natural resources like water to telecommunications and electric pipes - of being surrounded by settlements with a population of over 100,000. The Balfour Declaration, which encouraged "the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people" and set into motion the most enduring conflict of our time, hit its centennial this year. Speaking of the contested narratives of the region, Blincoe notes, "the desert around Bethlehem was never clean or empty._The urge to wish everything away reflects the desire of an immigrant to make a fresh start in a new landscape." Nowhere is this more true than in Bethlehem, a place where "people came armed with their own ideas of truth." Blincoe handles his own narratives of Bethlehem delicately, like a horticulturist pruning beloved orchids, following its many iterations through the rise and fall of civilizations as "a place caught between worlds. ... When there are so many possibilities, there is every reason to hope that one of the possibilities might be a miracle." More than anything, his love for the place leaps off the page; for all its chronicling of incursions and defeat, this is ultimately a book about hope. HALA ALYAN is the author of the novel "Salt Houses."
Library Journal Review
Novelist, playwright, and screenwriter Blincoe is an Englishman married to a native of the Palestinian city of Bethlehem. They divide their time between London and Bethlehem, so he is in a good position to introduce readers to this small town located on the West Bank. He employs apt images to help visualize a scene and historical comparisons to help understand particular events. While situating the historical Bethlehem in religious as well as Jewish and Roman history, the author also provides the flavor of the contemporary city. Similar to James Martin's Jesus, this is part travelog, part history, and part memoir. But Blincoe, who has produced two documentaries about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, shows more interest in current events and the political situation of Bethlehem (and Palestine generally). Using the Gospels, historical documents, archaeology, and his 1907 Baedeker, Blincoe weaves a tapestry of history, geography, and politics that illuminates this most famous of areas, here seen through the eyes of one who knows the place intimately. VERDICT Deftly written, this narrative has something to offer a wide variety of readers, whether interested in history, archaeology, religious connection, or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.-Augustine J. Curley, Newark Abbey, NJ © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.