Friday night Mary’s father, Abou Hannah, passed away. He was seriously ill for a few weeks, but we expected that his illness would last for at least some months more. Under the circumstances, all are happy that he did not suffer. 

The next day, Mary’s brother Hannah (Abou Hannah means the father of Hannah), and sisters Norma and Rita, married with partners who come from various parts of the world, come over from Paris where they live. After the shock of his death, the reunification of the family is the next intensely emotional moment. All cry upon arrival. It is sad for a family to meet at a moment of loss. 

The following days the burial and mourning are arranged according to custom. For three days, visitors pass by the house in which one room is reserved for the men and another for the women. During the day of burial, one of the neighbours offers their house for hosting the male part of the family. I enquire why this is so. It concerns a community building practise shared by almost all Christian denominations and also by Moslems. Another neighbour, Abou Bendi, explains that the neighbour offering hospitality should come from Bethlehem town. He himself, although also a close neighbour, is a refugee from Ramleh, and would therefore not even consider to offer hospitality. During the waiting period before going to church, we drink strong black coffee without sugar, which is in fact an effective non-alcoholic drink for fighting a depressive mood. At lunchtime, “kiddreh” is served, a customary meal during a mourning period, which consists of spiced rice and chicken or lamb meat. The neighbours take care of food and drinks during the first day. 

During the brief mass in St Catherine’s Church, the Catholic part of the Church of Nativity, the coffin lies open, and the closest family kiss Abou Hannah’s forehead to say farewell for the last time. Many people attend the mass, including Mary’s colleagues and all the Brothers of Bethlehem University. Afterwards the men carry the open coffin to the cemetery, where the male attendants pay condolences to the nearest family. For the next days, many hundreds of people pass by, including members of the larger “hamula” (extended family). Some cousins and an uncle of Mary work at Bethlehem municipality; their acquaintances and professional contacts also pay a visit. The visitors stay for about half an hour, and leave when a next round of visitors arrive. Never in my life I shook so many hands. Some of the older visitors obviously gained experience in quickly shaking hands along a row of people. The younger ones pass by to fill and to remove small coffee cups, in the Bedouin fashion, which they too do with a certain rhythm and skill. The talk is lively. It is clear that those with authority gain the attention of all. A souvenir shop owner and member of the municipality tells about his traveling difficulties despite having three passports. Of course the talk is largely about the political situation. On Monday morning, the visitors relay the heavy shooting in Bethlehem itself between Palestinians and Israeli soldiers near Rachel’s Tomb. The day before, soldiers and settlers injured more than twenty Palestinians in a village to the south of Bethlehem, and gunmen apparently took revenge by starting to shoot at Rachel’s Tomb, a traditional flashpoint. For our family from Paris it was their first “baptism” into the sound of shooting and shelling. This time it came dangerously close; the shooting entered even our street. The watertanks on the roof of our opposite neighbours were shot. Some of the visitors, too, tell about the damage on their roofs. 

While talking with the visitors I try to reconstruct Abou Hannah’s life which I largely know but not in all its details. Abou Hannah’s real name is Abdallah Morcos. “Abdallah” means “servant of God” while the Morcos family name derives from St Mark, the Gospel writer. The family traces its distant origins back to Yemen, where some Arab tribes were baptized in the first centuries after Christ, possibly due to evangelizing activities by St Mark’s followers who might have traveled from Alexandria in Egypt southwards to the Arabian Peninsula. 

Abou Hannah was born in 1917 just a few days after the Balfour Declaration was issued. In that declaration, the then British Minister of Foreign Affairs promised the Jews a homeland in Palestine under the condition that the rights of what were euphemistically called the “non-Jewish” citizens would not be infringed. Abou Hannah’s life thus spanned the whole conflict in Palestine, the end of which he did not live long enough to witness. 

Surprisingly, he was born not in Palestine but Chile. During the second half of the 19th century, many Christian Bethlehemites acquired a good knowledge of languages and made international contacts through the Christian missionary schools and institutions then established in Jerusalem and Bethlehem. The making of Holy Land products flourished, especially olive wood sculptures and mother-of-pearl products. Some of the more adventurous businessmen started to establish export markets in the Catholic Latin-American countries, and emigrated. They sometimes did so under the pressure of the deteriorating circumstances in Palestine before and during the First World War when young people tried to escape recruitment into the Turkish army. During his first years Abou Hannah grew up in Santiago de Chile. The young kid was brought back to Palestine by his mother and uncle, while his father, for business purposes, stayed in Chile where he died shortly afterwards. 

During the 1930s Abou Hannah married with Emily Salman (a name derived from “Suleiman” or “Solomon”). They enjoyed their honeymoon in Jericho, a winter resort where people at the time used to watch horse races. He was fortunate enough to find work in a cafeteria of the British Mandate army, in a garrison in the southern part of Jerusalem. There he acquired his life-long admiration for British organization and discipline. The British time was comparably favorable from an economic point of view, especially during the 1940s, yet very insecure politically, with the continuous disturbances between Arabs and immigrating Jews. After 1948, the Jordanian time was the opposite, politically stable but economically difficult. In that Jordanian period, traveling was remarkably easy for Abou Hannah and his family. While the inhabitants of the West Bank now have difficulty to leave their town or village, he and his wife went freely to Damascus and Beirut to buy fashionable clothes there, just in one day. For Palestinian youth now, Damascus and Beirut are like light years away, cities only familiar from TV.

Abou Hannah first worked in a Bethlehem grocery and later in a garage for car spare parts so as to be able to take care of his family. Shortly after the 1967 war, his son Hannah left for France, and after he established himself there, Norma and Rita followed. Like so many other Bethlehemite families, the family lives with one leg in the East, and with another in the West. Not only physically, but also mentally. I see in the many family discussions an East-West dialogue going on. Perhaps it is no chance that so many Christian Palestinians work in communicative professions. Hannah is director of the Arabic section of Radio Monte Carlo in Paris, which is a major radio station in the Middle East and valued for its objective reporting. Among other things, Norma is a film director whose film “The Veiled Hope” about Palestinian women still circulates at film festivals. Rita used to work as an Arabic-French teacher, while Mary is librarian and curator of Bethlehem University’s new heritage center which caters for university students and school children as well as tourists.

Emigrating or not emigrating has always been an issue for Bethlehemites and for Christian Palestinians. With so many contacts abroad, emigration is a real option. The political and economic stagnation brings young people at the brink of despair, and many of them look for the right opportunity to leave. Nowadays, the disastrous circumstances in Palestine further affect people’s morale. Last week we heard of a Palestinian family who left their house in Beit Jala for another house in the same environment. After shelling came close once again, they moved to Ramallah where their house was damaged by shooting. Now they live in Canada. Fuad remarks that it is at present comparatively easy for Palestinian Christians to get a visa to the United States and especially Canada. Is this out of solidarity or a tactic to get Palestinians out of their country?, he asks. Our neighbour, who works at a European consulate, tells how her European colleagues ask, almost encourage, her to leave. She responded that if at one point in her life she decides to leave Palestine, she wants to do that out of her own free will and not as a refugee. She asked her employer to do more to stop Israel from making Palestine an unsafe place.

Foreigners, too, are canvassing their options. This Sunday Karishma joined in a demonstration of foreign women living in the Bethlehem area to show solidarity with Palestinians. The past weeks foreign embassies and consulates contacted their nationals with the sole purpose of arranging their evacuation. Both in Ramallah, Jerusalem and Bethlehem expatriates now demand a more supportive stand of the consulates and embassies towards their nationals, who indeed are, or can be, “monitors”  and can thus fulfill a useful role which is in fact demanded by the international community. 

I myself am busy to renew my expired work permit. When I came here some six years ago, I used to leave the country every three month to Jordan for getting a tourist visa. These years I apply for a half-yearly work permit. For this I first visit the Palestinian Ministry of Civic Affairs in Ramallah who contact the Israeli Civil Administration for a work permit which is issued by the State of Israel. After receiving the work permit, I go to the Palestinian Ministry of Interior Affairs for the visa. They contact the Israeli Ministry of Interior which issues the Israeli visa, printed in Hebrew and English. The only difference with the situation under Israeli occupation some eight years ago is that now the client has to pay double visa fees, one fee for Israel, and another fee for the Palestinian Authority.  Still to do so is cheaper and less time-consuming than a three-monthly return trip to Jordan.

Upon my new work permit request last week, the Palestinian Ministry told me that they did not have contacts with the Israeli Civil Administration anymore. They could not help me. Why not submitting the request directly to the Israelis? A good idea indeed, why to have all these circumventions when it is after all the Israeli authorities who issue the work permit and visa? I contact “Beit Il,” the Jewish settlement in which the Israeli Civil Administration is housed. A spokesperson there tells me that it is true that there are presently no transactions with the Palestinian Authority but that the Authority never formally asked for stopping the contacts. As long as that is the case, it was impossible for him to deal with my submission directly. He suggested me – “informally” - to cross the bridge to Jordan for renewal of the visa. That was what so many foreigners were doing. Later on I hear that this is a risky option since it seems to happen that at the bridge between the West Bank and Jordan one gets a visa for only one week in order “to regulate one’s legal status.” I call the staff at the Palestinian Ministry once again who checks out with their Minister if there is no way to submit a work application. No new perspectives on the matter. A Catch 22 situation. Next week more. 

Fortunately, Jara is not at all concerned about permits or even about the shootings. She finds seeing so many visitors at my family in law fascinating and runs from one person to the other. She gives a singing performance in Arabic mingled with some Dutch words in front of the mourners who are cheered up. This morning she picked up her plastic mobile phone, pushed a number, and called “sido” (grandpa), who is traveling “ma’ ‘Issa,” with Jesus. “Bye sido!” she finished gaily. At that moment I once more felt happy that during the last few years in his life, Abou Hannah enjoyed the company of at least one of his grandchildren.