A Season in Bethlehem
Unholy War in a Sacred Place
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
Newsweek's Jerusalem bureau chief Joshua Hammer arrived in the West Bank in October 2000 -- just after Ariel Sharon made his inflammatory visit to the Haram al-Sharif, otherwise known as the Temple Mount. Sharon's trip ignited the worst violence the Middle East had seen in decades. Overnight, the peace process gave way to an ever-worsening cycle of attack, revenge, and retaliation, destabilizing the entire region, killing thousands, and culminating in Israel's reoccupation of Palestinian towns in 2002.
A Season in Bethlehem is the story of one West Bank town's two-year disintegration, as witnessed by a reporter who was there from the beginning. Woven together from Hammer's own firsthand reportage plus hundreds of interviews, it follows a dozen characters whose lives collided on the streets of this biblical city. They include a Bedouin tribesman who rose to become the commander of Bethlehem's most feared and brutal gang of gunmen; the beleaguered governor, an opponent of the al-Aqsa intifada, who believed he had a mandate to stop the violence, only to discover that Yasser Arafat was undermining him; a Christian businesman who watched helplessly as his community was squeezed between Muslim militants and the Israeli army; an eighteen-year-old female honors student turned suicide bomber; and an Israeli reservist, son of a leader of the Peace Now movement, who wrestled with his left-wing convictions as he rode to battle through the predawn streets.
The narrative reaches a climax with a moment-by-moment recreation of the epochal drama that drew many of these characters together: the thirty-nine-day siege of the Church of the Nativity. A clear-eyed chronicle of deepening chaos and violence, in which Hammer lets the opposing sides speak for themselves, A Season in Bethlehem is both a timely and timeless look at how longstanding religious and political tensions finally boiled over in a place of profound resonance: the birthplace of Jesus.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this well-reported but overly dense "biography of place," the author, Newsweek's Jerusalem bureau chief, takes readers through the exotic terrain of this hotbed city and many of the characters who make it vital. Beginning with the start of the al-Aqsa intifada in the fall of 2000 and ending with the notorious siege on Bethlehem's Church of the Nativity in spring 2002, Hammer opens his notebook to everyone from a Palestinian zealot to a Christian entrepreneur, from an Israeli army commander to the topography itself. The author has a knack for getting the rich comment or detail, and he mostly avoids the temptation to make snap judgments, carefully walking the line between sympathy and objectivity. But the book is done in by what is at once too much and too little information. It is hard to keep straight much less be moved by the avalanche of details about various revolutionaries and victims. At the same time, Hammer betrays his newsweekly roots by concentrating on the whats and wheres, but not the whys. The readability picks up in the last section, where the siege has the feel of a layered and well-written action sequence. But even here the constant cutting between vantage points makes the story confusing, while the author refrains from offering political or historical insight on one of the biggest flashpoints of the current conflict. It's like seeing Bethlehem through a very artful lens the scope is wide and the prose is poetic, but it is just a series of images, not sufficiently engaged or thought-provoking to be compelling.
