RAMALLAH // Today, by a quirk of the calendar, eastern and western Christians will celebrate Easter together, an irregular occurrence. With the Jewish holiday of Passover at the same time, however, a tightly locked-down Jerusalem has been the focus of festivities, and tension, for days now.
For most Palestinian Christians, even those from Jerusalem, the celebrations that will take place today will be off-limits as was the Ceremony of the Holy Light, yesterday. Israel “closes” the West Bank for Jewish holidays, and with Passover running until April 6, all of Easter is included.
Normally, Palestinian Christians have a slightly easier time of obtaining permits to enter Jerusalem during Christian holidays than Muslims do during Muslim holidays. But with Jerusalem tense in recent weeks, because of demonstrations against Israeli settlement building in East Jerusalem, Christians were told last week that their permits would not apply this year.
That order was supposed to have been relaxed a little after pressure was brought to bear on Israel from abroad. On Wednesday, Michael Oren, the Israeli ambassador to the United States, said the travel ban had been lifted in response to concerns conveyed to the Israeli Embassy by Reverend Michael Kinnamon, the general secretary of the National Council of Churches in the US.
“I hope the Israeli government realises that it is unacceptable to us that Christians be denied the right to worship in Jerusalem, especially Christians whose roots in the region go back to the time of Christ,” Rev Kinnamon had told the Christian Post on Tuesday.
As of yesterday, Palestinian Christians were still complaining that they had no access to Jerusalem, even if they carried permits, and no access to the Old City of Jerusalem, even if they had Jerusalem IDs.
“This year is worse than any other year,” said Peter Nasser, a Jerusalem resident.
Mr Nasser, who runs a restaurant in Ramallah, explained that every year for the past few years, Christians have had to obtain permits from their churches to get into Jerusalem, if they have West Bank IDs, or the Old City and the main Christian sites there, including the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, if they hold Jerusalem IDs.
But with the confluence of eastern and western Easter as well as Passover, this year, said Mr Nasser, Christians from Jerusalem were not being allowed into the Old City at all, while West Bank ID holders could not enter the city. “They let tourists in. They have to give some priority to Christians. Most of those who come to this country come to see the Christian sites. Israel can’t really marginalise Christians completely. Unless you’re a local: this year, we are completely marginalised.”
The army says it has relaxed the closure for Easter, but both in the local press and on the electronic grapevine, the unofficial means by which news of closures spread via SMS, e-mail, Facebook and other technology, Christians were warning each other yesterday not to try to get to Jerusalem. Instead, Ramallah was teeming with people for the Ceremony of the Holy Light, which is marked with scout marching bands, who come from the nearby villages.
Some of those attending, such as Abu George, who had come from the nearby village of Taybeh with his wife and two children, said he would normally have gone to Jerusalem.
“But this morning I received a message from a cousin that Israel is not allowing anyone into the Old City and that they are stopping people at checkpoints into the city. So I thought I’d come to Ramallah instead. At least we can be a part of something.”
The closure only adds to the pressures on a community that is already dwindling. Before 1948, the Christian community in what is now the occupied Palestinian territories constituted about 15 per cent of the population, mostly concentrated in Jerusalem and Bethlehem and the nearby towns and villages, including Ramallah. Today, it is about two per cent.
In what is now Israel, Christians made up five per cent of the population, mostly centred around Nazareth. There, too, Christians now also make up only around two per cent.
Higher Muslim birthrates and the mass influx of Jews in the late 1940s also altered the demographics. But there is little doubt that Christians continue to leave, an emigration that took on new impetus with the Al Aqsa intifada in 2000. Those who could took advantage of traditionally stronger links to the outside world, especially to North and South America, where Palestinian emigration started at the turn of the 19th century, to escape a political and economic pinch that shows little sign of abating.
It is the slow decline of a historic population; the only Christian population with roots in the land of Jesus. There is angry irony in this for some.
“If the Palestinian population before 1948 had been mostly Christian, England and other European countries would never have allowed anyone to colonise this country,” said Mr Nasser.
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