oppression, simultaneously cloaked in a touristic veneer for the steady stream
of pilgrims and tourists who visit the city each year. While Israel concentrates
the Palestinians into this enclave, it continues to oppressively colonize the
remainder of Bethlehem’s land, isolating its population and fragmenting it
from the rest of the West Bank, and Jerusalem.148
By the sixteenth century, Bethlehem had become one of the largest villages
in the Jerusalem district,149 and was economically entwined with Jerusalem
due to its surrounding fertile agricultural land and natural resources. Known
for its wheat, barley, almonds, grapes, bees, livestock, olive and olive oil
production,150 Bethlehem was also a source of oil, natural gas, and water.
With a series of viaducts, it supplied water for much of central Palestine,
and acted as Jerusalem’s main water source from 200 BCE until 1967.151 A
town of 8,000 people at the start of the British Mandate, Bethlehem was
heavily impacted by the associated colonial and pro-Zionist policies. Though
it remained an almost exclusively Palestinian town, the catastrophic impact
of Zionist-Jewish colonization in other areas and associated political violence
caused a significant exodus of the local community, with the population
almost halving from 1922 to 1948.152
In the aftermath of the Nakba there was a reversal of this population trend as
thousands of Palestinians from Jerusalem and its surrounding areas sought
refuge in one of the three refugee camps established in Bethlehem – Aida,
Azza and Dheisha. While Bethlehem remained a key destination for Christian
pilgrims under Jordanian rule, and the production of olive wood and mother
of pearl factories expanded to support the economy of East Jerusalem,153 the
town remained economically depressed due to its close proximity to the
Green Line. Looking at Bethlehem’s current situation under Israeli military
occupation, it is evident that rather than advancing and developing with
time, Bethlehem instead suffers from deliberate de-development. This is
evidenced by the fact that it has the highest unemployment rate in the West
148 Clarno, supra 5, 89.
149 Amy Singer, Palestinian Peasants and Ottoman Officials – Rural Administration Around Sixteenth
Century Jerusalem (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 80.
150 Id., 80-82.
151 Simon Worrall, “The Little Town of Bethlehem Has a Surprising History,” National Geographic, 23
December 2017, available at: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2017/12/bethlehemchrist-birth-blincoe/ [accessed 28 February 2020].
152 For 1922 figures, See Justin McCarthy, The Population of Palestine: Population Statistics of the Late
Ottoman Period (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 66; for 1948 figures, See Bethlehem
Municipality, “History of Bethlehem,” webpage, 11 November 2014, available at https://bit.
ly/2RWy5Df [accessed 28 February 2020].
153 Rochelle Davis, “Ottoman Jerusalem,” in Jerusalem 1948: The Arab Neighbourhoods and their Fate in
the War, Salim Tamari (ed.) (Jerusalem: The Institute of Jerusalem Studies & BADIL, 1999), 43.
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