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MATTHEW GUTMAN:
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Sects in the city

In many ways, the story of Bethlehem is an ideal vehicle to convey something that I would call "the intifada plus."

For a time Bethlehem went pound for pound with other Palestinian cities in its export of terrorism. But thrown into the mix are additional sensitivities due to the Christian shrines in the city and the bitter enmities between the Muslim clans and local Christians — a terrorized population that all too often sweeps the violence against it under the rug in fear of retribution.

All in all, it is a microcosm (plus) of Palestinian society today.

In A Season in Bethlehem, Newsweek’s Jerusalem bureau chief Joshua Hammer seeks to draw a portrait of the city between the beginning of the current uprising in September 2000 and the siege on the Church of the Nativity in spring 2002. He weaves together the lives of suicide bombers, murdered Israelis, Al Aksa Martyrs Brigades leaders, a priest, and Bethlehem’s beleaguered governor, among others.

The intricate mosaic of real-life characters — which surely poses a challenge of craftsmanship — is well laid out, and Hammer rarely lets us get lost in the numerous names (many of which end with Abayat, the name of the Beduin clan that graduated from running a car theft ring to heading the city’s Tanzim).

For the most part he delivers a stingingly accurate portrayal of events and personalities, and usually transcends political correctness to do what good journalists should do best: describe what they see and experience first hand.

Hammer takes the reader through the political, social and cultural scene of Bethlehem and its environs, a flashpoint of the Christian, Jewish and Islamic worlds, a place with too many angles to count. We are given a flavor of the tribal rites of the Tama’ra tribe; we see the rocky hills covered with a fuzz of scrub brush, and smell the fetid air of the Church of the Nativity after dozens of Palestinian fighters spent five weeks brooding, smoking, soiling and angling for an escape.

Through the eyes of his characters, he paints a picture of Bethlehem and Beit Jala that would make a Jackson Pollock mural look sedate.

The Al Aksa/Tanzim gangs that rule the city — enter the Abayat clan — treated the PA leadership and the citizens of Jesus’s birthplace with astonishing contempt. They do as they please, conducting honor killings, executing collaborators in city squares, blackmailing Beit Jala Christians, even raping young women with impunity.

While Hammer’s narrative tends to spare PA Chairman Yasser Arafat, his research seems to accurately map out the intifada’s infrastructure. We see Arafat as a leader, dispatching men to jobs, giving too few orders, and leaving everything nebulous. He is not the doddering lip-trembler that we have come to know, but a calculating character of ambiguous intent.

Hammer shows that more than passively giving a green light to terrorism, Arafat urged it on, playing ineffectual security forces against each other and leaving powerful gangs like Abayat’s Al Aksa gang with the actual power.

Through his investigations of the events leading up to the siege on the Church of the Nativity, Hammer portrays an atmosphere among the PA security apparatuses that championed increasingly brazen terror attacks.

That Kamel Hmeid, Fatah’s secretary-general in the city, funded and supported the murderous acts of men he considered his charges, is according to Hammer, irrefutable.

HAMMER’S SOMEWHAT tainted heroes such as Bethlehem governor Muhammad Al Madani, and its PA police chief Ala Hosni, are entangled by their own conflicting loyalties to the "Rais." They want to stop the terror, which only drags the city further into mayhem beckoning Israeli incursion, but run smack into the wall of Arafat’s other appointees.

When Arafat appointed Madani — who had never previously set foot in the city — governor of Bethlehem, his sole instructions were: "Act sanely." The extent to which Madani, a seasoned Fatah fighter in the 1970s, obeyed Arafat even against his better judgment is astonishing and slightly disconcerting. When Arafat told Madani to slip into the Church of the Nativity at the beginning of the siege he went. When Arafat said stay, he stayed — the entire 40 days. Unfortunately, Madani represents an entire cadre of Arafat devotees, too afraid of crossing the chairman to do what they knew was right: clamp down on Bethlehem’s Abayat-run Al Aksa cell to stave off Israeli invasion.

Most disturbing is Hammer’s epilogue. He brings us into the lavish digs of former Al Aksa chief Ibrahim Abayat, who was sent to stay at the resort home of a former Spanish prime minister after participating in the Church of the Nativity siege. Here a man who shot dead an Israeli soldier over a bet nibbled on a paella prepared by a maid and expressed his anger at being duped into exile. Months after the standoff, he says he should have fought his way out, even asking his Spanish hosts to send him back home to certain imprisonment.

At this point, Hammer writes, he felt a tinge of sympathy for the man.

We are then taken to Dublin to see Rami Kamel, whose arm was blown off by what might have been a booby-trapped gun he had smuggled into Bethlehem. In Dublin, Kamel, a senior lieutenant of Ibrahim Abayat, was fitted with a state-of-the-art prosthetic arm that enables him to wiggle his fingers through neuroelectric impulses transmitted from the brain. Not bad for a suspected murderer whose people are clearly suffering much worse than he is.

And just when you think Hammer has succumbed to bias, much like the Church of the Nativity’s Father Paternius — who learned to love the armed men who forced their way into the sanctuary — he sets the record straight reminding the reader that Ibrahim Abayat is a "sociopath" responsible for many murders. Hammer’s brother — the subject of his first book — is a religious Zionist who lives in a West Bank settlement. So Hammer’s casual description of the Abayat clan’s forays onto Route 60, hunting for easy prey, sometimes made me queasy. However, his description of the murder of Avi Boaz, a 72-year-old Israeli stricken with polio, and a much-liked personality in Bethlehem, was both gripping and compassionate.

Unfortunately, the epilogue founders in its assessment of blame for the intifada. The much-needed ending skirts into speculation, careening through various reasons for the violence, and unfairly charging Israel with shortchanging the Palestinians at the 2000 Camp David Summit.

The Taba agreements, brokered in the midst of the intifada — putting more than 95 percent of the West Bank on the negotiating table — would undoubtedly have supplied the Palestinians with a viable state, had they chosen to accept.

Finally, I will note a pet peeve: terminology. Hammer is prone to attaching quotation marks to the word "terrorist," especially when recounting Israeli versions of the events. When a Palestinian shoots or attacks an Israeli army base in the West Bank or Gaza Strip, it is not terrorism, it is a militant or guerrilla act. However, when someone shoots civilians, wherever they may live, or when he prepares suicide bomb kits, he is a terrorist.

Also, in several instances, Hammer dubs the IDF in the West Bank the "Israeli Occupation Forces.‘ This is a clumsy, cumbersome phrase — picked right out of the PA media kit — which even most militants I know have discarded for the more facile term ’the Israeli Army."

Such terminology takes away from what is otherwise an edifying and often exhilarating read.