A City Ancient, Glorious, All Shuttered and Glum
Semiautomatic rifle at the ready, the Israeli soldier commanded the high ground near here today, pacing a Palestinian "Martyrs' Cemetery."

He watched his comrades below search house after house, checking Palestinians' ID cards and lobbing the occasional booming percussion grenade to chase children indoors.

Beside him were more than 20 graves of Palestinians who have died in the 21 months of the current conflict, killed in shooting attacks or explosions or just walking along Bethlehem's streets. Some 15 empty graves waited, lined with cinder blocks, gaping.

For at least some Palestinians of Bethlehem, all of them under 24-hour curfew for more than three days now, the patrol was inflicting yet another humiliation. They saw it as part of an Israeli effort to deny Palestinian independence and cling to these glorious hills, ribbed with gray limestone and silvered by windblown olive leaves.

It is an increasingly strange place, Bethlehem — a place clenched, or perhaps twisted, by the relentless conflict. Almost as old as the hills themselves, it is held sacred by Christians as the birthplace of Jesus. But, hemmed in by Israeli settlements, it lies just south of Jerusalem, along the sharpening boundary between the two peoples. It has become a battleground for their reciprocal fears and hatreds.

Soldiers stop and search ambulances holding women and babies, fearing, the army says, that a killer might lurk inside. Men who violate the curfew and drive find themselves stripping their own cars to prove they are not carrying weapons, then — in the case of one BMW driver today — surrendering the keys to soldiers and pushing the car home.

One family finally received permission today from Israel to hold a small funeral for a loved one, dead more than three days of a heart attack. Through ghostly streets, past lime-green shutters of closed stores, about 50 people processed from the Church of the Nativity to a cemetery for those who are not "martyrs."
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/11/international/middleeast/11BETH.html