The birthplace of Christ is now a virtual prison for the Palestinian inhabitants, and Irish psychologist Felicity Heathcote has resolved to tell their stories, writes Róisin Duffy.
'Christmas will be here soon," says Dr Hania Al Jouzy Kasbari. "Since she was four years old, my daughter has drawn an ID card on her wish list for Santa Claus. She writes all of our names on it, because that way we could all get through the army checkpoint and be able to leave Bethlehem to go and visit her grandmother and her aunties. We have spent seven Christmases here now without family. It is very hard."
This is life in Bethlehem in 2007. Christ's birthplace has become something of a prison. It is now encircled by what the Israeli authorities call the "separation barrier". It stands nine metres high and cuts the town off from its hinterland and from Jerusalem, which is just six miles away. The Israelis justify this cast concrete structure on security grounds, saying that it keeps the suicide bombers out, but it also keeps many thousands of innocent Palestinians from working in Jerusalem, as permits to do so are apparently rare.
I have travelled to the Middle East with Felicity Heathcote. She is the wife of an Irish diplomat who felt compelled to speak out about what was happening to ordinary people in the occupied territories. Dr Hania's story is but one stop on what became a journey of conscience.
Dr Hania is deemed to be an illegal in the place of her birth. A Christian Palestinian, she is a diminutive woman of few words, not given to emotional outbursts.She runs the intensive care unit for premature babies at the Holy Family Maternity Hospital, which has a long-running association with the National Maternity Hospital at Holles Street in Dublin. She explains that the unit she has developed gives her great personal fulfilment: "Every time when I see a mother crying from joy when she comes to take her baby home after she was desperate and thinking that he will die, and then after a few days or a few months, he is well enough to go home - that is a big satisfaction for me."
Dr Hania left the country to finish her studies in France. Because she didn't return within a specified number of years, the Israeli authorities withdrew her Palestinian identity card, rendering her no longer Palestinian. She returned to Bethlehem under the auspices of the Palestinian Authority and as a result of agreements made under the Oslo Accord, but so far, and it's more than seven years now, she has been refused official papers.
It makes her job more difficult too. The Holy Family Hospital has the only intensive care unit for premature and very sick newborn infants in the Palestinian territories. She can't go out across the West Bank because, lacking papers, she could be picked up at any time by the Israeli army. It makes life precarious, not just for her but for the unit. If it closes there will be no facility for sick babies and access to such facilities in Jerusalem requires permits.
It must have been tempting to stay put with the family in France. She smiles sadly at the notion. "We took the decision as a family to return. This is a way to help our people. We just had to.We Palestinians want peace, we want a normal life. Although it is not easy, we need to talk to each other. We should not be separated by walls, walls will only increase this hatred, they will not solve the problem."
FELICITY HEATHCOTE ARRIVED with her husband in Jerusalem in 2002 at the height of the suicide bombings, just as the separation wall was being built. Through her work as a clinical psychologist, with an expertise in stress, she came to know many ordinary Palestinians and the daily humiliations they had to endure because of the four-decade Israeli occupation.
There came a moment, she says, when she had to "break the silence." She remembers attending a diplomatic reception one lunchtime, just after she had been told the story of an old man who had just lost an eye and had been treated at the eye hospital. His olive trees were being taken off him. He had gone to defend them by standing beside them and he had been shot in the eye by an Israeli soldier. Heathcote recounted the story to a European ambassador who was at the function.
She describes how "he stared into his orange juice, repeating over and over again, 'We have to do something, we have to do something.' " At that moment Heathcote had the alarming realisation that nobody could do anything.
That sense of impotence was to stay with her, and when she returned to Ireland she set about writing a book in the hope of breaking through the silence.That book, The Resting Place of The Moon, is her testimony.
Jeff Halper is Jewish, a prominent thinker in the Israeli peace movement and a nominee for the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize. He says of Heathcote: "She is a person of conscience, she is a person who really cares. You see if I can bring you here and show you the West Bank and show you the wall and show you a demolished home and have you meet with kids who can't go to school and can't go to hospital, you get it! Felicity saw it and just couldn't keep it inside."
WE PRESS ON to the village of Beit Umar on the road south. A grey cylindrical Israeli military watchtower stands at the village entrance, dominating the landscape. It is a disconcerting presence as we wait on the roadside to meet Habes Alami.
He has known Heathcote for a number of years. They met by chance when she came to buy fruit from him. Now, he tells us, his business is gone - his shop was demolished by the military because they said it stood too close to the main road used by Jewish settlers. Habes reminds us that the land upon which his shop was built was his own land. He tells us too about the difficulties in accessing his fruit crops.
He points to his vines, with the fruit now rotting in the fields across the road. But it is when we sit down to eat with him and his three children in his home that the depth of his sadness is revealed. He talks of his firstborn son who had fallen ill.
"I called a doctor at the Hadassah Medical Centre in Jerusalem, I tell him his symptoms. The doctor told me he had a dangerous disease, neurofibromatosis type I. He told me to get him to the hospital so that he could be treated. But nobody listens. I try to get the pass but they will not give me one. There are checkpoints and Jerusalem is closed for Palestinians."
Because he could not get the necessary permits, his son eventually died. To this day he carries his son's spectacles with him. Yet despite or maybe because of his loss, he has turned his garden into something of an oasis for his four remaining children. "My children just see water on the TV. They can't go to the beach, they can't go anywhere, so I have made paradise in my garden so that they have beauty for their soul."
Feeding the soul, though, is a tall order when your every movement can be tracked from a watchtower 24 hours a day.
Would You Believe: Felicity's Journey, RTÉ1, 10.35pm, Sunday. The Resting Place Of The Moon by Felicity Heathcote is published by the Other World Press