When visiting the West Bank...

From Sunday, 8/9
Our tour guide, Osama, is a graduate student in History and Religious Studies, a Christian and a native of Bethlehem. He is also a charming, friendly, outgoing and ridiculously positive human being. Having never met him before, I managed somehow to pick him out among the crowds of tourists and tour guides on the Mount of Olives, walked right up to him and asked, "Are you meeting three Americans here? Are you Osama?"
I must admit, that day was a blur to me, a cavalcade of sites of tremendous historical and religious significance, a collage of sights and smells and sounds that I was seeing and smelling and hearing and feeling for the first time. What comes back to me are random impressions: the gnarled and stately olive trees of the Garden of Gethsemane, the steep path down into the Kidron Valley and up through the Lion's Gate and into the Old City of Jerusalem, the labyrinth of cobbled streets, the stations of the cross, Russian Orthodox priests with long robes and beards, Arab women in modest dress, the stations of the cross, a stall with mountains of colorful aromatic spices in the Arab Souq (market), the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Golgotha, the Western Wall, crusader arches, Roman pillars, the smell of roasting lamb, orange juice vendors, ka 'ek vendors, felafel stands, cigarette smoke, dust, noise, cats, steps, shops, alleys, churches. Osama is determined that we will see the sites of Jerusalem (a task for a week, not a day) with time left over to visit his home town. So we eventually climb up the streets and out through the New Gate, and into his little mazda and head for Bethlehem.
It's not far. Nothing is far apart in this tiny country. That doesn't mean that it doesn't take a while to get there, however, following the circuitous route dictated by the Israeli Wall.
Entering the town of Jesus' birth, we find Palestinian soldiers, each in crisp camouflage with ammo belt and black beret, each with an automatic weapon at the ready, stationed every 50' along both sides of the main street. "Oh," says Obama, "I had hoped the PLO convention might be over by now, but apparently it's still going on. It's the first one in fifteen years, and it's happening right next to the Church of the Nativity." With that we approach a roadblock, shiny new black hummers parked across the road, manned by a couple dozen Palestinian soldiers, and Osama makes a sudden u-turn and through a narrow opening into what turns out to be a parking garage with an incredible view across the Shepherd's Vale to a beautiful new hilltop city, glowing in the afternoon sun. "What city is that?" we ask, thinking that we've been grossly misinformed on the state of the West Bank economy. "That's not a Palestinian city," he answers, "but a Jewish settlement built on land confiscated from Bethlehem."