Wall over Bethlehem

October 5th 2023

It's time for a scene change — while it wasn't on our itinerary originally, we have debated over the last couple dinners and decided that we do definitely want to visit Bethlehem as well and see what's going on behind the wall.
Our car rental company is not thrilled about us driving into Palestinian-controlled territory, so we leave the car on the Israeli side near one of the big checkpoints. Some kids in worn down office chairs have decided to occupy that parking lot and demand 100 shekel to park there. I could probably spin that into some kind of metaphor, but I really don't feel like it. We repark the car to an identical gravel lot for free and move on through the liminal guts of the checkpoint system.
On the way in there's little more than a one-way gate, and soon we're back in the midday sun greeted by a barrage of taxi drivers educating us on the sights of the city and offering all sorts of tour guide services.
The sights, by the way, are sixfold: Three of them Christian sites where Jesus did some thing or another (announced, born, fed), the other three are banksy pieces on the border wall. We negotiate with our driver to take us to two of each and start into the dense, steep streets of Bethlehem.
The Christian highlights are, like, two average churches so if you're ever in town don't be scared to skip out. We walk around the old town for a bit, which is nice — the streets are alive, there's all sorts of slightly scrappy looking stores, street-side mechanics in tiny, cave-like shops, the like. There's a market that fades from all sorts of fruit and vegetables into more of a flea-market situation featuring used electronics and large nests of tangled cables. The pomegranate juice is half as expensive this side of the wall, and we stop for some hummus-pita-motabal lunch.
The wall is... well it's tall for sure. Nine meters, or so we're told. It went up in 2002 and isn't even really a 'border' in as much as anything in this mess of a political situation can be considered an 'international' border — it's just a security wall that was placed more or less arbitrarily.
While I get lost in the street art of it all for a bit, our driver chats with my parents and shows them around a banksy-themed souvenir shop.
Things have been tough since the wall, he says — much fewer tourists, a corrupt Palestinian government that makes it hard to earn a living, and the feeling of being locked in in this city. He says a drive to parts of the dead sea — a different, lighter shade of Palestinian territory — takes two hours these days, with all the walls and checkpoints.
For us, the way back is much simpler: We cross the checkpoint in the opposite direction from the crowd of people returning home into Bethlehem for the weekend, and only one of us waves our passport vaguely in the direction of the Israeli border guard before she waves us all through.

I don't quite know what to make of this barely three-hour visit yet, and we're already moving on, ever restless, into the north.