December 23, 2003
Kamloops Daily News


"When the angels had left them and gone into heaven, the
shepherds said to one another, 'Let's go to Bethlehem and
see this thing that has happened, which the Lord has told us
about (Luke 2:15) '".

The shepherds are part of a long list of visitors who have
been interested in the birthplace of Christ.  Believers of
many faiths have been interested in the Holy Land for
thousands of years.  Too much attention by too many people. 
Too many conflicting blueprints for this tiny patch of
earth.

Christians want to turn back the clock in the Holy Land to
the time when Christ was born - - to a time when their Lord
and Savior walked the earth and spread his Gospel.  It's
long ago in a land far away.

If modern shepherds tried to get to Bethlehem and the Holy
Land using a map, they would have trouble finding the place. 
There is no place on the map called Holy Land and the name
for the town of Bethlehem is uncertain.

Not to worry.  The shepherds could simply hop aboard a tour
of the Holy Land and the tour guides would find the place.
For example, a U.S. tour agency called Four Winds Bibleland
Tour has a nine day, seven night, tour of the Holy Land. 

On Monday, you arrive at Ben-Gurion airport in Israel. On
Tuesday, you visit Jerusalem.  On Wednesday morning it's
Mount Zion and in the afternoon, Bethlehem.  You get the
picture - - it's a whirlwind tour.  The little town of
Bethlehem, how they welcome the nativity industry.  There's
not much else.

Tourists might be surprised to find that Bethlehem is in the
territory of Palestine, home to 32,000 Arabs and Christians
who live there.  After the tourists are gone, the Arabs will
call their town Bayt Lahn.

Jews want to turn the clock back even further than the
beginning of Christianity.  They prefer golden times before
that troublemaker came along 2,000 years ago, rumoured  to
be the Son of God, the Messiah.  Jews dream of a return to
ancient glory where "the king made silver and gold as common
in Jerusalem as stones (2 Chronicles 1:15)."

Dreams and daily experience are as different as day and
night for  modern Jews and Palestinians.  Not only is it a
land of unfulfilled dreams, it's a place where "the other"
is a plague upon the land.

Names, like designs for the Holy Land, have power.  Words
and language are a way of calibrating thought.  For some
Israelis, "Palestinians are like cancer. There are all sorts
of solutions to cancerous manifestations.  For the time
being, I am applying chemotherapy,"  says Moshe Y'alon,
Israeli Chief of Staff.

Understandably, Palestinians have a problem with this point
of view.  The Palestinian poet, Mourid Barghouti, calls it
"verbicide."  As someone whose uses words in his craft, he
feels "attacked by the apartheid hate language of Israeli
generals."

Palestinians want to turn the clock back too, but only a few
decades.   They prefer the way things were before the Jews
descended on the land to carve Israel out of Palestine
in1948.   Barghouti still remembers that time as a child
growing up in the eastern hills of Palestine.

When fellow Palestinian arrived from afar, running for their
lives,  Barghouti asked his father what they were running
from.  His father told him that their homes had been
destroyed by "Zionist brigades that declared the State of
Israel." 

"The battle for language becomes the battle for the land,"
says Barghouti in the August, 2003, issue of New
Internationalist magazine.  As far as Israelis are
concerned, he no longer lives in his childhood home of  east
Palestine, they call it the West Bank or the Territories.  
The Israelis propose changing the name again to Judea and
Samaria, to evoke the biblical entitlement of Jewish
suburbs.

The Holy Land is tiny - - one-half the size of Nova Scotia,
one-fortieth the size of B.C.  You need a magnifying glass
to see it clearly on a globe.  But it's also magnified by
conflicting visions and realities.

The focus of so many conflicting dreams and truths on this
tiny bit of land has heated it up - - as happens when
sunlight catches a magnifying lens and the subject catches
fire.

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