AhlulBayt News Agency: The city of Bethlehem, the cradle of Christianity and a heritage of all humanity, is facing one of the darkest and most perverse plans of Israeli colonialism. The revealed project seeks to divide the spiritual heart of Palestine—Bethlehem, Beit Jala, and Beit Sahour—into three separate entities, stripping them of their historical, cultural, and religious fabric, and subjecting them to different forms of foreign administration: Israeli occupation, US intervention, and Vatican control over holy sites.
The plan is not new. From Oslo to the present, Zionism has systematically worked to fragment Palestine into disconnected enclaves, surrounded by settlements, walls, and military bases. However, what is being proposed today with Bethlehem is even more serious: it seeks to separate Palestinian communities from their own spiritual roots and their millennia-old connection to the land.
In this scheme, Beit Jala would be permanently detached from Bethlehem and connected to the colonial settlements of Har Gilo, Gilo, and Etzion. This means isolating it from its Palestinian identity and absorbing it into the “Greater Jerusalem” project that Israel promotes as its eternal capital. For the inhabitants of Beit Jala, many of them descendants of families who have lived there for centuries, this represents a double dispossession: territorial
The city of Bethlehem would be placed under a civil administration “specialized in religious affairs,” with the Vatican in charge of the Church of the Nativity and regulating access for international pilgrims. In this way, the aim is to reduce Bethlehem to a religious museum without a people, denying its Palestinian inhabitants the right to exercise sovereignty and a political life of their own.
Beit Sahour, the city of shepherds, would be subject to the framework of agreements dictated by the occupation (such as the Adumim agreement), which in practice would mean an administration controlled by Israel and subordinated to its colonies. The plan aims to disintegrate their community resistance, which has historically been an example of popular organization against colonialism.
One of the most revealing points of the plan is the elimination of the Dheisheh camp, a symbol of the ongoing Nakba and the resistance of Palestinian refugees. The intention is clear: to erase the living memory of the right of return and disperse its inhabitants under political and social pressure.
The project includes imposing on the inhabitants of Bethlehem an identity restricted solely to the city, with no national or political rights in the rest of the West Bank. In other words, a modern form of urban apartheid, where Palestinians would become mere tolerated residents, without real citizenship.
The case of Hebron shows where this model is headed: the division into three zones, each controlled by clans under Israeli supervision, with Palestinian banks absorbed by Israeli banks. A feudal-colonial system that eliminates the possibility of Palestinian political unity and turns cities into islands administered by the occupation.
The role of the Vatican, the US administration, and the international community's own silence cannot be minimized. Turning Bethlehem into an externally administered religious enclave recalls the colonial attempts of yesteryear to appropriate holy sites, but now under the logic of Israeli apartheid.
The fragmentation of Bethlehem is not a local issue: it is a direct attack on Palestinian identity and the universal memory of humanity. Beit Jala, Beit Sahour, and Bethlehem are not simply territories; they are symbols of resistance, culture, and history.
Accepting this plan would validate a new kind of Nakba, one where land and faith become commodities under colonial control.
In the face of this, the Palestinian voice—Muslim and Christian, in Palestine and in the diaspora—must unite forcefully to denounce this project, resist it, and remind the world that Bethlehem is not divided; Bethlehem is Palestine.
Source by Palestinian Union of Latin America (UPAL)
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