MIDDLE EAST: What would Joseph and Mary make of Bethlehem today? Michael Jansenreports from the holy city in the Israeli-occupied West Bank
Anne draws her car up behind half a dozen vehicles waiting at the Israeli checkpoint on the main road from Jerusalem to Bethlehem. While we wait, I observe a Palestinian Christian family in Sunday best exiting a taxi and crossing on foot to meet relatives with cars on the other side.
A soldier glimpses at our foreign passports and waves us on.
Anne parks in an empty Manger Square not far from the squat Church of the Nativity with its tiny, low door. A shabby man selling cheap jewellery ambushes us.
"Please, buy, no one comes here any longer," he demands. When Anne gives him five shekels, he insists she take a pair of silvery earrings. He is too proud to beg.
The chill Orthodox chapel is empty, a dusty chandelier gleams softly in the pillared gloom. There is no one in the grotto where, tradition holds, Jesus was born.
The turquoise-coloured shutters are firmly shut on all but one of the square's shops.
Anne and I rush in as the owner prepares to close. He welcomes us and introduces himself as Jack Giacaman. We inspect his collection of finely worked olive wood crucifixes, nativity scenes, Christmas ornaments, spoons, and bowls, postcards and booklets.
We each choose several delicate ornaments. "You're the first customers of the day," he remarks.
St George's restaurant on the corner is serving lunch to 23 pilgrims from the US and Canada. "It's a good day," observes the proprietor, Ramzi Juha, sitting in the sun on the pavement outside. "We used to have 25 buses a day, now we get two to three buses a month. People go to the church, buy a few souvenirs and leave."
Anne drives to a stretch of Israel's West Bank wall near Rachel's Tomb at the entrance to Bethlehem. When the wall is completed it will encircle the town with 110 kilometres of cement, barbed wire and trenches, cutting it off from Jerusalem, claimed by Israel as its exclusive capital. A lion eating a dove has been painted on the rough grey concrete face of the wall. On the outskirts of the not-so-little town of 61,000, we find Palestinian women and children evading Israel's 10 checkpoints by climbing over one of 55 earth barriers and entering through a back door, dubbed a "Tora Bora," after the mountains in Afghanistan where the US pursued al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden.
I ask myself, "what if the Virgin Mary and her husband Joseph were to travel today from Nazareth to Bethlehem as they did 2000 years ago?"
They might take the regular Friday bus to the Old City of Jerusalem where many Palestinians from Galilee do their weekly shopping in solidarity with merchants cut off from customers since 1991 when Israel barred West Bankers from the capital. The couple take two places in a seven-seat taxi to a Tora Bora where the heavily pregnant mother of Christ stumbles up the hard-packed earth mound to catch another taxi on the other side.
As citizens of Israel, the holy couple are barred from visiting the West Bank and have to enter Bethlehem this way. Once Israel finishes its barrier, the gaps provided by the Tora Boras will be closed, sealing in residents of Bethlehem and shutting out anyone who dares not brave a checkpoint or two.
Mary and Joseph have no problem about accommodation at Bethlehem's many inns.
Mayor Hanna Nasser tells me occupancy is 30 per cent. Instead of the 91,725 tourists who came in 2000, only 7,249 have visited this year.
Jesus is born in a clinic rather than a stable and laid in a crib rather than a manger. White uniformed nurses keep watch.
The three kings bearing gifts are turned back by Israeli immigration officials at the bridge across the Jordan River. Israel does not grant them entry because they hail from enemy Iran.
Security lock-down does not permit shepherds to tend their flocks by night and angels cannot approach the birth place of Jesus because they will be shot down by Israeli snipers.