The journey from Nazareth to Bethlehem is faster but not much easier than it was 2,000 years ago, Nuala Haughey discovers
And it came to pass in those days that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed. And all went to be taxed, everyone into his own city. And Joseph also went up from the Galilee, out of the city of Nazareth, into Judea, unto the City of David which is called Bethlehem (because he was of the house and lineage of David) to be taxed with Mary, his espoused wife, being great with child. - Luke 2:26
Joseph and Mary lived in turbulent times as Jews under Roman occupation in a kingdom simmering with religious tension and civil unrest. Two millennia later, it is the Palestinians who live in a troubled era as foreigners in their land, enduring the daily indignities of a decades-long Israeli military occupation that has blighted landscape and people alike.
Travelling by camel, donkey or horse, it would have taken Mary and Joseph more than a week to make the gruelling 150km (93-mile) journey to Bethlehem to register for the Roman emperor's tax census.
Today, Nazareth, the modern metropolis of the Galilee region of the Jewish state of Israel, is a two- to three-hour drive from the Palestinian city of Bethlehem in the West Bank.
However, depending on the ethnicity of travellers, a bewildering maze of Israeli travel restrictions can add hours to the trip or even render it impossible, while the region's ongoing ethnic conflict can make the journey unpredictable and hazardous.
Our pre-Christmas 2005 nativity trail begins with a glance back in time to biblical-era Nazareth, at an outdoor museum where staff in homespun costumes scamper around stone buildings and terraces of olive trees and vines demonstrating first-century domestic techniques.
While the Nazareth of Jesus's time was a Jewish town of up to 1,200 residents, today the sprawling city has a population of 70,000 Arab Israelis, one third of them Christian. Arabs make up 20 per cent of the population of the Jewish state, inhabiting a peculiar world - Israeli by citizenship, Palestinian by national identity. Along Nazareth's streets, this cultural dichotomy is on display, with shopkeepers greeting visiting customers in Hebrew instead of their Arabic mother tongue, while stalls sell Israeli military caps alongside keffiyehs, the traditional chequered Arab head coverings.
Amer Nicola, the programme manager of the Nazareth Village museum, explains that, prior to the outbreak of the Palestinian intifada five years ago, today's Arab Israelis, such as himself, were able to travel freely to West Bank cities such as Bethlehem and Ramallah to shop or visit relatives.
"Before the intifada the way between Bethlehem and Nazareth was opened and all the Israeli Arabs or Jews could go there easily, but now it is illegal for Israelis to go to the West Bank, even Arabs," he says. "You can apply for a permit to visit your family, but people go still without any permission. If they will be caught, they can go to court."
Under complex rules dating back to the failed Oslo process, it has actually been illegal since 1995 for Israeli citizens to visit urban Palestinian centres in the West Bank, including Bethlehem, although they are allowed to travel through Palestinian villages as well as to Jewish settlements.
However, these travel restrictions became more rigidly enforced - and more imperative - with the declining security situation following the intifada's onset in September 2000. For foreign journalists unfettered by the multifarious restrictions, the most scenic and direct route from Nazareth to Bethlehem is along road 60, a north-south artery running along the West Bank's central mountain ridge.
THE WEST BANK hills along road 60 - roughly the biblical region of Judea and Samaria - have been colonised over decades by ever-expanding illegal Jewish settlements bristling with military guard towers, checkpoints, trenches and fences.
While the West Bank's 230,000 settlers move around their areas under Israeli army protection, its 2.4 million Palestinians are subject to bewildering and ever-shifting Israeli travel restrictions and an economically crippling regime of curfews and "closures," which has become entrenched during the intifada years.
Road 60 links six Palestinian cities from Jenin in the far north to Hebron in the south. Or at least it would, if you discount Israel's arcane West Bank travel system - compared by Israeli human rights group B'Tselem to South Africa's apartheid regime - which denies Palestinian drivers access to some roads known as "sterile," while others, including parts of road 60, are open only to Palestinian vehicles with Israeli-issued Special Movement Permits.
Israel defends its restrictions on Palestinian movement within occupied territory as vital to protect its citizens from militant attacks, but human rights groups claim they are based on the discriminatory premise that all Palestinians are security risks.
The combination of Palestinian terror and resistance and Israel's occupation policies have turned road 60 into one of the most hazardous routes in the country.
Before we set off from Nazareth Village, news comes through that a Palestinian suicide bomber from the West Bank has just killed five people in the northern Israeli coastal town of Netanya. Such attacks always provoke punitive Israeli clampdowns and this one was swiftly followed by a week-long "general closure", effectively a lockdown which prevents all Palestinians, including merchants and workers, leaving the West Bank.
Expecting to encounter tense soldiers at checkpoints in the wake of the bombing, we head south out of Nazareth, descending from its high plateau on switchback roads leading to the fertile plain of Esdraelon.
The first Israeli checkpoint is at Al Jalama, eight kilometres (4.9 miles) north of the Palestinian city of Jenin and one of 29 de-facto border crossings where Israel meets the West Bank. Merchandise here is unloaded, checked and reloaded on the other side in a laborious and costly cargo-transfer system known as "back to back". Two lanky soldiers request identity papers.
"Today is a bad day, you know," says one, referring to the terrorist attack hours earlier. "Did you talk to anyone to get permission?"
We didn't, but are still allowed to proceed, and as the heavy yellow gates roll back we enter the northern West Bank.
It feels like that moment when a movie turns from colour to black and white. The road goes from smooth to pitted and it is lined with rubbish-strewn fields pitched with the remains of demolished houses and piles of rusting cars.
Palestinian security officials wave us through a makeshift roadblock towards the packed centre of the grimy grey city of Jenin, its buildings draped with huge posters of deceased Palestinian leaders and gaudy portraits of "martyred" militants brandishing firearms in front of serene painted backdrops of Jerusalem's Al-Aqsa mosque.
South of Jenin, the road winds its way gently through the rural Dotan Valley and for a brief moment the unspoilt stony hillside is reminiscent of the famed 19th-century lithographs of the region by the British artist, David Roberts.
With only a few scattered Jewish settlements located this far north, the car licence plates are almost all Palestinian green. (Yellow Israeli plates are allowed in the West Bank, but green Palestinian plates are not allowed in Israel.) Passing terraced hillsides and fields thick with ancient olive groves, it takes some effort to pick out among the pretty hills the site of the former settlements of Sanur and Homesh, two of four in the northern West Bank evacuated last summer as part of prime minister Ariel Sharon's unilateral "disengagement," which also saw all of the Gaza Strip evacuated.
THE FIRST SETTLEMENT spotted is Shave Shomro, close to the Palestinian city of Nablus, with its characteristic whitewashed houses and red tiled roofs. A permanent Israeli army checkpoint is located here.
"Where are you from?" asks the young soldier. "Ireland? Very good beer."
We proceed, driving past rickety Bedouin huts in rocky fields, heading towards the main settlement blocs of the central West Bank.
Along the next 20km (12.4 miles)stretch of road, another two temporary or "flying" checkpoints appear, among some 200 which the army says it erects at any given time in response to terror alerts. Green-plated service taxis - all battered yellow stretch Mercedes, the equivalent of west Belfast's black taxis - wait for security checks while Israeli-registered vehicles like ours cruise past.
Yellow car-plates and a decidedly non-Arab appearance helps at such checkpoints, although they can be a handicap when driving along the West Bank's "settler roads" where random attacks occasionally occur.
At Tappuach junction, where road 60 intersects the "sterile" Trans- Samaria Highway connecting settlement blocs to Israel's Mediterranean coast, the soldiers appear not to even notice us as we pass. Young Palestinian women in headscarves and men in impossibly tight jeans wait outside taxis for their documents to be checked, a process which can take a few minutes, or many hours.
It is dusk now, and the lights around clusters of hilltop caravans, known as "outposts" of main settlement blocs, twinkle like fairy lights. Another two checkpoints come and go without checks. On the approach to Jerusalem an unfinished concrete portion of Israel's illegal West Bank separation barrier looms in the semi-darkness.
Historians believe it unlikely that Mary and Joseph travelled through Jerusalem on their way to Bethlehem because of the threat posed by King Herod the Great, who, according to St Matthew's gospel, attempted subsequently to kill the infant Jesus by ordering the death of all children under the age of two in the area.
We head for the Palestinian-only Wadi Nar (Valley of Fire) road which bypasses Israeli-annexed east Jerusalem's huge illegal settlements, which almost entirely sever the West Bank in two. This is the only permitted route for green-plated Palestinian vehicles travelling from the north to the south of the fractured West Bank. The route is very beautiful, the road dangerously serpentine. By the roadside, an abandoned building descending into the valley has a stencilled image of a menacing rat and the salutation "Welcome to Hell".
A stream of raw sewage from Bethlehem and surrounding villages runs through this valley, adding a pungency to the air. At the valley entrance, an Israeli paramilitary border policeman refuses to let our Israel-registered vehicle pass, but relents after press passes are produced.
"Just be careful, because there are no Israelis here," we are cautioned.
But there are, at two more flying army checkpoints which we are waved through, reaching the biblical home of Jesus's birth some three hours after setting out from the city of the annunciation, ending our peculiar 21st-century odyssey through this troubled land.
See www.nazarethvillage.com