"Newsweek'"s Jerusalem bureau chief Joshua Hammer arrived in the
West Bank in October 2000 -- just after Ariel Sharon made his
inflammatory visit to the Haram al-Sharif, otherwise known as the
Temple Mount. Sharon's trip ignited the worst violence the Middle
East had seen in decades. Overnight, the peace process gave way to
an ever-worsening cycle of attack, revenge, and retaliation,
destabilizing the entire region, killing thousands, and culminating
in Israel's reoccupation of Palestinian towns in 2002.
"A Season in Bethlehem" is the story of one West Bank town's
two-year disintegration, as witnessed by a reporter who was there
from the beginning. Woven together from Hammer's own firsthand
reportage plus hundreds of interviews, it follows a dozen
characters whose lives collided on the streets of this biblical
city. They include a Bedouin tribesman who rose to become the
commander of Bethlehem's most feared and brutal gang of gunmen; the
beleaguered governor, an opponent of the al-Aqsa intifada, who
believed he had a mandate to stop the violence, only to discover
that Yasser Arafat was undermining him; a Christian businesman who
watched helplessly as his community was squeezed between Muslim
militants and the Israeli army; an eighteen-year-old female honors
student turned suicide bomber; and an Israeli reservist, son of a
leader of the Peace Now movement, who wrestled with his left-wing
convictions as he rode to battle through the predawn streets.
The narrative reaches a climax with a moment-by-moment
recreation of the epochal drama that drew many of these characters
together: the thirty-nine-day siege of the Church of the Nativity.
A clear-eyed chronicle of deepening chaos andviolence, in which
Hammer lets the opposing sides speak for themselves, "A Season in
Bethlehem" is both a timely and timeless look at how longstanding
religious and political tensions finally boiled over in a place of
profound resonance: the birthplace of Jesus.
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