Some of Bethlehem’s Syriacs have been displaced multiple times over. Joseph Khano was born in Bethlehem to Syriac parents who found refuge there after fleeing their home in what is now Turkey. He grew up in West Jerusalem. He told me that in 1948, his family was forced to flee, this time from the Nakba, the expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians from what is now Israel. In 1967, when Israel occupied the West Bank, they were displaced yet again.
On Bethlehem’s edges are three refugee camps founded after 1948. “My grandfather always remembered how they fled into the hills for safety, living in tents during the rain and freezing cold,” said Tamara Abu Laban, a professor at Bethlehem University, whose family is originally from Zakariyyah, a village around 10 miles away. “He told me how the people of Bethlehem helped them during those times, receiving them with love and compassion in the churches and monasteries.”
Over time, the tents were replaced by tin shacks and eventually cinderblock homes. Today, they have become apartment buildings stretching toward the sky even as the alleyways below follow the tight dimensions laid out when they were just footpaths. Dheisheh camp, where Abu Laban lives, is home to nearly 9,000 people, most of whom hope to one day return to their ancestral villages inside what is now Israel. When Abu Laban was growing up, Israel surrounded the camp with a fence, forcing residents to use a single checkpoint to enter or leave. Today, Israeli forces raid the area almost daily, and many young men here have done time in Israeli prison.