The Body and the Blood: The Holy Land's Christians at the Turn of a New Millennium (review)

Charles M. Sennott: The Body and the Blood: The Holy Land's Christians at the Turn of a New Millennium. New York: Public Affairs, 2001. 479 pages. ISBN 1-891620-95-9. $30.00. .

Charles M. Sennott, the award-winning Middle East correspondent of the Boston Globe, traveled in the footsteps of Jesus from Christmas 1999 to Easter 2001. He set out to document the life of the local inhabitants along the path and most of all to find out why Christianity was disappearing in the land where the faith was born. But his pilgrimage came to encompass much more as events unfolded and the path became a war zone by October 2000.

In this pilgrimage, as the author goes from Bethlehem to Egypt, Nazareth to Jordan, Galilee to Lebanon, and back to Jerusalem, he finds that military occupation, religious extremism, economic injustice, and the strife to control Jerusalem are as acute today as they were two thousand years ago. He talks with Christian Palestinians, Muslim Palestinians, and Israelis, and while he writes about their personal experiences he also takes the reader back in time. The author excels in reviving for the reader the history of this land as he gives specific details about the 1948 war and how the families that fled the fighting were never permitted by the Israelis to return to their homes. It was then that "the Palestinian refugee crisis was born," Sennott writes. The homes of the people who fled were "seized by Israel's Custodian of Absentee Property, and the Jewish Agency turned them over to new Jewish immigrants, who were flooding into the newly founded state."

Another wave of emigration occurred after the Six Day War in June 1967, with Israel's stunning victory. History repeated itself; people fled the war and Jewish immigrants from Europe, Russia, and North Africa settled in Israel. As the author explains, demographics changed with Zionism's effort to bring Jews from all over the world to Israel and with the Arab population explosion due to a soaring Muslim birthrate. Due to the economic pressures created by the upheaval of the war and the social pressures created by this demographic shake-up, Christians, too, were squeezed out of Israel.

Within Arab societies throughout the Middle East, Sennott states, Christians were "squeezed further by the upsurge in Islamic fundamentalism," which changed both the social and the political landscape of the Arab world during the past twenty years. As Arabs they were mistrusted by the Israelis—and as Christians, by the overwhelmingly Muslim Palestinians. At the same time, many Christians in the region are still frustrated with the fact that "the Christians of the West," as some say, "look at us all here as Arab, and they assume we are Muslim. . . . Why don't they look at us as fellow Christians?"

In the chapter "Beit Sahour," referring to a village in the West Bank, the author describes the Beit Sahourans' civil disobedience of not paying taxes and their first major nonviolent action in July 1988, when more than five hundred residents gathered their ID cards and returned them to the Israeli authorities. As the author explains, not only is it illegal under international law to collect taxes on occupied land, the tariffs imposed on the Palestinians by the Israelis were exorbitant. Upon the warning of American consultants to Israel that civil disobedience was unstoppable once it took root, the Israeli government swiftly decided that the movement had to be stopped. "We will teach them a lesson," Rabin is quoted as saying. And on 19 September 1989 hundreds of troops of the Israeli army entered Beit Sahour. They cut phone lines, barred the press from entering, and confiscated an estimated $2 million worth of commercial equipment and personal property.

As Sennott goes on with his pilgrimage and visits Egypt, where the Holy Family...