Swapping dreams for a more compelling reality

After several days in clean, modernised Jerusalem, crossing the border into the West Bank felt less like a 25 minute bus journey and more like I had been hurled face-first into the desert dust before I’d even lost sight of the Dome of the Rock. Bethlehem: the name immediately ignites a thousand images inscribed onto the wallpaper of my childhood.
The real experience is overwhelming.
Crawling its way across the outskirts of the town, shunned by the surrounding houses, up to eight metres of concrete stands silently unaware of its own controversy. As we slipped down behind the buildings along the gravelly track encrusted with shards of emerald glass, Bethlehem suddenly seemed still. In the dry silence of the suburbs, this imposing, lifeless structure has been awakened into motion with endless layers of colour, graffiti and even restaurant advertising. All the anguish of a community that has been severed from Israel – and in many cases, work, friends and family – has been plastered onto a 2D edifice, proof of an agonising modern history. I was kept at a distance by what can only be, no matter how hard you try, a patronising empathy, inalienable ignorance and metre upon metre of gnarled barbed wire. Confronted with the Israeli security wall it was inevitable that I would feel a hot sting in my eye and a dead lump sinking towards my stomach.
If you want to go and see the Bethlehem that years of Christmas celebrations have built up in your mind, stay at home and look at a greeting card. You will never get anything from a visit to the real one but the tendency to look back on all your childhood dreams with a kind of sour cynicism. Had I not been able to scrub all my presumptions away, the experience would have been one of the most disappointing to date. But it isn’t my ideas that make a place what it is. Bethlehem is an accumulation of experiences, the most important of which belong to its inhabitants, and I was grateful I was able for a moment to see it through their eyes.