BETHLEHEM, West Bank — Hundreds of Christian pilgrims celebrated Jesus’ birth on Tuesday in the West Bank town where he was born, in an atmosphere made markedly cheerier by the renewal of Israeli-Palestinian peace talks after years of bloody conflict.
By midday, the ancient Church of the Nativity was packed with tourists waiting in line to see the grotto that marks the traditional birthplace of Jesus.
The visit to Bethlehem was a first for Kiel Tilley, 23, a science teacher from Charlevoix, Mich.
“It’s very powerful and meaningful to me,” Tilley said. “It’s very moving to visit a place which I always read about in the Bible.”
The relaunch of Israeli-Palestinian peace talks at a U.S.-sponsored conference last month reassured him before his trip, he said.
“I’m always in fear something would happen,” Tilley said. “But the peace process made me feel safer.”
Hundreds of people from all over the world crowded the church’s dark interior. Some stopped to look at part of the original floor about 2 feet below the current one, exposed in a fenced-off section in the middle of the church.
Some of the tourists inside the church wore Santa hats, and one carried the national flag of Indonesia, a country whose population of 235 million is nearly 95 percent Muslim.
The church, first built in the 4th century, looks like a fortress. Two rows of columns line each side of the long, narrow central hall.
Vendors mingling with the crowd in Manger Square hawked rosaries, handcrafted bags, popcorn, steamed corn and Turkish coffee.
According to Israeli border police, who monitored the entry of visitors into Bethlehem, 22,000 tourists had crossed over by midday, including about 7,000 Israeli Arabs.
The outbreak of the Palestinian uprising against Israel in late 2000 and the fighting that followed had clouded Christmas celebrations in Bethlehem for years, battering the tourism industry that is the city’s lifeline. Although holiday tourism numbers were still off from the tens of thousands who visited in the peak years of the late 1990s and the 2000 millennium, they were up from recent years, when just a few thousand tourists trickled in.
Moussa Azein, a 40-year-old tea vendor who lives in a village near Bethlehem, said business picked up this year. “This is the best year since the uprising began,” Azein said.
Steve Dintaman, 56, of Harrisonburg, Va., was seeing Bethlehem for the first time. He said he enjoyed the visit but felt that the trip wasn’t necessary to feel the spirit of Christ.
“I don’t identify Christ so much with the location, as with the person who is a part of my life and a part of many people’s life, but it’s still historically significant, and it’s wonderful to see,” Dintaman said. “I hope this isn’t heretical — I don’t feel any closer to God here than I do at home.”
