Oh little town: the mean streets of Bethlehem.

• Author: Demick, Barbara
• Position: On Political Books - Book Review

In an unguarded moment, Joshua Hammer's translator blurts out an astonishing description of his fellow Palestinian Christians. "We are like the Jews in Fiddler on the Roof; we are living inside a ghetto," he tells Hammer. It is surprising to hear a Palestinian identifying himself with Jews; but this is Bethlehem, a city where many of the assumptions about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are turned on their heads. The world that Hammer depicts so eloquently in A Season in Bethlehem is about nothing so simple as Arab versus Jew, or Muslim versus Christian. This portrait of Palestinian life in Bethlehem reveals a complex, fragmented society populated by sometimes heroic, sometimes murderous personalities who struggle as much with themselves as with the Israeli enemy. The first murder in the book is between cousins--the victim is a woman who has offended her clan with an adulterous affair and is shot in an honor killing. It is clear from the get-go that there will be many layers to the onion that Hammer is about to peel.

The biblical birthplace of Jesus Christ is one of the few places on the West Bank that still has a sizeable Christian population, with many of the Christians living in the shadows of the Church of the Nativity, built over the reputed site of the manger. The Palestinian Christians are for the most part multilingual, private-school-educated, and property-owning. They are also victims of their own success, their ranks thinned by generations of emigration to the Americas and Europe. They fret less about the Israelis at their doorstep than the growing population of Muslims, who have become the majority in Bethlehem after being displaced in the 1948 and 1967 wars with Israel. The old Christian businessmen zealously guard their right to ban Muslims from their private club where they retreat to drink alcohol and play bingo. The Palestinian Christian translator, Samir Zedan, who is one of many fascinating presences in this book, tells Hammer he would rather his son marry an Israeli Jew than a Palestinian Muslim. Many grumble openly that Bethlehem was better off under the Israeli occupation than under Yasser Arafat's Palestinian self-rule. For the Palestinian Christians, Hammer writes, "the game was about survival, about negotiating a path of least resistance between the Israelis on one side, Muslims on the other."

At the other extreme of Palestinian society is the extended Abayat family, descendants of nomadic Bedouin who have...