{"id":35524,"date":"2026-08-03T03:36:55","date_gmt":"2026-08-03T03:36:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/gsrra.com\/?p=35524"},"modified":"2026-08-03T03:36:55","modified_gmt":"2026-08-03T03:36:55","slug":"israel-a-famine-in-the-house-of-bread","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gsrra.com\/?p=35524","title":{"rendered":"Israel: A famine in the house of bread"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Bethlehem’s Christians are going abroad to escape economic collapse, leaving behind weaker institutions and a more fragile West Bank. Israel can’t afford to lose them.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

A man rests by a row of empty shops near the Church of the Nativity, where Christians believe Jesus Christ was born, ahead of Christmas in the West Bank city of Bethlehem, December 17, 2024. (Mahmoud Illean\/AP)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Book of Ruth begins with a famine in Bethlehem. A family leaves because there is nothing to eat in the town whose name means house of bread. They go to Moab, modern-day Jordan.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I met Jiries on a plane out of Amman.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was May, near the end of Israel\u2019s second war with Iran, and Amman was the only way I could get out of Israel that week. For him, it isn\u2019t a war measure. Ben Gurion is an hour from his house and he has never used it. Every time he leaves the country, he has to cross into Jordan first.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We kept in touch, and in June he invited me to Bethlehem. Within an hour of arriving, we were at his family\u2019s table, and his father was putting food on my plate faster than I could eat it. Chicken in za\u2019atar, two types of ancient grains, and fresh watermelon. His older brother had gotten engaged that week. His younger sister was about to finish school and get on an airplane, to Europe, for the first time in her life, to look at universities. The family imports and exports Christian ornaments. They have not had a real season in three years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The next day, we went to visit a very quiet Church of the Nativity. Our guide told us we were his first group in over a year. He holds an Israeli tour guide license, like many guides in Bethlehem. He cannot get a permit to cross and use it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bethlehem was about 86 percent Christian in 1950, and is roughly a tenth of that now. The separation wall takes in roughly a tenth of the Bethlehem region, including some of its best land; the UN estimates that only about 13 percent of the region is available for Palestinian use at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tourism, the town\u2019s only real industry, has not recovered since October 2023. And the other pillar of the West Bank economy went at the same time, when Israel revoked Palestinian work permits \u2014 around 115,000 of them, of which roughly 8,000 had been reinstated as of last year, according to the Israeli movement-rights group Gisha.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Christians leave at much higher rates than Muslims, simply because they can. They have cousins in Chile and Michigan, church-school English, second passports, and somewhere to land. Muslims in the same towns, under the same conditions, have fewer exits.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There was a famine in the land. There is a famine now, and Israel created it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Why is their emigration so detrimental? Because Palestinian Christians hold up an enormous amount of the West Bank. Palestinian Christians are somewhere around one or two percent of the population. A third of the West Bank\u2019s healthcare system is either run or supported by the church. There are 71 church-related schools across the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Those institutions are open to everyone, and many of their students are Muslim. This is not charity for a tiny minority. It is public infrastructure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Institutions are not buildings. They are people who know how to run them, donors who have stayed loyal for decades, and diaspora communities that keep writing checks because a cousin still teaches there. A hospital does not collapse the day Christians leave in greater numbers. It gets harder to staff. A school does not close overnight. It loses teachers, principals, and the institutional memory that keeps it functioning. A university does not vanish. It slowly becomes poorer, smaller, and more fragile.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Ruth, the poor survive by gleaning the edges of functioning fields. But a field is only useful if it still exists. Israel is dismantling the field that everyone else gleans from.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Israel does not benefit from a neighbor whose hospitals are failing, or from a generation of Palestinian women who couldn\u2019t finish nursing school. A West Bank with fewer schools, fewer clinics and fewer jobs is not a quieter one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Israel\u2019s alliance with American evangelicals has been among its most reliable assets, and it is already thinning. Support for Israel among evangelicals aged 18 to 29 fell from 69 percent in 2018 to under 34 percent by 2021, according to a Barna Group survey conducted for researchers at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke. The thing that moves Christians is what happens to other Christians.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the dining table, I asked Jiries\u2019s sister about Europe. She talked about the flight more than the universities. First trip on a plane, at 17, from a family indigenous to the land she is leaving.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Multiply her by a few thousand and you get a hospital with no head nurse, a school without a principal, a town whose best-connected people are gone, and a Bethlehem that is less able to sustain itself, and therefore less able to sustain the region around it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the Book of Ruth, the famine ends and the family comes home, and the town rebuilds itself around their return. That is the part I don\u2019t believe anymore.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Reference Link:- https:\/\/blogs.timesofisrael.com\/a-famine-in-the-house-of-bread\/<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Bethlehem’s Christians are going abroad to escape economic collapse, leaving behind weaker institutions and a more fragile West Bank. Israel can’t afford to lose them. A man rests by a row of empty shops near the Church of the Nativity, where Christians believe Jesus Christ was born, ahead of Christmas in the West Bank city […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":22414,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"aside","meta":{"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2],"tags":[32851,10005,2076,23749,1510,4383,32284],"class_list":["post-35524","post","type-post","status-publish","format-aside","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sample-category","tag-bethlehem","tag-christians-2","tag-economy-2","tag-famine-2","tag-israel-2","tag-jordan-2","tag-migration-2","post_format-post-format-aside"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gsrra.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35524","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gsrra.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gsrra.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gsrra.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gsrra.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=35524"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gsrra.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35524\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35525,"href":"https:\/\/gsrra.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35524\/revisions\/35525"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gsrra.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/22414"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gsrra.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=35524"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gsrra.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=35524"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gsrra.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=35524"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}