Easter Without Pilgrims

What's happening

Every Easter-timed hotel reservation at Bethlehem's Notre Dame of Jerusalem Center has been canceled. The tourism industry that sustains the city is, in the words of local tour operator Elias Hazin, "basically dead." More than half of Bethlehem's 30,000 Christians work in tourism, which accounts for 70% of the local economy. Unemployment has reached 31%.

The collapse accelerated after the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack and the Gaza war. A brief recovery during the October 2025 ceasefire ended when the Iran war scared away tourists again. Former mayor Anton Salman says Christians are emigrating to Europe, the US, and South America. "We are fewer in number," he said, "so we feel the loss acutely." Christians represent just 1% of the West Bank's Palestinian population.

Hazin's remaining business is now outbound: helping Christians leave. "We are not asking for charity," he said. "We are asking them to protect the Christians who remain."

What the text says

Psalm 137:1-41By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down. Yes, we wept, when we remembered Zion.2On the willows in its midst, we hung up our harps.3For there, those who led us captive asked us for songs. Those who tormented us demanded songs of joy: "Sing us one of the songs of Zion!"4How can we sing Yahweh's song in a foreign land?

Psalm 137 is the Bible's sharpest expression of what it means to lose a sacred place. The exiled Israelites sit by the rivers of Babylon and weep. Their captors ask them to sing. They cannot. The songs of Zion belong to Zion. Torn from the land, the music dies.

The psalm's anguish is not abstract homesickness. It is theological crisis. The temple was where God dwelled. Jerusalem was where the promises were rooted. To lose the place was to lose access to the presence. The question "How can we sing the Lord's song in a foreign land?" is not rhetorical. It is desperate. They genuinely do not know the answer.

Bethlehem's Christians face a version of this question. Their faith was born in their city. The manger, the shepherds' fields, the ancient churches built over the sites of the story itself are not tourist attractions for them. They are home. And they are watching the community that kept that home alive for two thousand years thin to the point of disappearance.

The reflection

Christianity began as a Middle Eastern faith. Bethlehem is where the story starts. The Christians leaving Manger Square are not converts or transplants. Their families have lived in the shadow of the Church of the Nativity for generations.

Elias Hazin once brought pilgrims in. Now he helps Christians out. The man who sold the birthplace of Christ to the world now sells departure tickets to the faithful who can no longer afford to stay.

When the last Christians leave Bethlehem, the city will still draw visitors. The living faith that animated it will become a museum exhibit. A faith remembered where it began, no longer practiced.