A Season in Bethlehem: Unholy War in a Sacred Place Book

I was ignorant to the specifics of the events that had occurred in Bethlehem in the spring of 2002 until I visited the West Bank with an audacious French photographer in 2004. We experienced the warm hospitality of a number of families in and around Bethlehem who shared both their memories of the Israeli occupation and their accounts of specific events that had incited some (whose relation to them remained ambiguous, of course) to violence. I read A Season in Bethlehem to fill some gaps in my knowledge of the event.

In this book, Hammer constructs an account of a sequence of events that climaxes as a siege at the Church of the Nativity and leaves Bethlehem in economic despair. Hammer describes the involvement of the key participants in the intifada and attempts to relate to their personal thoughts and struggles before, during, and after the siege. Though Hammer, like most of us, undoubtedly harbors his own biases and lacks the personal experience to be able to truly empathize with all the characters he describes, I felt I learned a lot about the people and events of the siege from his account.