Dusk was just falling as the Washington ceremony ended and men of the Shomaly family stood outside their eldest brother’s home to listen to the bells tolling joyfully from the Greek Orthodox church.
As Yasser Arafat, Yitzhak Rabin and Bill Clinton walked back into the White House, a final pink blush filled the sky over Shepherd’s Field and the muezzin called Muslims to prayer.
Under the darkening outline of Bethlehem on the neighboring hill, the road was lit by a string of cars jammed with shouting, cheering Palestinian teenagers.
Each of the five middle-aged brothers of the Shomaly family supports a different Palestinian faction. They are Roman Catholic, but joke that one of them should convert to Islam to represent the views of Hamas, the Muslim zealots who vow to reject any agreement.
“We get into some heated discussions, between brothers and cousins, even between fathers and sons,” says Dr. Wazein Shomaly, a radiologist and one of the three who watched the signing ceremony along with two cousins.
But for all their political differences and angry words, they are a family, and they came together for the live CNN feed from Washington of a ceremony that many hope will herald the birth of a Palestinian Arab state.
They are watching it on Jordanian television, in Arabic. But for a visitor’s sake they turn to the Israeli channel, with the sound broadcast in English and Hebrew subtitles scrolling across the bottom.
The Shomaly men sit on sofas arranged in a horseshoe around the TV set. They pour beer into small glasses and nibble on shelled peanuts.
Elias Shomaly’s daughter Rasha, who is 14, quietly helps clear dishes in the kitchen. Her mother, Sawsan, straightens the counter; she is not watching the TV, but there is a stillness about her as she listens. She sets out slices of chilled cucumber and hot, sweetened tea.
Minutes after Clinton begins speaking, Elias tells his son, Rani, to put a tape in the VCR. A sense of history takes hold in the room. The women, who have been chatting around the dining room table, turn toward the screen.
“Do you believe that?” the wife of a cousin remarks quietly as Clinton ends his speech, saying all will live in peace. There is a shadow in her eyes; it is all she will say for the next hour.
“He is without his pistol,” Elias notes as Arafat appears. “He never leaves it.”
Shimon Peres, the Israeli foreign minister, talks about Gaza prospering and Jericho flourishing. Wazein comments immediately on the omission of the rest of the West Bank: “He didn’t finish the list-that’s one of our fears.”
Arafat extends his hand to Rabin. “That was very, very important,” says Elias.
His brother Shawkat, visiting from Jordan, is pleased and lauds Arafat: “He made the initiative to shake hands.”
But history isn’t only on the TV screen here tonight. News of what’s happening in the neighborhood, scenes from memory, old antagonisms and new fears-all of that crowds into the room.
“Every Palestinian agrees to have a state, whether they are against this process or not,” says Wazein. “This agreement doesn’t give all the answers. What I want to know is, when shall I have my state and my identity which I lost 26 years ago?”
After four wars, their uncles and cousins are among the Palestinian diaspora, spread across the Middle East in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Yemen. One cousin was driven from Kuwait after the PLO supported the Iraqis; another lives in Michigan, yet another in Spain.
Five years ago, the family moved to this hillside from the center of the village to get away from the constant curfews and Israeli patrols and because the village collected donations and loans to build houses on ground they say Israel was about to confiscate for a new Jewish settlement.
During one period, the children missed 18 months of school because of strikes and curfews. The military government forbids assembly by more than nine people in a home without permission, but the people of Beit Sahour brought in tutors. Most days, Sawsan had 20-25 children in her basement.
“The men fear for their work,” she says. “We fear for our husbands and our children.”
Beit Sahour has always been ahead of the resistance to Israeli rule, whether it was blocking the roads with burning tires or throwing stones. At the beginning of the intifada (uprising), the residents tossed away their identity cards. Later, they decided to withhold their taxes and they drove around in illegal cars and let their drivers’ licenses expire.
“No taxation for occupation,” was their slogan. That prompted the Israelis to confiscate cars, TV sets, even refrigerators.
“If the others had followed us, things would be different now,” says Anwar, a cousin who manages a travel office.
But they didn’t, he says.
Almost all of Beit Sahour’s 12,000 residents are Christian, although Christians are a minority of less than 5 percent among Palestinians. They tend to be better educated, more prosperous and have fewer children than Muslim Palestinians.
“Maybe we have to prove our Arab nationalism more than most,” Anwar suggests.
Rani hears from a friend that there was a fistfight in town between two young men, one who supports Arafat and the other who backs George Habash, one of the PLO faction leaders who reject any compromise.
“Shall we be democratic in our behavior or not?” says Wazein. “See, that too is what worries us.”
Rani brings out a Beit Sahour calendar, a chronicle of a village’s sorrows.
In the center, surrounded by a border the colors of the Palestinian flag, are pictures of six who died in the intifada during the last five years. Five are young men and one is a 52-year-old man who suffered a heart attack while Israeli soldiers searched him.
Below those photos are 11 others from the village who died at Israeli hands. The brothers point out two killed during the 1967 war and two others who died fighting in Lebanon.
“This is to remind all of us of our hate for the occupation and love for the land,” Wazein says of the calendar.
Across the street, photos of a young man, images of tragedy, are plastered on the stone walls of a home. He was a favorite son of the neighborhood, and apparently a favorite of the Shomaly family as well. He majored in business administration at Bethlehem University until the day nearly five months ago when he was caught in a demonstration and killed by a soldier’s bullet.
From balconies, older people watch the cavalcade of teenagers and listen as some smaller groups of youths sing “My Country, My Country,” a Palestinian national hymn.
“You have my love/You have my heart,” they sing, and the old folks sway behind the railing. “Palestine is the land of our ancestors/We surely will return to you.”
At the checkpoint that separates Jerusalem from the West Bank, soldiers turn back all Arab cars, distinctive because of their blue license plates.
Coming from the other direction, Jewish settlers are trying to return home by the same road, but the soldiers block them as well. The tension is high.
“Is there trouble?” a settler yells from his car window. The only thing he can hear up ahead are honking car horns.
To show how the village spreads across the valley, the brothers walked up to the flat roof of the home, built of stone in the traditional style. There they pointed toward Jerusalem, to the closest hilltop covered in pine, where at least until two weeks ago Israel intended to build another Jewish settlement.
A fighter plane far overhead breaks the sound barrier and everyone flinches as the sonic boom bounces across the land.
