BETHLEHEM - Marching bands, children dressed as Santa Claus and clergymen in magenta skullcaps gathered in the center of Bethlehem on Sunday to celebrate Christmas Eve, doing their best to dispel the gloom hovering over Jesus's traditional birthplace.
In an annual custom, Bethlehem's residents enacted Christmas rituals that seem out of place in the Middle East. Palestinian Scouts marched through the streets, some wearing kilts and pompom-topped berets, playing drums and bagpipes as they passed by inflatable red-suited Santas.
Other aspects of this Bethlehem Christmas, however, could take place nowhere else. To get to the town, Michel Sabbah, the Catholic Church's highest official in the Holy Land, rode in his motorcade through a huge steel gate in the separation fence. Two Border Police troops closed the gate behind him.
"God wants us all to be peacemakers. He wants every believer who has faith in God Jewish, Muslim or Christian to work to make peace," Sabbah said in his annual Christmas address at his Jerusalem office before departing for Bethlehem. "Our leaders so far have only made war, they haven't made peace."
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