Mrs. Asma Tubi.. Corrects Errors about Bethlehem

In last January's issue there appeared an article about Bethlehem, translated from the French by Miss Umayma Riz at the wish of the editors. The writer Mrs. Asma Tubi, who was born and lived in the Holy Land, knows everything that has any connection with it. Certain slips in the article caught her attention, and she wished to call attention to them. And we, who are anxious to present the truth and the truth alone, appreciate our friend's zeal and make room for her in this issue, with our thanks..

Dear Umayma,

I read your "Nativity in Bethlehem" in the issue of The Woman's Voice before last, and I admired your fine choice and the beauty of your translation.. But something in certain of the lines pained me.. The fault is not yours that these lines were written as they were, though I wish you had left them untranslated, for they are as far as can be from truth and reality.

The writer says: "Palestine remains to this day an oasis of nomads.. on the highest hills the black tents of the Bedouin stand fast against the winds." The writer, as it appears, is one of two things.. either he has never visited Palestine at all.. or he is one of the propagandists of Zionism and colonialism — though I incline to the first, and hope it is so.

Palestine is no oasis of nomads.. In all its plains and mountains there are no tents or black pavilions of the Bedouin, unless it be around Beersheba in the Gaza region; and such people exist in Syria, for instance — is it then said of Syria that it is an oasis of nomads and a place for the black tents of the Bedouin?

Then there is the writer's saying: "In an air where the bleating of the sheep and the goats and the she-camels mingles, the children sleep with the bare earth for their bedding." God help this writer.. It is as if he were picturing some country in the wilds of Africa... But has not worse than this, by far, been written by others about Egypt?.. Only ten years ago a professor came from America to teach in the schools of Egypt, and he brought with him three cases of soap, because Egypt in his head was a primitive country that did not know soap.. As for the pupils, he imagined them — as he declared after he was astounded by what he saw — he imagined them barefoot, sitting in their gowns on a mat on the floor, their books on their knees, and the teacher standing to explain the lesson on the board before them.. Consider that.

Then the shepherds and their tents.. Tents are a refrain repeated by everyone who has written about the shepherds of Bethlehem.. whereas those shepherds in fact used to sleep in a cave, a hollow, which remains to this day a holy shrine to which millions of people come...

And the people of Beit Sahour — the village lying beside Bethlehem, from which the shepherds came on the night of the Nativity — will tell you, handing it down from their fathers and their grandfathers.. that this cave is the Shepherds' Cave, unchanged and unaltered..

The shepherds of Palestine, like the shepherds of Lebanon and elsewhere, carry no tent with them, for they return every evening to their houses.. And if they once go far from the village and must pass the night in the pastures, there is nothing commoner than the caves in which they spend their night.

And there were no camels and no she-camels, except the camels of the Magi, which came and went back whence they came.. But our friend regards camels as the complement of tents.. so he tells us of "the she-camels whose bleating mingles with the bleating of the goats and the sheep, while the children sleep to their cries with the bare earth for their bedding." And Nazareth, crouching on a hill, which in the writer's view has not changed from the days of the Virgin until now... the narrow, rugged roads in it, the dark shops and the mud-daubed houses.. and so on to the end of that same description...

Nazareth today spreads over a number of hills joined one to another... And the elegant houses, like palaces.. and the institutes of learning.. and the convents cover these hills, with the orchards and the lovely gardens around them.

Even the Nazareth of the days of the Lord Christ was no village.. Josephus, the famous historian, records that there were in Galilee in the days of Josephus 204 towns and villages.. the smallest of them with 15,000 inhabitants.. And he says of Yafa, beside Nazareth, that it was the largest village in Galilee.. and that the Romans killed 15,000 of its people and carried off 2,130 souls into captivity.. And this was a village beside Nazareth.. So Nazareth was no village.. And this apart from the fact

that it is named in all the Gospels thus: "the city of Nazareth."

The city of the Nazarene lay, as the historians say, between two Roman roads that were among the greatest roads of the land.. through it passed the caravans of trade, east and west, north and south... and it was the meeting place of the caravans coming up from Egypt on their way north, joining the East to the West.

And Jerusalem was the capital of the Romans.. and what do you know of the Romans and their luxury in the days of their glory.. And Caesarea was a port where the cargoes were unloaded — above all the cargoes of marble brought from Italy and elsewhere, so that the luxury of the Romans might be complete.

And after all this, the children in England, my dear Umayma, chant a carol that says: We shall go to Bethlehem, lying upon the shore.. and Bethlehem is an hour and more by motorcar from the nearest shore.. yet in the eyes of the carol's composer it is on the shore.. and it is repeated always as something real and settled.. God help us.

Thus do they write about us, and thus do they rhyme.. Pens such as these have done us harm — indeed, they have committed a crime against us.. Did they not picture Palestine to the peoples of the West and of America as the pen of our friend, whose work you translated, pictured it — a land empty and desolate but for a few villages, and then the black tents and the wandering Bedouin, so easily moved from one place to another — so why should Israel not occupy it and build it up?..

The peoples were deceived by this propaganda, but today we shall stand against it.. and we shall fight it.. And it is in our power — as peoples cooperating with their governments.. and as conscious individuals.. to do much.. and we shall.