Pilgrims complain of exhausting security checks at Bethlehem crossing

By Irit Rosenblum
Wed., December 07, 2005
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/654562.html

Palestinians waiting to get checked at the newly opened checkpoint at the entrance to the West Bank city of Bethlehem with armed Israeli soldiers patrolling overhead. November 15, 2005. (MAANnews/Inbal Rose)

Winding corridors without any signposts or guidance, exhausting security checks and passage through a monstrous building that feels like a prison - this is the new Bethlehem crossing that is supposed to improve and ease pilgrim traffic between the city and Jerusalem.

Rafi Farber, CEO of the Royal Plaza hotel chain and vice president of the Israel Hotel Association, recently wrote to Tourism Minister Abraham Hirchson warning that the ordeal tourists undergo at this crossing is causing tremendous damage to the tourism industry and to Israel's image.     
Complaints that have reached Farber, through an American representative of a major company that brings Christian pilgrims, as well as through Israeli tour guides, paint a depressing picture of the situation at the Jerusalem-Bethlehem crossing.

Farber pointed out that Israel undertook to provide unfettered access to all holy sites, and for Christian pilgrims a visit to Bethlehem is an inseparable part of their tour.
to clear.

In his letter to Hirchson, Farber emphasized that the new procedures at the Bethlehem crossing were undoing years of progress and will wind up doing great harm to the Israeli tourist industry and to the state's image.

"Christian tourists who arrive at the new crossing feel hurt and angry. All of the great effort invested by the Tourism Ministry and the tourism industry could go to waste because of unwise procedures at the crossing into Bethlehem," Farber wrote.

Farber suggested that the Tourism Ministry director general, in concert with senior tourism industry representatives, carefully examine what is going on at this crossing and take immediate action to amend the situation.

The Tourism Ministry said Hirchson had instructed members of his staff to do whatever was necessary to ease the plight of tourists crossing from Jerusalem into Bethlehem and vice versa. Hirchson's directive, the statement added, was part of the policy to improve the tourism product and to generate regional package deals in the wake of his talks with the Palestinian tourism minister.