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Book Review: A Season in Bethlehem: Unholy War in a Sacred Place
(Boston Globe) Charles M. Sennott - In A Season in Bethlehem, Newsweek's Jerusalem bureau chief Joshua Hammer covers the siege of the Church of the Nativity and all of the disheartening violence of the Palestinian intifada as it unfolded from the fall of 2000 to the present. At the center of the book is the Abayat tribe, a Bedouin clan whose sons became leaders of the Al Aksa Martyrs' Brigade, which to Israel was a terrorist cell behind a surge of attacks in the weeks before the siege and which to Palestinian Christian residents was to be feared as a band of thugs who set out to put their historic town in the center of the conflict. Hammer takes readers inside Bethlehem and its surrounding villages, stripping away the cliche image of Hallmark nativity scenes. He accurately points out the storming of the holy site by armed Palestinian gunmen "exacerbated the ill will" felt by Palestinian Christians toward the Palestinian leadership.