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By Daniel Schwammenthal, online.WSJ.com  Wall Street Journal

Meet Ibrahim, a 23-year old Palestinian refugee living in the West Bank. Unlike those descendants of refugees born in United Nations camps, Ibrahim fled his birthplace just two years ago. And he wasn’t running away from Israelis, but from his Palestinian brethren in Gaza.

Ibrahim’s crime in that Hamas-ruled territory was to be a Christian, a transgression he compounded in the Islamists’ eyes by writing love poems.

“Muslims tied to Hamas tried to take me twice,” says Ibrahim, and he didn’t want to find out what they’d do to him if they ever kidnapped him. He hasn’t seen his family since Christmas 2007 and is afraid even to talk to them on the phone.

Speaking to a group of foreign journalists in the Bethlehem Bible College where he is studying theology, Ibrahim describes a life of fear in Gaza. “My sister is under a lot of pressure to wear a headscarf. People are turning more and more to Islamic fundamentalism and the situation for Christians is very difficult,” he says.

In 2007, one year after the Hamas takeover, the owner of Gaza’s only Christian bookstore was abducted and murdered. Christian shops and schools have been firebombed. Little wonder that most of Ibrahim’s Christian friends have also left Gaza.

On the rare occasion that Western media cover the plight of Christians in the Palestinian territories, it is often to denounce Israel and its security barrier. Yet until Palestinian terrorist groups turned Bethlehem into a safe haven for suicide bombers, Bethlehemites were free to enter Israel, just as many Israelis routinely visited Bethlehem.

The other truth usually ignored by the Western press is that the barrier helped restore calm and security not just in Israel, but also in the West Bank including Bethlehem. The Church of the Nativity, which Palestinian gunmen stormed and defiled in 2002 to escape from Israeli security forces, is now filled again with tourists and pilgrims from around the world.

A demonstration of power: Muslims praying in Manger Square, Aug. 7, 2009.

But even here in Jesus’ birthplace, which is under the control of the Palestinian Authority (PA), Christians live on a knife’s edge. Ibrahim tells me that Muslims often stand in front of the gate of the Bible College and read from the Quran to intimidate Christian students. Other Muslims like to roll out their prayer rugs right in Manger Square.

Asked about why Muslims would pray so close to one of Christianity’s holiest sites, Pastor Alex Awad, dean of students at the Bible College, diplomatically advises me to pose this question to the Muslims themselves. Mindful of his community’s precarious situation, he is at pains to stress that whatever problems Christians may have with their Muslim neighbors, it’s not the PA’s fault.

“Muslims and Christians live here in relative harmony,” he tells reporters, only to add that Christians “feel the pressure of Islam . . . There is intimidation and fanaticism but these are little instances and there is no general persecution.”

Samir Qumsieh, the founder of what he says is the holy land’s only Christian TV station, also stresses that there is no “Christian suffering” and that the Christians’ problems are not orchestrated by the PA. Yet his stories of land theft, beatings and intimidation make one wonder why, if the PA doesn’t approve of such injustices, it is doing so little to stop it?

Christians have only recently begun to talk about how Muslim gangs simply come and take possession of Christian-owned land while the Palestinian security services, almost exclusively staffed by Muslims, stand by. Qumsieh’s own home was firebombed three years ago. The perpetrators were never caught.

“We have never suffered as we are suffering now,” Qumsieh confesses, violating his own introductory warning to the assorted foreign correspondents in his office not to use the word “suffering.”

Always a minority religion among the predominantly Muslim Palestinians, Christians are, Qumsieh says, “melting away,” even in Bethlehem. While they represented about 80% of the city’s population 60 years ago, their numbers are now down to about 20%, a result not just of Muslims’ higher birth rates but also widespread Christian emigration. “Our future as a Christian community here is gloomy,” Qumsieh says.

Palestinian plight not attributable to Israel barely seems to register in the West’s collective conscience. As Christians around the world reflect on Jesus’ birth, death, and resurrection in this season that extends from from Christmas to Easter, perhaps we can think of Ibrahim and those Christians still suffering in Gaza and Bethlehem.

By David Bedein, Middle East Correspondent for The Bulletin (Philadelphia, PA)

http://thebulletin.us

Saturday, February 6 will be the observation of Tu Bshvat on the Hebrew calendar, the 15th of Shvat, the Jewish arbor day, a day when the Jewish people bid a “happy birthday to the Land of Israel.”

One rabbi, known as “the Ari of Tzfat,” declared in the 16th Century that Tu Bshvat should be celebrated as the real Jewish New Year.

In the modern era, Tu Bshvat combines a heavenly commitment of love for the land of Israel with the Zionist enterprise in order to make the Land bloom in the modern era.

The organization in charge of planting trees in the land of Israel, after two millennia of desolation, is known as the Jewish National Fund (JNF).

This is how the momentum of tree planting in the land of Israel has progressed over the past 90 years:

In 1920, the year the JNF was established, there were 14,000 dunams (a measurement of one-quarter of an acre) of planted forests in the land of Israel. By 1942 there were already 35,000 dunams of forest, and more than a half a million in 1980.

Israel is the only country in the world that will have more trees in its territory this year than it did in 1910. The trees that will be planted this year during the annual Tu Bishvat celebrations are part of the JNF’s “A Tree for Every Resident” program.

“In the framework of the program we are going to plant seven-and-a-half million trees,” said Efi Stentzler, the JNF chairman. “A tree for every resident of Israel. Our project is part of a global project that was announced by the UN, the goal of which is to fight the causes of pollution that humanity is responsible for.”

Forests currently cover some 1.6 million dunams of land in the state of Israel. A million of those dunams are administered by the Jewish National Fund.

The JNF has planted more than 240 million trees to date. The national master plan envisions another 300,000 dunams of available land to be covered with forests. This year, between 15,000 and 20,000 dunams of land will be forested. Tree-planting season ends in March. The saplings are provided by the JNF nurseries, which produce 1.2 million saplings every year.

In 1960, pine trees accounted for 85 percent of all trees planted in Israel, which made them the icon of JNF planting in Israel. In recent years, pine trees have come to account for under one-third of the trees planted. Rather, 70 percent of all saplings planted are indigenous trees.

The JNF plants 150 different kinds of trees and invests an average of five million dollars every year for that purpose. The JNF has recorded in a special diary an account of all plantings since Israel was re-established. In 1991, that diary was computerized.

The largest forest in Israel is the Yatir Forest, which is spread over 40,000 dunams, half of which are desert. The smallest forest is the Dalton Forest, which is on a modest 42 dunams of land.

The first forest ever planted by the JNF is the Ben Shemen Forest —which was initially called the Herzl Forest and consisted of just 18 olive trees.