January 15, 2001
Holy Lands losing ground to urbanization
despite ongoing political unrest
___By Elaine Ruth Fletcher
___Religion News Service
___SAMSON'S FARM, Israel (RNS)--As the sun sets in the west over the distant Mediterranean Sea, a shepherd hustles to get his herd down from a hillside and into a pen for the night.
___Fifty brown, black and tan goats charge down a rock-strewn path, pausing at a cluster of young olive trees to nibble leaves. The shepherd urges them on with his staff, a fewsmall stones and phrases of Hebrew-Arabic goat-speak--"brrh, ye'lla, he'eh."
ISRAELIS rally in Jerusalem. Despite political unrest, urbanization continues to change the landscape.
___It's the sort of Holy Land scene that evokes the classic stories and parables of the Bible.
___Yet today, at the beginning of a new millennium, the pastoral biblical landscape and agriculture-based culture that have endured here through more than 4,000 years of tumultuous political and cultural change are gradually disappearing.
___A land burned, scarred and pockmarked by countless wars and foreign invasions is now being subjugated by the most mundane of forces--rapid urbanization, soaring population, human shortsightedness and greed.
___Indeed, Christianity's third millennium may be remembered at some future period as the time when widespread agriculture--which first appeared 10,000 years ago in the "Fertile Crescent" of the Middle East--disappeared from the region holy to the three Abrahamic faiths of Christianity, Islam and Judaism.
___Even in the West Bank, where the Palestinian economy is far less developed than in Israel, today's generation of young shepherds seeks work in the cities.
___Around Bethlehem, the heartland of the Nativity tradition, for example, old farm tracts are subdivided over and over to accommodate fast-growing families. In the process, a traditional peasant economy that had maintained the culture of the land for centuries is being replaced by a new Palestinian suburbia.
___But it is here, in Israel's Judean hills just outside Jerusalem, where the pressure for change is most marked today--around places like Samson's Farm, where a lone Jewish shepherd guided his flock home one cool winter evening.
___"Already today, very little really remains of the original symbols of the Hebrew landscape," said Moti Kaplan, one of Israel's foremost planners.
___"The Judean hills around Jerusalem and the Judean foothills farther west were the cradle of ancient Hebrew culture. But this is really a precariously small area of only a few dozen square kilometers. For that reason, every new development project creates a new wound on the land and destroys its integrity," he said.
___"The area is trapped, as it were, between Israel's two largest cities, Jerusalem to the east, where there is constant political pressure to expand, and to the west, the constantly expanding Tel Aviv suburban metropolis."
___Several years ago, Kaplan carried out the first systematic mapping of Israel's landscape and geographical regions, rating them in terms of their historical, cultural, archaeological and religious importance.
___His work was part of a national master plan for Israel in the year 2020 sponsored by the prestigious Technion University and was widely acclaimed. But his cry to safeguard sensitive sites was at first ignored and later only partially heeded.
___"I don't want to indulge in prophecy," Kaplan said, "but there is a real danger that what will be left of Israel in another generation or two won't any longer be a country, but one big suburb of houses with patches of grass. It will be something sterile, more like Los Angeles than Israel."
___Few Israelis or Palestinians--beset by pressing short-term development needs, the pursuit of affluence and an age-old political conflict--have had time in the last century to reflect on the fate of their shared land and legacy.
___And few elected officials, themselves heavily burdened with political debts to land speculators and developers, appear willing to reflect on what's ahead for the land.
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