Pageant is short on congeniality

JERUSALEM – Sixteen Israeli girls wore evening gowns and bathing suits in a beauty pageant Tuesday on the contentious line dividing Israel and a Palestinian area. Their Palestinian counterparts from the nearby West Bank town of Bethlehem did not show up.

Eight Bethlehem girls, all Christians, were to participate in the Miss Barrier Line contest, named after the line that separates the West Bank from an Israeli neighborhood of Jerusalem.

Israel is reinforcing the line with a concrete barrier, setting off harsh Palestinian protests.

But the Palestinian girls, citing threats, slowly backed out over the past months, leaving only one.

Hours before the pageant, however, Israeli organizer Azi Nagar asked the girl, Dina Mukhreiz, to stay home after her family received threats on their lives from fellow Palestinians.

“I prefer to have a happy, pretty girl than a frightened beauty queen, not to mention a dead one,” Nagar said, pulling a picture of Mukhreiz out of his wallet.

The contest was held in the neighborhood of Gilo, an area Israel captured in the 1967 Mideast war and later annexed as part of Jerusalem. Palestinians oppose settlements built on the lands taken by Israel.

Organizers invited girls from Bethlehem and Gilo to participate with the hope of fostering understanding between them. The neighborhoods were a key flashpoint in the Israeli-Palestinian fighting that started in late 2000.

Shooting between Palestinian militants and Israeli soldiers across the rocky valley separating the sides reached a peak in late 2001.

Now, Israel is building a barrier between the communities to separate Israel from the West Bank in an effort to keep Palestinian suicide bombers out of the country.

Despite the lack of Palestinian contestants, at least six men from Bethlehem came to watch the contest and said they would encourage girls from the town to participate in 2005’s pageant