Before the collection of folk tales became a science, Tawfiq Canaan — a physician and son of Beit Jala — was gathering peasant songs, proverbs and stories from Palestinian villages, becoming a pioneer of Palestinian folklore studies. The town also gave the singer Tony Qattan, who carried the Palestinian song to Arab radio.
The land has its own story: a large part of the population farms, especially olives and vineyards, on roughly 13,307 dunums, alongside some 465 licensed economic enterprises.
So the place shares out the notebook and the plough: those who write the story, and those who plant the land it is told from.
Source: “Beit Jala” — Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beit_Jala
Cover photo: Gilabrand at en.wikipedia — Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.
