Tag: southern Israel

TAYBEH, West Bank — “Come visit Taybeh,” begins the brochure touting the touristic attractions here, the last entirely Palestinian Christian village in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

Though it counts Jesus among its many visitors over the years, said Khaldoon Hanna, Taybeh’s avuncular deputy mayor, these days “no one is coming.”

He sighed as he looked around the restaurant he owns on the village’s Main Street. It felt abandoned, with little trace of activity in the kitchen and a layer of dust coating most tables. Only one faucet worked in the bathroom, but it didn’t feel worth it to repair the rest.

“In the last two years, I haven’t had more than 20 tourists come in here,” Hanna said.

How could they, Hanna said, when you have to negotiate a growing gantlet of Israeli roadblocks just to get here? Or face off emboldened settlers who make increasing forays into the village to burn cars or destroy property? In July, they even tried to set fire to the ruins of the Church of St. George, a 4th century Byzantine structure on Taybeh’s hilltop, Hanna and religious leaders said; the Israeli government says it’s unclear what started the blaze.

“There’s a vicious attack on us at this point, and we as Christians, we can do nothing,” Hanna said. “If we don’t get support, be it social, political, economic, we’ll be extinct soon.”

Life as a Palestinian near the settlements has long been difficult in this bucolic portion of the West Bank, where the olive groves covering the hills are the sites of regular confrontations between Palestinian residents and Jewish settlers. The confrontations have become increasingly lethal, with more than 1,000 Palestinians killed by Israeli forces and armed settlers since the Hamas-led onslaught in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, according to the United Nations.

But although the war in Gaza is abating, extremist settler groups such as the so-called Hilltop Youth have doubled down on their unprecedented — and increasingly effective — campaign of harassment and land-grabbing that has hit all Palestinians, regardless of religion or political affiliation.

This year, the U.N.’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, or OCHA, tallied more than 1,000 attacks in the West Bank through August, putting it on track to be the most violent on record.

And the scope of the intimidation campaign is increasing: The olive harvest in October saw 126 attacks on Palestinians and their property in 70 West Bank towns and villages; it was almost three times the number of attacks and double the communities targeted during 2023’s harvest. More than 4,000 olive trees and saplings were vandalized, the highest number in six years, OCHA says.

Almost half of those attacks have been in Ramallah governorate, which encompasses Taybeh and a slew of communities contending with intensifying violence from settlement outposts — that is, encampments set up by settlers in rural parts of the West Bank that are illegal under Israeli law but often protected by the authorities.

Taybeh, which means “delicious” in Arabic and which relies on tourism along with olive and other harvests, has been particularly affected, if only because of sheer demographics: Christians account for roughly 1% to 2% of the 3 million Palestinians in the West Bank, down from about 10% when Israel was founded in 1948.

Even within that tiny minority, Taybeh’s 1,200 residents are fiercely proud of their community and see it as unique. Tourists have long come here, whether to day-trip through hiking trails where prophets once trod or visit the village’s different churches. In years past, it was the site of an Oktoberfest celebration that would draw 16,000 people.

Just as Christians in other parts of the Middle East have left because of war and instability, the constant lack of security, not to mention the economic strangulation that has accompanied it, have pushed 10 families to emigrate from the village in the last two years. It may sound like a small number, but it is a loss the village can ill afford, said Father Jack-Nobel Abed of Taybeh’s Greek Melkite Catholic Church.

Abed, who sports an impressive beard and a baritone voice, passionately advocates for Christians to stay in the Holy Land. When U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee — an ardent supporter of the settler movement — visited Taybeh after the torching near the church, Abed asked him to not issue U.S. immigrant visas to Christians from the area.

“I told him, ‘We have something to do in this land. This is our land, and our roots are deep enough to reach hell,’” Abed said. But he said he also understood if people leave for a time and return later.

“If the circumstances and the situation is forcing someone [to leave] because they’re afraid their kids will be killed, imprisoned, or to have no proper future, then you can’t hold a stick and stop them from what they need to do,” Abed said.

He has little patience for Christian Zionists such as Huckabee, who he said claim to care for Christians in the region while turning a blind eye to the persecution driving them away.

“Who are you to speak in my name as a Christian? How would you have learned of Christianity if it weren’t for someone like me in this land?” Abed asked.

The Israeli military says it works to prevent settler attacks, and Palestinians must coordinate with Israeli authorities in advance to visit their lands if they’re near settlements or outposts. But even when Palestinians do that, settlers often come out to block them anyway, and they’ve commandeered areas that never required coordination in the past.

When Palestinians fight back, the army prosecutes them under military law, while settlers, if they’re prosecuted at all, are subject to civil law. A report last year from the Israeli human rights group Yesh Din said more than 93% of investigations of settlers between 2005 and 2023 closed without an indictment. Only 3% led to a conviction.

In any case, Hanna and others say, the line between settlers and army has been blurred since the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza.

“It’s all the same,” Hanna said. “The entire aim is to make me forget anything called Palestine — to reach a point of desperation where I have nothing here. I have no future here.”

On that point, Hanna and hard-line settlers agree.

“Look at how much territory we’ve conquered in the last two years, in how many places the wheel has turned and despair has seeped into the enemy,” wrote settler leader Elisha Yered on X in a post exhorting Jews to deny Palestinians employment opportunities.

But some Palestinians refuse to give up. Madees Khoury, the general manager of Taybeh Brewing Co., is one of those who choose to stay in town, though she knows at least one family gearing up to emigrate in the coming weeks.

“Khalas, you can’t blame them,” she said, using the Arabic word for “enough.” “It’s sad. These are the good people, the ones you want to stay, to build, to educate their kids, to resist.”

That was the ethos driving her family, which opened the microbrewery in the optimistic days after the 1993 Oslo Accords, when peace and a Palestinian state seemed within reach. Instead of starting a brewery in Boston, Khoury’s father, Nadeem Khoury, and his brother gave up their business in Brookline, Mass., and moved back with their kids to Taybeh.

Khoury started hanging out in the brewery when she was 7, folding cartons “and generally staying in other people’s way.” She remembers her childhood during the second intifada, or uprising, when she couldn’t attend birthday parties because of Israeli checkpoint closures, and driving through mountain passes permeated by the smell of tear gas.

“It’s not normal. But I’m a stronger Palestinian for having gone through it. I’m not afraid of a settler in the checkpoint with an M-16; he’s more terrified of me,” she said. She added that pressure from the U.S. is the only way to reduce the wave of violence engulfing her village.

“If Americans want peace, if they really care about the Christians in Palestine, they wouldn’t allow settlers to stay on Taybeh land and causing problems.”

Although Israel portrays itself as a model of religious freedom, there has been a rise in anti-Christian behavior in recent years. A 2024 report by the Jerusalem-based Rossing Center for Education and Dialogue counted 111 reported cases of attacks against Christians in Israel and the West Bank, including 46 physical assaults, 35 attacks against church properties and 13 cases of harassment.

“We think that as Christians, nothing will happen to us. But this is empty talk. As long as you’re Palestinian, they’ll attack you,” Khoury said.

After earning a college degree in Boston, she came back in 2007 and has been working at the brewery since. She acknowledges that the last two years have been the most difficult yet, with business down 70% and Israeli security procedures turning a 90-minute drive to the port of Haifa into a three-day odyssey. Still, the company used the lull to build a new brewery — an expression of faith despite the almost daily settler attacks.

“My brother jokes around and says we’re building this for the settlers to take,” she said, walking through the new brewery wing.

She paused for a moment, her face turning serious.

“We’re not going anywhere. We’re building. We’re growing. We’re investing. And we’re staying,” she said.

“Because this is home.”