Israeli Settlers Attack Christian Town of Taybeh

Christians are under attack by Israel and its settlers, as last week’s violent attack on the Holy Land’s only fully Christian village showed. Donovan Roebert argues that it is time to stand in loyalty with our brothers and sisters in faith — before they are driven away from their ancestral land.

On the night of June 26, around 100 Israeli settlers attacked the Christian town of Taybeh, near Ramallah, in the occupied West Bank. Taybeh is the only 100% Christian village, and home to a popular brewery of the same name.

Christian homes were set alight and vehicles were burnt, while three Palestinians from neighbouring Kafr Malik were shot dead by Israeli soldiers who accompanied the settlers.

For Christian Palestinians it was a night of horror and the climax of a pattern of settler invasions of Christian-owned homes and lands near Taybeh which has been ongoing since 2019.

Fr Bashal Basiel of Taybeh’s Latin-rite Catholic parish of Christ the Redeemer parish describes the situation in the aftermath: “These days we are living under fire, barbarism, and brutality of the settlers,” noting that they are conducting their attacks under the direct protection of the Israeli army.

“We are Palestinian Christians. We resist with our faith,” Fr Basiel said.

This pattern of settler terrorism is not new. Over the past decade, Israeli policy has been directed at accelerating settler land grabs, deemed illegal by the United Nations and other international legal watchdogs. These land grabs are encouraged by Israeli political leaders such as Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, who have acted to legalise the “settler outposts” established adjacent to existing Palestinian villages, including Christian villages such as Taybeh, Al Makhrour, and Nahalin, near Bethlehem.

It is therefore becoming increasingly important that Christians should understand the religious and political influences that underpin these ongoing settler encroachments on Christian Palestinian lands, homes and businesses — encroachments that regularly involve violence and acts of terror aimed at driving Christians permanently out of their ancestral areas.

Israeli political doctrine is now demonstrably focused on territorial expansion into the occupied West Bank. This process been greatly accelerated under cover of the genocide in Gaza. The dynamic here involves the increasing seizure of “outpost” lands which are then used to terrorise the surrounding Palestinian population, often succeeding in driving them out, after which the vacated land is seized.

While this pattern is being played out, Palestinian communities are increasingly incarcerated within a system of gated checkpoints, leaving them unable to mobilise to retrieve their properties, which are often re-designated as “closed military zones”.

The objective is the creation of a Greater Israel(Eretz Israel), which envisages complete absorption of the occupied West Bank, enclosing fragmented islets of Palestinian-designated areas completely under de facto Israeli control, in a format resembling Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago.

Of the two religious-geopolitical mindsets that enable these insidious developments, the first is a radical Judaism which envisages a takeover of all Palestinian territories in concert with the “purification” of these lands of all non-Jewish and non-Judaist communities, including Christians, who are viewed as unclean and idolators.

This religious view is encouraged by the far-right supremacist ideologues who now hold sway over the policies of the Netanyahu government.

The second, and equally fanatical force, is that of so-called Christian Zionism, a powerful cult in worldwide Evangelical churches that sees the achievement of a “Greater Israel” as part of the divine dispensation preparing for the second coming of Christ.

Its eschatological and theological premises have been denounced in the 2014 Jerusalem Statement, to which the Latin patriarchate of Jerusalem is a signatory.

This heresy is embodied in such Christian figures as Mike Huckabee, US ambassador to Israel, who has said that there is “no such thing as a Palestinian”and has signally avoided any offer of support to any of the communities of Christian Palestinians, including Protestant communities such as Lutherans, Anglicans and Baptists. For him and his like, these Christians simply do not exist.

The disingenuous nature of the cooperation between radical Judaists and Christian Zionist is most clearly symbolised in their fallacious revisionist renaming of the West Bank as “Judea and Samaria”. This is a geographical nomenclature that harks back to the biblical era before Jerusalem was razed by Hadrian in 135 AD and the whole territory renamed Palaestina.

Such a reversion to biblical geography aims at the complete erasure of Palestinian identity, which has existed in Palestine for 1900 years, the early centuries of which were characterised by a majority Christian presence.

Today’s Palestinian Christians are the descendants of the first Christians we read about in the Acts of the Apostles.

In the light of the above, it is time for Christians everywhere, and especially for Catholic and Orthodox Church leaders, to speak and act against anti-Christian radical powers in the Israeli regime and Israeli society — and against other Christians who are involved in the depredations of heretical Christian Zionism.

Christian Palestinians do exist, most of them Catholic and Orthodox, and are therefore part of the global Body of Christ. Often called the Living Stones of the ancient Church, they are our brothers and sisters in the deepest spiritual sense, and their persecution and displacement should not be ignored only because it is politically or personally expedient for Catholic and Orthodox Christians to look away.