This is the first installment of a two-part series featuring original CatholicVote interviews with Christians in the Holy Land.
Christians in the Holy Land expressed hope and quiet defiance last week after a string of internationally reported attacks by Israeli settlers, one of which left three Palestinians dead.
One of the villages reportedly attacked was Taybeh, about 10 miles north of Jerusalem. Taybeh is “100% Christian,” Nadim Khoury told CatholicVote via phone on Friday. A resident of Taybeh, Khoury is the founder of Taybeh Brewery, colloquially known as Taybeh Beer.
This week’s attack in his town was far from an isolated incident, according to Khoury. He fluently listed from memory a number of similar instances of violence and intimidation against local Christians by alleged Israeli settlers.
“Last month, they went inside 14 homes and they broke the doors while people were sleeping,” he said. “Last harvest … they didn’t allow the people to go into their groves to harvest their olive oil.” Last week, he went on, settlers brought sheep to graze on the crops of hardworking locals, ruining their business. They “ate all the wheat and barley that the farmers were growing on the mountains of Taybeh,” Khoury said.
Wednesday night, he went on, they broke into people’s homes to “kick them out,” and when the residents resisted, the attackers “burned the homes.”
Footage of some of the violence was widespread on social media this week.
Asked about Israeli soldiers arriving to police the violence, Khoury expressed a sentiment that several other local Christians who spoke with CatholicVote also volunteered: “Soldiers are usually with the settlers.”
“They’re protecting the settlers, and they’re not doing anything” to protect those under attack, he explained. “There’s nothing we can do. It’s a peaceful village, very quiet. I have a family tree of 600 years in Taybeh. I’m not gonna leave.”
Asked what his hopes are for the future, Khoury answered simply: “Nothing is left for us except hopes. We pray so hard for peace and prosperity in this area. We have deep roots in this area. We cannot give it up. We must keep fighting for it.”
Khoury’s friend and pastor, Father Bashar Fawadleh, spoke along similar lines. In a phone call with CatholicVote Friday, Father Fawadleh expanded on his parishioner’s allusion to settlers aiming to get locals to leave their hometowns.
The priest said he knew of “more than 140 families” who have left their cities in the West Bank. “In Taybeh we are also bleeding from emigration,” he said, with 10 families having left since October 7, 2023.
“We have to stop this bleeding,” he said, and asked that CatholicVote spread the word to American Catholics that “we need support.” What is needed, he said, is the creation of good jobs, and — ultimately — a peaceful end to the violence and intimidation.
Father Fawadleh expressed gratitude to American Catholics who stand in solidarity with the Christians of the Holy Land. But the hope he encourages in his flock, he said, “is very deep for our side – because it’s built on the Resurrection of Jesus Christ from the now-empty tomb in Jerusalem.”
“We are still awaiting the third day,” he went on, “to have the new life, to have liberty and freedom for our society, our country, and our population. And we hope that one day we have justice, and from justice we can have the fruit of justice, [which] is peace.”
The pastor is confident, however, that Christians are not alone in that hope.
“That is the dream that we are all dreaming here in the Holy Land,” he said, both “the Jews and the Palestinians. We are all dreaming that we can live together without any problems, without any occupation, without any killing, so that we can all live together in this very important and very holy place — the homeland of Jesus.”
Another Catholic leader in the region is businessman and former Minister of the Economy of Palestine Bassem Khoury (no relation to the founder of Taybeh Brewery). Speaking with CatholicVote over the phone, Khoury said that Wednesday’s attacks were only the latest in a running series of violent “pogroms” that have happened “almost on a daily basis in different parts of the West Bank.”
Khoury is a former board member of the Society of St. Yves and continues to work closely with the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem and other Catholic institutions that aid Christians in the West Bank and Gaza.
The current government of the West Bank is operating under “the main idea” of trying “to transfer Palestinians,” Khoury said. These officials “are extremists who basically believe that the only solution” to conflicts in the Holy Land is to deplete “the Palestinian presence in Palestine.”
The attack on Taybeh this week was about “basically forcing people to evacuate,” he said, reporting that the attackers even put up large billboards in town that read: “THERE IS NO FUTURE FOR YOU HERE.”
Khoury corroborated what others told CatholicVote about the response of Israeli officials to such incidents: “This is all being done with the support and with the encouragement of Israeli soldiers,” he said.
If locals try to stop settler gangs during an attack, “they are automatically shot at and killed by Israeli soldiers,” he said. “So it is done in collaboration with the Israelis. And the world is silent. The Christian world is silent about the attack on the town of Taybeh.”
But not the whole world.
“The Catholic Church’s role in Gaza is simply phenomenal,” Khoury was quick to add. He said he follows “on a daily basis the amazing work that the Catholic Church is doing in Gaza. And there is a Christian community in Gaza … without the support of the Church, they would simply die.”
“The situation for Christians after October 7th has really been difficult,” he said, “not only in Gaza but in the West Bank.” The condition of the “Christian community, especially in Bethlehem,” is “really really dire,” he said, noting that the local economy is largely dependent on visitors, and tourism and pilgrimages have been shut down during the Israeli campaign against Gaza in response to the Hamas terror attack in 2023.
Asked what Western Christians might do for their brothers and sisters in the Holy Land, Khoury said it is “very important” for American Catholics to read and listen to the statements of the late Pope Francis and of Pope Leo XIV, who have spoken out strongly for Palestinian Christians in the West Bank and Gaza. Khoury pointed out that Pope Francis was in regular contact with Holy Family Parish in Gaza until his death — speaking to them by phone at least three or four times a week and sometimes daily.
American Catholics may balk at the perspective of the Holy Father and of Christians in the Holy Land who speak against the controversial actions of the Israeli military under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. But “nobody can accuse the Pope of being Hamas,” Khoury joked.
Editor’s note: The second installment of this series is set to publish July 1 and will feature the perspective of Alice Kisiya, a young Christian woman from Bethlehem.
The post Exclusive Part 1: After the latest Israeli settler attacks, Christians in the Holy Land ask American Catholics for help appeared first on CatholicVote org.
Click this link for the original source of this article.
Author: Stephen Herreid
This content is courtesy of, and owned and copyrighted by, https://catholicvote.org and its author. This content is made available by use of the public RSS feed offered by the host site and is used for educational purposes only. If you are the author or represent the host site and would like this content removed now and in the future, please contact USSANews.com using the email address in the Contact page found in the website menu.
