Taybeh, on a hilltop near Ramallah, is the site of the Middle East’s oldest microbrewery, which produces Palestine’s most exported beer. The Christian village – a mixture of Greek Orthodox and Catholic – has a population of about 1500 people. Its name, which translates to both ‘goodness’ and ‘kindness’, was said to have been given to Taybeh by Salahadin in recognition of the villagers’ generosity. Jesus is said to have found refuge here with his disciples, when it was known as Ephraim.
In July 2025, Israeli settlers set fires near the fifth-century church of al-Khader (St George) and the Byzantine cemetery. These arson attacks are increasing. In June, settlers started fires on farmland near the village and prevented firefighters and local residents from putting them out. Taybeh, which used to welcome tens of thousands of visitors each year and host an annual Oktoberfest, is now surrounded by settler outposts.
Writing after a recent visit to the West Bank, the former Irish president Mary Robinson described an ‘emboldened and aggressive process of Israeli annexation of Palestinian land unfolding in plain sight’. The settlers’ ‘systematic violence’, she said, is ‘enabled by the complicity of the Israeli government and its military’. On 5 August, the Israeli army raided Qalandiya refugee camp, between Ramallah and Jerusalem, injuring 51 people.
Robinson spoke of the Israeli flags lining the roads to Palestinian villages, and of her delegation being hurried on when two young settlers approached, as the fear of violence was so high and accountability for it so low. She came to the ‘clear conclusion’ that Israel ‘aims to make Palestine disappear physically, economically, culturally and politically’.
A 17-year-old Palestinian was shot dead on Friday by a settler in the village of Sair, near Hebron. The previous night Israeli troops had shot dead a man whose home they were raiding in Jenin.
In June, Benjamin Netanyahu approved $1.9 million to be allocated to the extremist settler group Hilltop Youth. Under the new package, 657 teenage settlers will each receive a monthly stipend equivalent to $550. Many of them are from ‘troubled’ or ‘at-risk’ backgrounds. They live without any kind of family structure and are free to carry out violence inspired by the extremist Kahanist ideology that seeks to expel non-Jews from the West Bank.
More direct support, in the form of ‘schools’ for illegal settlers, was pledged in August. As the conservative Times of Israel pointed out, it’s ‘unclear who will ensure that such youths, who live in the outposts without their parents, will go to school, and how they will travel there given that they cannot drive’.
In 2024 Hilltop Youth was sanctioned by the British government and the US Treasury. Two years later, attacks in the West Bank are at an ‘all time high’, according to the UN, with more than 1260 attacks between January and July. The Palestinian Colonisation and Wall Resistance Commission puts the number much higher, reporting 11,074 attacks in the first half of this year (including ‘land confiscation, colonial expansion, forced displacement, field execution, demolitions and bulldozing of land, uprooting of trees, property confiscation, as well as closures and checkpoints that disrupt the connections within Palestinian geography’). On 5 August – better late than never – the Charity Commission opened an inquiry into eight UK charities allegedly operating in illegal Israeli settlements.
The Jerusalem municipality has worked to ethnically cleanse the city of its Palestinian population since the illegal occupation of East Jerusalem in 1967. Discriminatory taxes and planning laws, house demolitions, closure of Palestinian schools, hospitals and cultural centres, revocation of residency rights, harassment of businesses and restrictions on the right to entry are some of the ‘legalised’ ways in which Palestinians have been pressured to leave the city.
Silwan in East Jerusalem, with a population of twenty thousand, has been systematically attacked by settlers working with state authorities. Evictions and house demolitions in the neighbourhoods of Baten al-Hawa and Wadi Hilwa have left hundreds of people homeless. In June, Israel seized land in Silwan belonging to the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate, forcibly removing the Patriarchate’s representative, confiscating equipment, uprooting trees and fencing off the property.
It is, as the bookseller Mahmoud Muna put it to me, ‘tricky’ to write of Palestinian Christians:
For me as a Muslim, to comment on the persecution of Christians could appear as though I consider it to be a different issue, when in actual reality we don’t really think of it differently, we in Palestine often don’t know who is who … we kind of suffer together in pretty much the same way.
I asked Mahmoud, whose bookshop on Salahadin Street was raided in February 2025, what the situation was with the case against him. ‘Nothing new,’ he replied. ‘Still technically on bail, on paper it is an ongoing investigation, yet we are carrying on doing what we have always done and enjoyed, celebrating authors and promoting books.’ He has recently been working on an archive of Raja Shehadeh’s diaries.
The line that the onslaught by Israel against Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon is about Hamas and Hizbullah is undercut by a closer look at the indiscriminate nature of the killing and uprooting of Arabs whatever their religion. The Vatican has expressed its concern at the violence against Christian villages in Southern Lebanon and in Gaza. St Porphyrius Church in Gaza was destroyed by Israel in October 2023.
In May 2022, before more than two hundred Palestinian journalists were killed by Israel in the current genocide, the veteran al-Jazeera reporter Shireen Abu Akleh was assassinated by an Israeli army sniper in Jenin. Her funeral procession in Jerusalem was an extraordinary show of solidarity across class, religious and age divides. Abu Akleh was Christian and for the first time in decades, if not centuries, Christian sects that ‘couldn’t stand’ each other came together with Muslim leaders. Church bells rang out with the muezzin call to prayer. This should be remembered. Not just the Israeli army smashing the window of the hearse and riot police charging at the pallbearers, causing her casket to slip.
