Taybeh totters on the abyss

Whatever about Palestine being free from the river to the sea, the all-Christian town of Taybeh on the Palestinian West Bank is not even free from one end of the town to the other. At one end, Israeli volunteers shield Bedouin tribes from the worst excesses of the settlers, who are annexing the town’s olive trees, water supplies and ancient Christian monuments.

Cars are regularly torched, and the locals are jailed for offering even the most token form of resistance to attacks on them. The entire village, including the Latin, Greek Orthodox and Greek Catholic priests, are on the town’s local WhatsApp groups, which inform them of the many roadblocks the Israelis set up between Taybeh and Ramallah, which, though it is only 18km away, often takes hours to reach when either the Israeli Army, the settlers or both are on the prowl.

Although much the same applies to travelling the 14km to the prestigious BirZeit university, that might soon become moot, as the Christians of Taybeh no longer have the money to pay for the fees there, or the even more modest fees local primary and secondary schools charge.

Parish

Palestinians have not been allowed to work in Israel since October 2023, there is no work available on the West Bank, there are no free-spending tourists, the settlers continue to destroy their crops and, as several parents told me, if they could leave Palestine today, the entire town would do so and not wait until tomorrow to leave. Things could hardly be bleaker.

If there is any silver lining on this dark horizon, it comes from the local Catholic, Melkite and Orthodox churches, where the Latin parish now finds itself as the town’s biggest employer.

At the head of the local Catholic community is parish priest Fr Bashar Fawadleh, and at its heart are three orders of nuns, the French Sisters of the Holy Cross of Jerusalem (Soeurs de la Sainte-Croix de Jérusalem) and two Arab orders, the Sisters of the Incarnate Word and the Sisters of the Rosary (Rosary Sisters), who keep the parish and its many evangelising, medical, and education outreach programs ticking over as seamlessly as a Swiss watch.

Taybeh is also badly in need of volunteers to help save the olive harvest, as well as musicians and the like”

If the nuns are at the heart of the community, then Fr Bashar is its undisputed head, with an almost superhuman drive to steer the town through these troubled times and into the brighter future all of its people deserve a thousand times over. To this end, he has a number of projects afoot, ranging from expanding the Church’s Caritas Medical Centre into a hospital capable of conducting emergency life-saving operations to securing sponsorship for the schools and students of the town, through twinning arrangements with sympathetic schools, parishes, towns, individuals and the like.

Taybeh is also badly in need of volunteers to help save the olive harvest, as well as musicians and the like to keep the children occupied so that the nuns can have some downtime. There is no grass to play on, and the best that can be done for now is to give them some swings and roundabouts at the back of the church. Fr Bashar is also addressing that problem.

Sanctuary

Whereas Fr Bashar is taking St Francis of Assisi’s invocation to “go, rebuild my church” very literally, Orthodox priest Fr David Khoury, together with his cousins who run the Taybeh beer and wine company, as well as an 80 room shuttered hotel, compliment that with a number of entrepreneurial efforts, which have seen the local scouts spend an enjoyable few weeks in Italy with the scout families who hosted them there. No big deal, you say, but most Taybeh teenagers and young adults have never even seen the sea, which is only 100 km away from their village.

Taybeh needs and deserves the help of all people of good will”

Although the Bible (John 11:54) tells us Jesus and His disciples found sanctuary in Taybeh (then called Ephraim), Fr Bashar points out that it is that very history and the witness Taybeh has shown from Jesus’ time to our own that commands us to lend the helping hand Taybeh so desperately needs.

In this connection, it is important to state that the reason I visited was because I had kept in sporadic contact with Maria Khoury since I last visited Taybeh 14 years ago and, when discussing the recent settler attacks, I felt duty-bound to visit rather than to offer yet more words of empty sympathy, bakā bakā as Arabs call the empty shibboleths about the river and the sea their fair weather supporters endlessly prattle on about.

Whatever about all of that, because Taybeh needs and deserves the help of all people of good will, all Irish Catholic readers and all Irish people in a position to donate to Fr Bashar (via the Latin Patriarchate) and all people in a position to volunteer, to make twinning arrangements between Irish schools and parishes, or who are in a position to lobby public representatives and grant-giving bodies, should do so as a matter of the utmost urgency because, if they do not, the Church will most definitely die in our lifetime in the Holy Land that gave birth to it.