Israeli and Hamas negotiators were still haggling over the final details of US President Donald Trump’s peace plan as we arrived in Taybeh.
Villagers greeted news that progress was being made with relief. But they had more urgent problems.
The village, which has a predominantly Christian population of around 1,300 people, is subject to a reign of terror. October is the olive harvesting season, but its residents risk settler assault if they go into their land to pluck the fruit.
As with all Palestinian villages, gates have been installed at the village entrance to enable the Israeli army to cut off access at a moment’s notice.
Youssef Moussa, a 64-year-old Bedouin man, told us how a settler militia broke into his tent while his family was asleep two weeks ago.
New MEE newsletter: Jerusalem Dispatch
Sign up to get the latest insights and analysis on
Israel-Palestine, alongside Turkey Unpacked and other MEE newsletters
They beat him unconscious, breaking two of his ribs. He woke to hear the settlers beating his wife.
The settlers rampaged through his home. “They turned the place upside down,” he told us. “When we assessed the damage, 7,000 dinars [$9,870] were missing.”
Like all farmers, the Bedouin keep reserves of cash raised from selling their livestock in order to buy feed, farm implements, and other essentials.
A grandson stood impassive beside him as he spoke.
Moussa, a father of five children, told us that the settlers also took “the gold which my daughter-in-law was gifted on her marriage”.
They took away 85 sheep and lambs. “It’s my capital. Everything I have.”
Youssef said that when an ambulance arrived to take him to a nearby hospital, the Israeli army would not open the gate so it could enter the village.
Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, not just the terrorised Bedouin, are in the same desperate predicament.
They are being wiped off the map by armed groups who act with freedom to shoot at, steal from, maim and kill Palestinians.
On Sunday, armed settlers, accompanied by soldiers, attacked Palestinian farmers harvesting their olives at a number of locations across the West Bank.
In Turmus Ayya, northeast of Ramallah, settlers targeted Palestinian farmers and international volunteers assisting with the harvest, with footage showing masked men attacking an elderly woman and a foreign volunteer with batons, setting vehicles on fire and stealing the harvest.
Other incidents were reported in villages and towns near Nablus, Ramallah and Bethlehem.
‘Erased from the table’
Jamal Juma, a peace activist based in Ramallah, describes the groups responsible for these attacks as “fascist militias”.
Such language is pointed and uncompromising, but the word is impossible to challenge.
These militias, funded and armed by the state and increasingly wearing military uniforms, follow a racist ideology which defines Palestinians as sub-human.
They routinely employ murderous violence and are enabled by and linked to the Netanyahu government.
Bezalel Smotrich, one of the primary inspirations for the recent wave of attacks, is a self-proclaimed fascist.
Smotrich, a settler himself, is Netanyahu’s finance minister and a key figure within the coalition government as the leader of the far-right Religious Zionist Party.
He is also a minister in the defence ministry responsible for approving new settlements and the de facto governor of the West Bank.
Smotrich’s programme of land seizures is remorseless. Last weekend saw a wave of assaults on Palestinian farmers across the northern West Bank around Aqraba, Burqa, al-Zawiya and Beita.
The settlers have almost complete impunity. If Palestinians complain to the police to defend them, no one comes.
If they defend themselves, settlers call in the army.
This state-sponsored campaign has one overwhelming objective: to eradicate the Palestinian communities that have existed in this area for generations.
These communities long predate the predatory settlers – an illegal presence in Palestine that first arrived with the Israeli occupation following the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.
Last month, Smotrich set out his plan to annex 82 percent of what he calls Judea and Samaria.
Under his vision, Palestinians would be herded into isolated islands in Palestine’s larger towns. If realised, it would make the much vaunted two-state solution, supported by Britain and other western states, quite impossible.
This is entirely by design. Announcing the approval of the E1 settlement project in August – a plan to build more than 3,000 homes that would effectively cut off the West Bank from occupied East Jerusalem – Smotrich stated as much.
“The Palestinian state is being erased from the table, not with slogans but with actions. Every settlement, every neighbourhood, every housing unit is another nail in the coffin of this dangerous idea,” he said.
This explains why the Smotrich plan has not been welcomed by the West. Smotrich’s vision of annexation of the West Bank is already well underway.
The Economist magazine, a strong supporter of Israel and no friend to Palestinians, recently observed: “In reality, annexation has already happened.”
Anybody who lives in Taybeh can see this for themselves.
An ancient church stands at the summit of the village. It commands an imposing view over pastoral land across the northern West Bank towards Jericho, the Jordan Valley and beyond.
There, the farmers, herders and nomadic Bedouin tribes have been driven off the land in the frenzied wave of brutal attacks and bloodletting under the cover of the Gaza genocide over the last two years.
Taybeh’s status as one of the few Christian-majority villages in the West Bank affords it attention that other villages cannot command.
Israeli settlers repeat attack on Palestinian Christian village in West Bank
Read More »
In July, the village was visited by Mike Huckabee – the US ambassador to, and staunch supporter of, Israel – in the aftermath of an arson attack targeting the fifth-century Al-Khader church.
Huckabee called for those who had committed “acts of terror and violence” to be found and prosecuted.
In a statement, he pledged “solidarity with the people who just want to live their lives in peace, be able to go to their own land, be able to go to their place of worship. This is a Christian community, largely, and it’s one that deserves respect and deserves to be treated with dignity. Nothing short of that”.
In the following days, further high-profile visitors to the village included US senators Chris Van Hollen and Jeff Merkley, and German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul.
But their visits did little to deter further violence. Now, the attacks are coming into the heart of these villages. There have been repeated attacks within the village of Taybeh itself.
The setters walk with impunity through the village, setting fire to homes and olive groves. They also target Taybeh’s ancient religious and cultural heritage, with its roots in the Byzantine era.
Leaving aside the humanitarian catastrophe, we are talking about an act of gross cultural destruction.
When the attacks come, Israeli soldiers stationed nearby either fail to answer calls for help or come to the aid of the settlers.
The plight of Taybeh is typical of what the Bethlehem-based human rights group Balasan calls a “deliberate Israeli policy of forced displacement”.
Balasan adds that this policy “is strictly prohibited under international law and constitutes a grave violation, amounting to a war crime. Under international humanitarian law, Israel, as the occupying power, has an obligation to ensure the protection of the civilian population in the occupied territory”.
Israeli human rights group B’Tselem reports that the primary goal is to “drive Palestinians off the land and seize as much territory as possible”.
It adds: “The violence perpetrated by settlers living in these outposts has escalated sharply, reaching unprecedented levels during the months of Israel’s assault on Gaza.
“This terrifying daily routine includes severe physical assaults, settler incursions into communities and homes at all hours, arson, expulsion of shepherds from pastureland and farmers from their fields, killing and theft of livestock, destruction of crops, theft of equipment and personal belongings, and blocking of access roads.”
This has been the daily life of Palestinians across the West Bank for the last two years. Yet the demographic transformation has either been ignored or under-reported.
Shockingly, there is no mention of Israel’s forced displacement of Palestinians across the West Bank in Donald Trump’s 20-point plan for Gaza.
This is a glaring omission. The American president claims that the war in Gaza is over.
Yet there is no chance at all of long-term peace unless Israel is forced to end its war crimes across the West Bank.
It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the omission is deliberate – or at least highly convenient for Smotrich and his fellow fascists, who it is reasonable to speculate would have imposed a price in exchange for their support of the ceasefire in Gaza.
On the ground in Taybeh and other West Bank communities under siege, they have been given free rein to carry on the illegal and murderous task of ethnically cleansing Palestinians from their land.
