The Christians of the Middle East Are Washington's Bridge to Peace
A field dispatch- just back from Taybeh, the last entirely Christian town in the West Bank.
Lex Pouliot, VPP's Middle East projects manager, with Father Bashar Fawadleh, parish priest of the Church of Christ the Redeemer- Taybeh, May 2026.
Arab Christians are the bridge between the East and the West.
Of the hundreds of things told to me in the West Bank this week, lines fraught with fear and lifted with hope, heavy with indignation and, at times, resignation, this one stayed with me. It encapsulates at once a geopolitical reality, a theological claim, and an indictment. Because if the Christians of the Middle East truly are this bridge, why has this minority suffered so severely at the hands of American foreign policy these past decades? And why has a Christian majority population allowed it?
I am writing this just having returned from Taybeh, the last Christian majority town in Palestine. Its in the news often, a tiny haven of Christians under daily attack from radical Zionist settlers. The fear is palpable and the air is heavy with a sense of coming threat.
It is a land that has survived empires. Ottoman rule, British mandate, Jordanian administration, and now Israeli occupation. Throughout all, the Christians have persisted. But many in Taybeh told me that they are deeply afraid that within a few decades, if nothing changes, there will be no Christians left at all. Without serious diplomatic pressure, specifically from the United States, to halt the new settler movements, the Christian presence in the Holy Land will be gone within our lifetime.
The history of Christians in the Holy Land already contains the epic tale of a clash of civilizations since the time of the Ottoman Empire. Control over the land has been fiercely contested and has resulted in war and bloodshed for millennia, the tale is not a new one. Yet, the present struggle for the Holy Land and explicitly stated Israeli desire to annex the West Bank in its entirety carries particularly grave implications for the Christians. Demographically, their presence is already slipping to extinction. In 1948, Christians in Gaza and West Bank accounted for ten percent of the population- today they make up barely one percent. Bethlehem, the very cradle of Christ himself, is down from 85 percent to around 10 today. The Christians of Palestine are in diaspora, pushed out with strategic and ferocious pressure by the ideology of Zionism and the radical settlers used by members of the Knesset’s far right government to achieve their aims of ethnic cleansing.
The Architecture of Occupation
I have seen these pressures firsthand, as the IDF attempted to stop a Marian Festival from taking place, even setting off a stun grenade, in a situation requiring Cardinal Pizzaballa’s intervention to proceed. I watched five armored IDF vehicles and thirteen soldiers and intelligence officers impose themselves at the Taybeh Brewery, armed to the teeth. I heard an IDF soldier tell a Palestinian woman: “We are the new Jew. You don’t know us yet, but we can do whatever we want,” with the threat of returning to her home that night and making the family pay.
On the roads in and around the little town of Taybeh, Israeli military vehicles roll through with the unhurried deliberateness of a confident and permanent presence- not responding to a threat, not pursuing an objective, simply there, asserting dominance, intimidating. The message is architectural. This is not your road, not your hillside, it may be your home for now- but not for long.
The Radical Accelerant
But it was in conversation that the sharper, more pressing fear emerged. When I asked people in Taybeh what they were most afraid of, the answer was rarely the IDF. The army is the occupation’s formal, repressive state apparatus- suffocating, humiliating, structurally total- but in the West Bank it is not the engine of organized terror it is in Gaza. The checkpoint fear is real and chronic, written into posture, into the careful calibration of every encounter with a uniformed man holding a weapon. Yet the occupation has found a more effective instrument than the soldier with the gun. What people returned to, again and again and with particular gravity, was the Hilltop Youth. The distinction they drew matters: the IDF is the occupation’s architecture; the Hilltop Youth are its accelerant.
To understand what that means on the ground, it is necessary to understand what the Hilltop Youth actually are, because the name obscures the reality. The Hilltop Youth are extremist settler youth operating in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, rooted ideologically in Kahanism, the movement founded by Rabbi Meir Kahane, which advocates the expulsion of Palestinian Arabs from both Israel and the occupied territories. According to terrorism expert Ami Pedahzur, they espouse a worldview favoring “deportation, revenge, and annihilation of Gentiles that posed a threat to the people of Israel.” Their ideology is not a fringe aberration within Israeli settler culture- it is the logical endpoint of a maximalist religious nationalism that has been incubated in yeshivas across the West Bank for decades. National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir is himself a settler with direct ties to the group in the West Bank- a clear sign that the radicalization of these young men is not incidental to government strategy but part of it.
Taybeh is currently surrounded by them. In recent years, Israeli settlers have established several illegal settlement outposts around Taybeh, the latest as recently as this April, with Hilltop Youth from the right-wing movement active in the pastoral outposts encircling the town. The attacks have been relentless. The parish priest of the Church of Christ the Redeemer in Taybeh, Father Bashar Fawadleh, stated plainly: “We do not live in peace but in daily fear and siege.” The aggressions, arson attacks on crops, theft of livestock, destruction of property, are part of a systematic effort to strangle them economically and push them out. The most recent attack came in the early hours of the morning- settlers breaking into the village, throwing stones at homes, attempting to set a house on fire, torching three vehicles, and scrawling threatening messages in Hebrew on walls.
An unspoken policy of impunity for settler violence has taken hold throughout the West Bank. IDF soldiers stand guard as attacks occur, instructed to protect the settlers and arrest Palestinians if they resist. When settlers attack Palestinian families, they often do so with weapons and ATVs provided by the government itself. This is not isolated incompetence.
By April 2026, approximately 360 Palestinians had already been injured by Israeli settlers in the first months of the year alone: this figure is nearly equivalent to the annual total for each of 2023 and 2024, at a daily average of 3.8 Palestinians injured by settlers. Settler attacks in 2026 have become more severe, with a 54 percent increase in injuries and a more than fourfold increase in related displacement compared to 2025 averages, and displacement linked to settler attacks has already reached 95 percent of the total recorded across the entirety of 2025, in just the first months of this year. Since 2023, 38 Palestinian communities have been emptied of their populations entirely.
A March 2026 UN Human Rights Office report documented 1,732 incidents of settler violence in a single twelve-month period. It concluded that Israel has accelerated unlawful settlement expansion and annexation, forcibly displacing over 36,000 Palestinians in the process. When violence of this scale enjoys near-total legal impunity, is carried out with state-issued weapons, protected by state-deployed soldiers, and dismissed by the head of government as a youth welfare problem- there is a word for it. It is not unrest. It is not friction. It is a campaign.
A Christian Nation’s Unchristian Policy
Why is it that Christian minorities suffer so severely at the hands of American foreign policy in the Middle East? Why don’t we stand with the Christians so heavily persecuted by our ally India where church burnings, anti-conversion legislation, and violence against Dalit Christians proceed with near-total impunity under a government Washington courts as a strategic partner?
Or pressure China to protect its Christians?
How does a nation with a Christian majority and an arguably Christian foundation justify its active role in the erasure of the oldest Christian community on earth?
The United States is not a neutral party at diplomatic distance from what is happening in Taybeh. It is the primary underwriter of it: providing the weapons, the diplomatic cover, and the international legal protection that make the occupation’s continuation possible and allow the settlements to spread like a cancer. The Christian Zionism that has most substantially shaped evangelical political support for Israeli policy has functioned in practice as a framework for abandoning living Christians in favor of an eschatological schema that, in its most extreme formulation, requires the elimination of a Christian Palestine as a precondition for its fulfillment. American Christians have been persuaded to fund the dispossession of their oldest brothers and sisters in the faith and to call it biblical fidelity- propagandized into underwriting the ecclesiacide of the most ancient Christians on behalf of a modern, secular nation-state.
Scott Horton, one of the most rigorous critics of American conduct in the Middle East, has spent decades making this structural argument: the United States has built its regional influence on authoritarian partnerships and strategic dishonesty, generating precisely the conditions, instability, radicalization, civilian devastation, they were ostensibly designed to prevent. The wars have produced more wars. The partners have produced more enemies. In every cycle of resulting chaos, minorities, and Christians specifically, are the first to flee and the last to return. As Palestinian Christians themselves have noted, their faith has been co-opted by American lawmakers to justify the policies that are erasing them. The theological framing is not incidental to this policy architecture. It is load-bearing. And the policy of the status quo is failing.
The Case for the Bridge
The argument for reorientation, for the ‘Arab Christian bridge,’ is at once religious and strategic, political and historic.
The heritage is there. It was the Christian translators of Abbasid Baghdad who carried much of Greek antiquity into Arabic, rendering Aristotle and Galen and Euclid in an age when the Latin West had largely lost them, preserving the classical mind and handing it forward to a Europe that would one day build its rebirth on the inheritance. The bridge is not an unrealistic metaphor, its both an historic reality and an honest potential.
The bridge is there, in communities such as those found in Taybeh and Bethlehem. Indigenous to the East, fluent in Arabic and in the civilizational grammar of Islam from the inside, bound to the West by a shared scripture and a shared confession. They are the one community in the region that can interpret each world to the other, because they have never not belonged to both. In the West Bank they are barely one percent of the population and have founded an estimated 40 percent of its NGOs and civil-society institutions- disproportionately educated, internationally networked, formed in a tradition of coexistence older than the modern state system by a thousand years. This is what a bridge looks like in practice. No government built it, and none can commission its replacement.
And yet for half a century the United States has chosen to build almost everything except the bridge. It chose strongmen and client armies, arms transfers and the grammar of force, on the wager that stability could be imposed from above and loyalty bought outright. The historical ledger on that wager is not ambiguous, and Iraq is its clearest entry. A war that promised a new democratic order delivered instead the near-erasure of one of the oldest Christian communities on earth- Aramaic-speaking, apostolic, rooted in that soil since the first century- which fell from roughly 1.5 million before 2003 to fewer than a quarter of a million today, an exodus of some eighty percent, while the country produced not order but sectarian slaughter and, in time, ISIS. The same logic has run through the region for decades: the interventions manufactured the very disorder they were sold to prevent, the partners curdled into adversaries, and the security purchased at such expense never arrived. The whole time, America had access to the one asset that yields the opposite of blowback, a credible, indigenous, peaceable people asking for protection rather than weapons- and the whole time it underwrote the forces driving that people out.
Which is the part that should be intolerable to the American Christians who pray, on Sundays, for the persecuted church. Ours is not an abstract church somewhere east of the map; it is being hollowed out in real time, and in the Holy Land the abandonment wears its cruelest face: a Christian Zionism that has convinced American believers to finance the dispossession of their own oldest kin and to call it faithfulness. For decades the heads of Jerusalem’s ancient churches, Greek Orthodox, Latin, Armenian, Coptic, Syriac, have testified with rare ecumenical unanimity that the occupation is the primary engine of Christian flight from the land of Christ’s birth, and they testify not as activists but as the custodians watching their own congregations empty, parish by parish. To profess solidarity with the persecuted church while underwriting its persecutors is not solidarity. It is its precise inversion.
No diplomatic appointment, no defense contract, no authoritarian partnership has produced or can come close to what can be found in partnership with the Christians of Palestine. The status quo is broken and doomed to failure.
It has resulted in a Middle East where the Christian communities that could have been America’s most honest and durable partners are surrounded by settlement outposts, filing emigration applications, and wondering how many years they have left.
There is a better path. It runs through Taybeh.
Still Standing
The festival took place. Prayers were offered to Mary, Theotokos, God-bearer, venerated on this hillside through every empire that has attempted to claim it. Candles were lit, bells rang, and a children’s dance troupe and choir performed. But had Father Bashar not had an ally in the Latin Patriarch, or support from and access to the Cardinal, it would not have. If Cardinal Pizzaballa didn’t have the international visibility and diplomatic weight he has, it would not have.
The people who choose to remain in the town rather than take an easier, freer, more prosperous life elsewhere celebrated, because persistence is, at a certain point, its own form of argument. And the people of Taybeh have been making that argument for two thousand years.
But fewer of them remain every year. Those who stayed told me, not with self-pity but with the measured honesty of people who have decided to stop softening the truth, that they do not know how many more years there are. The soldier who told a Palestinian woman she doesn’t yet know what they can do was correct about one thing: the endgame of this policy has not yet fully arrived. What Taybeh is living through is the approach of it.
Arab Christians are the bridge between the East and the West. That bridge is still standing, on a hilltop in the West Bank, surrounded by olive trees and encircled by settlements, maintained by a community that has outlasted every previous empire and is not certain it will outlast this one.
The question is not whether America has the capacity to change this- it does. It has the economic weight, the diplomatic standing, and the stated religious identity to make the protection of Arab Christians a genuine foreign policy priority, not a talking point deployed when convenient, but a commitment applied with the consistency that the word requires.
The question is whether it will decide to, before the bridge is gone.
Lex Pouliot is the Manager of Middle East Projects for the Vulnerable People Project, based in Amman, Jordan.