The Diaspora
Taybeh asks its American citizens to build a US lawsuit against settlers
Graphic: Times of Palestine
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The municipality of Taybeh, the last entirely Christian town in the occupied West Bank, has asked residents who hold United States passports or green cards to register the attacks and property losses they have suffered from Israeli settlers, ahead of a civil lawsuit it intends to file in the United States.
The case would target the settlers and "the American institutions that support these assaults," the municipality said in a statement posted to its social media channels and reported by Middle East Eye on Thursday. Residents who were attacked in person, whose property was damaged, or whom settlers barred from reaching their land were asked to contact the town hall to record their names and losses.
The Palestinian-American lawyer Jonathan Kuttab represents the Olive Branch Funding Group, a Palestinian-American body that has undertaken to pay the full cost of the case, the outlet reported.
Why the diaspora is the plaintiff#
Taybeh's story is a diaspora story before it is a courtroom story. The town east of Ramallah has about 1,200 residents and a far larger population abroad, concentrated in the United States, where families left in successive waves since the 1960s. Many residents hold American citizenship through those relatives, which is what gives a US court jurisdiction over harm done to them.
The municipality's count, given to Al Jazeera in August by mayor Suleiman Khourieh, is that roughly seven settler outposts now surround the town, four or five of them on Taybeh's own municipal land.
The attacks the suit would document run back to July 2025, when settlers set fire to land beside the fifth-century Church of St George. In June this year Mount al-Masees was set alight and firefighters were held at the entrance for security coordination, an episode this paper reported on 10 August. Videos of burning crops on the town's eastern side circulated again this week.
The Palestinian Commission against the Wall and Settlements recorded 3,488 settler attacks across the West Bank in the first half of 2026.
A US civil action against settlers has precedent in the sanctions regime that Washington imposed on individual settlers in 2024 and lifted in 2025, and in private suits by Palestinian-Americans that are still working through US courts. Middle East Eye reported no date for the Taybeh filing.
