Ephraim under siege: what Leo XIV said when he named the West Bank

John 11:54

⁵⁴That is why Jesus no longer appeared in public among the Jews, but with Drew to the region near the desert, to a town called Ephrem, and there he stayed with his disciples.

There is a biblical name hidden behind the word "Taybeh," and that name is Ephraim. It is there, in this town now sealed off by the Israeli army and surrounded by settlers, that the Gospel places Christ's final retreat before his Passion: "He no longer walked openly among the Jews, but withdrew to the nearby desert region, to a town called Ephraim, and there he and his disciples stayed" (John 11:54). This verse, long read as a mere topographical detail in the account of Lazarus's resurrection, takes on in mid-August 2026 a resonance that no commentator would have dared to prophesy: the last entirely Christian village in the West Bank, ancient Ephraim, has in turn become a place of retreat, of hiding, of waiting for the violence to pass.

On August 16, from Liberty Square in Castel Gandolfo, the day after the Feast of the Assumption, Leo XIV uttered words that broke with the Holy See's usual diplomatic caution. "I renew my appeal for an end to the repeated violence against the Palestinian civilian population in the West Bank," he declared, adding that he "urged the international community to ensure progress toward the two-state solution, in order to achieve a just and lasting peace." This was no longer an allusion. It was a demand, made publicly, on a Sunday, before pilgrims, directly following his appeal of July 26, in which he had already denounced "the persistence and escalation of violence in the Holy Land" in Gaza and the West Bank. This rhetorical shift by the American pontiff, usually measured in his geopolitical pronouncements, deserves to be examined with the gravity it warrants.

Ephraim, the city of retreat

What Taybeh says about the Holy Land today

Taybeh is not just any village. It is the only one in the entire West Bank to have remained entirely Christian, an island of three parishes—Latin, Greek Orthodox, and Melkite—nestled in the hills east of Ramallah, on the very ruins of ancient Ephraim mentioned in the Gospel of John. For months, the inhabitants have been enduring what the priest of the Latin parish, Father Bashar Fawadleh, describes as a «climate of fear» deliberately fostered by Israeli settlers in the nearby settlements: nighttime intimidation, occupation of farmland, vehicle fires, an attempted arson attack on an old church, threatening graffiti, and livestock released or stolen. On August 5, settlers broke into the home of a family in the parish; according to Father Fawadleh, this was «not an isolated incident.».

Faced with this escalation, the Israeli army declared on August 9 that Taybeh and the neighboring village of Rammun were becoming a "closed military zone," off-limits to Israeli citizens and foreigners—including journalists and international observers, but not to Palestinians themselves. Officially, the measure was intended to protect the civilian population from settler attacks. In reality, it had the opposite effect: residents reported that the attacks continued after the closure, particularly against the Naif al-Kaabneh family, who were subjected to repeated assaults east of the village, while the isolation of the area now prevented solidarity activists and the media from bearing witness. The cordon, presented as a bulwark, proved to be a glass dome under which the violence continues, but without witnesses.

Cardinal Pizzaballa's visit to besieged Ephraim

It was in this context that the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, traveled to Taybeh on Saturday, August 15, the very eve of the papal Angelus, to celebrate the Mass of the Assumption in the Latin Church of Christ the Savior, accompanied by Father Bashar Fawadleh and Father Davide Meli. Before a community both exhausted and dignified, the Cardinal uttered a phrase that speaks louder than any diplomatic communiqué: «We will continue to do everything in our power to preserve the Church’s presence here, at every level, throughout the Holy Land.» He urged the faithful to remain courageous, reminding them that «the power of evil is not absolute.» This statement, with its almost Augustinian restraint, deserves reflection: it does not deny the reality of the evil that has befallen Taybeh; it simply affirms that it does not have the final word.

This visit by the patriarch, occurring just hours before the Pope's address in Castel Gandolfo, demonstrates a continuity of action between the successor of the apostles in Jerusalem and the Bishop of Rome. It is significant that Leo XIV chose to speak the day after this Mass celebrated in the besieged village: the pontiff was not commenting on a distant event, but rather echoing a concrete pastoral gesture, undertaken on the ground, by the one directly responsible for this flock. The Pope's words thus take root, very precisely, in the very flesh of a community named, visited, and embraced.

From allusion to demand: a deliberate rhetorical escalation

The difference between the two papal interventions of July and August must be considered. On July 26, Leo XIV spoke in general terms of "the persistence and worsening of violence in the Holy Land," linking Gaza and the West Bank in a single lament. On August 16, the wording changed: the Pope no longer lamented, he demanded. He "renewed his appeal for an end" to the violence—a verb of authority, not of diffuse compassion—and he "urgently" called on the international community to act for a two-state solution. The diplomatic vocabulary of the Holy See, usually crafted to appease all parties, gave way to a direct, almost peremptory, address.

This shift is explained by the accumulation of events on the ground during the preceding three weeks: the construction of an illegal outpost at Jabal al-Massis, announced in early July; the raid on the Fawadleh family home on August 5; the military lockdown of August 9, which stopped nothing; and the further attacks on August 11 against the al-Kaabneh family. Each week has provided further proof that the announced security measures were ineffective. The Pope, by changing his tone, is therefore not engaging in mere rhetoric: he is responding to a reality that is worsening before his very eyes, despite the measures officially intended to contain it.

This progression in papal language evokes, through a connection that is not artificial, the way in which the prophets of Israel raised their voices when injustice became systemic. The prophet Micah, addressing the leaders who were stripping the humble of their land, did not mince words: «Woe to those who devise wickedness and plot evil on their beds! At daybreak they carry it out, because they have the power. They covet fields and seize them, and houses and take possession of them» (Micah 2:1-2). This text, twenty-seven centuries old, describes with disturbing precision the very mechanism of the seizure of agricultural land in Taybeh, where 1,500 of the village's 2,400 hectares are located in Area C, the very area that the most radical wing of the Israeli government is working to annex. Prophetic denunciation is not a literary motif that is invoked for convenience: it is the very grammar that the Church rediscovers, almost in spite of itself, when it encounters a methodical confiscation of a people's land.

The two-state solution as a theological, not just political, requirement

Why the Pope speaks about geopolitics as a theologian

One might be tempted to read Leo XIV's appeal as a mere diplomatic stance, aligned with the Holy See's decades-long doctrine in favor of two sovereign states, Israel and Palestine, coexisting in peace. This would be to miss the essential point. When a pope calls for "a just and lasting peace," he is not speaking merely as the head of state of the Vatican: he is speaking as a universal pastor who refuses to allow sacred geography to become a place of dispossession. The Holy Land is not, for the Catholic Church, a territory like any other: it is the place where the Word became flesh, where every hill, every village, every spring bears a memory of the Incarnation. That this place should become the scene of a silent expulsion of its Christian inhabitants constitutes, for Rome, a wound that strikes at the very integrity of the Christian mystery.

This was already recalled, with renewed clarity in the current context, by the Gospel reading that Leo XIV commented on that same Sunday before delivering his appeal: the Gospel of the Canaanite woman (Mt 15:21-28), in which the Pope emphasized that the Church must remain open to God's action "beyond the borders already drawn," and that the Christian faith makes "inequalities, discrimination, and barriers" that violate human dignity "unbearable." The choice of this text, on the eve of his appeal for the West Bank, was not accidental: the Canaanite woman, a foreigner and despised, obtains from Jesus the healing of her daughter precisely because she refuses to let ethnic and religious boundaries have the final say over mercy. By linking this Gospel to the "barriers" that wound human dignity, the Pope points, without ever explicitly naming it, to the system of zones, checkpoints, and military cordons that redraws the map of the West Bank every week.

The silence of the earth and the voice that must rise

Within the prophetic corpus, there is a less frequently cited text that sheds a unique light on the situation in Taybeh: that of Habakkuk, denouncing the violence caused by the accumulation of stolen possessions. «Woe to him who amasses ill-gotten wealth for his house, to set his nest on high, hoping to escape calamity! […] For the stone will cry out from the wall, and the beam from the rafters will answer him» (Hab 2:9, 11). This image of the crying stone, of the beam bearing witness against injustice, finds an almost literal echo in the accounts from Taybeh: the houses themselves, the burned fields, the scattered flocks become the silent—yet crying—witnesses of an ongoing dispossession. When the human voice is silenced by fear or isolation, it is the stones, says the prophet, that speak. The military closure of Taybeh to journalists and outside witnesses has precisely this formidable function: to silence the stones by preventing them from being heard.

This may explain the Pope's newfound firmness. When the usual channels of witness close, when areas are declared "military-only zones" to shield the public, it falls to the Bishop of Rome to give voice to those who can no longer be heard. This role is not new in the Church's tradition: it is that of the prophet who, according to Ezekiel's words, must be established as a "watchman" for the house of Israel, and who will bear the responsibility for the bloodshed if he remains silent in the face of the predicted danger (Ezekiel 33:6-7). Leo XIV, by now rejecting mere allusion in favor of explicit demands, assumes this role of watchman who refuses complicit silence.

A two-faced diplomacy: Jerusalem and Moscow

What gives the intervention of August 16 its full significance is the diplomatic calendar in which it is situated. Four days later, from August 25 to 28 according to the most recent information, Archbishop Paul Richard Gallagher, Secretary of the Holy See for Relations with States and International Organizations, is scheduled to visit Moscow—the first visit by an official of this rank to the Russian capital since the election of Leo XIV, and one of the few since the outbreak of the war in Ukraine in February 2022. The Vatican is therefore not speaking out on just one front: in the same month, it is deploying a diplomacy of words that encompasses both the Middle East and Eastern Europe, the West Bank and Ukraine, two theaters where civilian populations are paying the price for a geopolitics that is beyond their control.

This simultaneity is not a coincidence of timing: it reveals a method. The Holy See rejects the hierarchy of suffering. It does not devote its diplomatic energy to a single crisis to the detriment of others, but keeps channels open, simultaneously, to Jerusalem, to Tel Aviv, to Ramallah, and to Moscow. This is a diplomacy of pastoral ubiquity, which refuses to allow any victim to be forgotten in favor of another, more publicized one. The Pope who demanded an end to the violence in the West Bank on August 16 is the same one who, a few days later, sent his highest-ranking diplomat to discuss "other major humanitarian crises" with the Russian authorities—a gesture that presupposes equivalent patience and courage, since it involves speaking with those who might be deemed responsible for the evil, without ever abandoning the demand for justice.

What the silence of Jerusalem does not say

It should be noted, for the sake of completeness, that the situation in Taybeh is part of a broader context in which international attention has largely focused on Gaza, leaving the West Bank in a kind of media obscurity. It is precisely this obscurity that the Pope, through his renewed insistence, seeks to pierce. By explicitly linking the West Bank to the need for a two-state solution—and not simply to a temporary ceasefire—Leo XIV refuses to allow the fate of Taybeh to be treated as a local incident. He connects it to the overall political architecture that alone can structurally end the logic of colonization and de facto annexation that afflicts 60% of the West Bank territory classified as Area C.

This insistence echoes an intuition that the Apostle Paul expressed in a completely different context, but whose universal scope illuminates the present situation: «Let no one seek his own good, but the good of others» (1 Corinthians 10:24). The logic of colonization, as described in the testimonies from Taybeh, is precisely the opposite of this Pauline precept: it is the systematic pursuit of self-interest—territorial expansion, control of agricultural resources, securing outposts—at the absolute expense of the interests of others, in this case, the Christian and Muslim families of the West Bank who see their land, their homes, and their future shrink every year. The two-state solution called for by the Pope is therefore not merely a diplomatic framework: it is, in its very principle, the political expression of an evangelical precept that rejects the idea that the survival of one people should be built on the dispossession of another.

Lectio divina

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