Yet the tantalizing smell of grilled meats wafted through the air and the music of a traditional dabkeh dance performed on the stage blasted through loudspeakers as the West Bank’s Taybeh village celebrated its fifth annual “Oktoberfest” on October 3-4.
The beer is fantastic, the food cheap, wonderful and fast,” Kimberly Bell, originally from Minneapolis, Minn., who works with USAID told Ecumenical News International. Sporting a twisting vine and flowers henna tattoo on her hand, she admitted that a beer festival is not the first thing that normally comes to mind when one thinks about the West Bank.
The Oktoberfest experience in the West Bank is unique to Taybeh, the only all-Christian village in the West Bank, said event coordinator Maria Khoury, wife of Mayor David Khoury. In Palestinian Muslim tradition, alcohol is not sold, noted Maria Khoury, an author who has written of the Christian presence in the Holy Land.
Taybeh is believed by locals to be the Old Testament village of Ofra and the New Testament settlement of Efraim, the village in which it is recorded Jesus chose to stay with his disciples before his passion as written in the Gospel of John 11:54.
Surrounded by Muslim villages on all sides, the village is also the home to the Taybeh microbrewery, which sells its beer throughout the West Bank, Jerusalem, and even in Japan. A franchise was sold to a German company that markets the beer in Europe.
The brewery was founded by master brewer Nadim Khoury, who returned in 1995 to his native village from Boston where he had been studying with his brother David. Following the accord signed at the time in Oslo, the two enthusiastic brothers believed that peace was at hand. Though peace has evaded the region, the Taybeh Beer brewing company is a key part of the local economy, noted Maria Khoury.
“Nadim works hard to make beer for beer lovers,” she added. “He has remained small on principle, in order to produce a quality Palestinian product.”
Security at the Oktoberfest was tighter than in past years, as a week before the event the car of Mayor Khoury, a Greek Orthodox Christian, was destroyed in a bombing attack that also damaged the municipal building.
“We have no idea who could have done that,” noted his wife. There had not been any prior warning or threats, Maria Khoury told ENI. Still, she said she has seen a rise in extremism in the region since the events of September 11, 2001, in the United States and there has been a change in the way women dress.
Though rattled by the attack, Maria Khoury said the village decided the Oktoberfest was important enough to the local economy to continue as planned.
In 2006 a mob from a neighboring Muslim village had attacked Taybeh, believing a young man from Taybeh had fathered the illegitimate child of a young Muslim woman from their village. The young woman was killed and the home of the suspected young man was burned to the ground as were 13 other homes.
On the other hand, noted Maria Khoury, many of their Muslim neighbors participate in the festival helping set up the stage, providing part of the entertainment, selling homemade products and offering henna tattoos, an ancient form of body art.
When it became financially restrictive for small cooperatives to market their products in other parts of the West Bank because of Israeli restrictions of movement, the two brothers decided to work together to bring the consumers to Taybeh to buy locally-made products.
“You can’t find this anywhere else in Occupied Palestine,” said Muna, 22, an Arab from the northern Israeli city of Haifa who spent both days in Taybeh for the festival. Now studying in Jerusalem, she said she came to hear one of her favorite local Palestine rock and rap bands perform on stage and also to have fun with friends. “People don’t realize that there is life here. They think there is shooting here 24 hours [a day]. It’s not like that.”
Stoking the coal on a traditional water pipe, a plastic cup of golden beer nearby, Nazareth resident Amir Kandlaft, 26, sat at a table full with laughing young people.
Why had they come here? It was simple, he said: to drink some beer.
