Maria Khoury, a Harvard-educated Palestinian woman, spoke at St. Ambrose Parrish Hall in Claremont on Feb. 15. She discussed the hardships facing the Palestinian people and promoted her West Bank village of Taybeh.

The small town of Taybeh, located 20 miles north of Jerusalem, is the only village in the West Bank with a Christian majority. Strict regulations on the purchase of land in the area have kept the town exclusively Christian.

“We have been Christian since the time of Christ,” Khoury said. “We have this beautiful history of 2,000 years of Christian presence, and this little village has survived many wars and occupations. We’d like to continue our presence there and continue to survive as a small little Christian community.”

According to Khoury, the town has faced severe hardships because of the Israeli occupation, and is threatened by the expansion of three Israeli settlements nearby.

Khoury claimed that Israelis steal Palestinian land, restrict access to roads and water, and prevent Palestinian children from walking to school.

“All around us, the Israeli army comes and confiscates land that belongs to Palestinians,” Khoury said.

Khoury presented a long list of what she referred to as Israel’s human rights violations, such as the intermittent use of search lights over the village and restriction of movement, which has made running her microbrewery challenging.

Yet Taybeh Beer has been surprisingly successful in an area where the vast majority of the population is Muslim. The brewery also exports to Japan and has opened a franchise in Germany.

“We’re the first Palestinian product to be franchised and to be made in Germany, which we’re very proud [of], because Germany is the country of mother beer,” Khoury said.

David Khoury, Maria’s husband and the mayor of Taybeh, helps facilitate an annual Oktoberfest, which drew more than 10,000 people to the city last year.

“We try to use our good name of Taybeh Beer to entice people to come,” Maria Khoury said. “And so we feel this is part of our nonviolent action.”

Despite the success of these efforts, Khoury said living in the midst of a frequent war zone has been trying.

“You could literally go crazy when people are killing themselves all around you,” she said.

Khoury considered joining her neighbors who were flooding out of Taybeh, but ultimately decided to stay at her husband’s insistence.

“I was trying to be an obedient wife and live there with my husband, because he has such a love for his country, and he feels that his presence there is peaceful resistance,” she said.

Khoury, who belongs to the Greek Orthodox Church, believes Christians can play an important role as “neutral arbiters” in the dispute between Jews and Muslims.

She suggests that open borders are the best solution for peace between Israel and Palestine. Khoury said she is particularly upset with the wall that Israel has been building since 2002.

“In my area, the wall completely closes us in,” Khoury said. “So it’s a bunch of little prison camps meant to take more and more land and put it on the Israeli side....Their efforts are just to try to make the place 100 percent Jewish.”

Khoury added that these efforts felt like a colonization and eviction of the local population.

“Every single day,” she said, “your human rights are being violated. Every single day people treat you with such harshness, and you can…react sometimes in a very violent way. And I constantly have to work so hard to fill my heart with God’s grace and with God’s love.”