While it’s not uncommon for them to try and hijack and exploit the Christmas holiday season, wait until you get a load of what anti-Israel radicals are declaring during protests and on social media ahead of Christmas.
It’s an argument they’ve been pushing for years, that Jesus, who was Jewish, allegedly “was a Palestinian.”
Below, you’ll see several tweets as well as videos taken from recent pro-Palestinian marches where protesters are being urged to chant “Jesus was a Palestinian”:
Not surprisingly, there has been a ton of pushback on this preposterous claim:
I admit this is not my area of expertise. Because my dad knew his stuff on this topic, I’ve understood since I was a teenager that Jesus was Jewish, but I didn’t know much about the history of the land/region at the time.
At Honest Reporting, Jerusalem-based writer Emanuel Miller explained the complexities in-depth:
Jesus was born in Judea, a client kingdom of the Roman Empire, and identified as a Jew. Jews living there at the time would most likely have described themselves as living in the Land of Israel. Anyone referring to “Palestine” in the first century C.E. would have earned themselves strange look, especially from the indigenous Aramaic-speaking Jews. The land was subject to all the religious laws in Judaism that apply in Land of Israel.A century later, the area was renamed. After a Jewish revolt was crushed in the 2nd Century CE, the vast majority of Jews were exiled and the Roman emperor Hadrian subsequently had the region entitled “Syria Palestina” after the Jews’ ancient enemies, the Philistines, in an antagonistic move designed to demonstrate that the Jews were no longer owners of the land.Put simply, an Aramaic-speaking Jew living a century before this change of name would never have called himself Palestinian.Indeed, while the New Testament mentions Israel and the Jews repeatedly, Palestine is not mentioned even once.
Jordan Cope, who is the director of policy education with the pro-Israel group “StandWithUs,” tackled the argument in an Jerusalem Post op-ed published on Christmas Eve:
In reality, Jesus was a proud, observant Jew who lived in his indigenous homeland of Judea and Galilee – from manger to grave. The myth that Jesus was Palestinian, a ploy designed to invite Christians to support Palestinian nationalism, often morphs into deliberate efforts to deny Jews their history, indigeneity, and right to sovereignty in Israel. Ironically, as Jews seek to combat rising antisemitism, now might be a good time to set the record straight on Christianity’s most important figure.[…]The term Palestine derives from Philistia after the land of the Philistines, a people originally from the Aegean coastline (modern-day Greece and Turkey). Goliath was defeated and the Philistines disappeared centuries before Jesus was born. After Imperial Rome defeated the third Jewish uprising, Roman forces massacred and expelled massive numbers of Jews from Judea and renamed it: Syria Palaestina. This was in 135 CE, over a century after Jesus’s death (sometime around 27-33 CE).The new name was “to minimize Jewish identification with the land” and punish the rebellious Jews by naming the country after their biblical enemies.As evidenced by the Romans, the erasure of Jewish memory, identity, and culture from Israel has become a mainstay tactic for antisemites over millennia.
Even the New York Times of all places had to issue a correction in 2019 to an op-ed published around Easter that falsely claimed Jesus “most likely” was Palestinian:
The op-ed, titled “As a Black Child in Los Angeles, I Couldn’t Understand Why Jesus Had Blue Eyes,” read: “Jesus, born in Bethlehem, was most likely a Palestinian man with dark skin.” The New York Times issued the correction one week after it ran the story and received a barrage of criticism.”Because of an editing error, an article last Saturday referred incorrectly to Jesus’s background,” the Times wrote. “While he lived in an area that later came to be known as Palestine, Jesus was a Jew who was born in Bethlehem.”It was changed to: “But Jesus, a Jew born in Bethlehem, presumably had the complexion of a Middle Eastern man.”
In short, saying “Jesus was a Palestinian” is a lot like the “from the river to the sea” chant. It’s anti-Semitic to the core, and it deserves a sound debunking every time it is uttered.
— Stacey Matthews has also written under the pseudonym “Sister Toldjah” and can be reached via Twitter. —
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