Jesus | First One Through

For years, pro-Palestinian activists have promoted the false claim that Jesus was a Palestinian.

Jesus was a Jew, born to a Jewish family, living in the Jewish homeland, speaking to Jewish audiences, teaching from the Hebrew Bible, and making pilgrimages to the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem. The word “Palestine” was not even the name of the province during His lifetime. The Roman renaming of Judea to Syria Palaestina occurred about a century after His death.

Yet the claim persists because it serves an ahistorical but political purpose: If Jesus can be transformed from a Jew into a Arab, then the central figure of Christianity can be detached from Jewish history and reinserted into a modern political narrative. Suddenly, Jews are no longer obvious indigenous people in the Holy Land, but Arabs – who did not arrive en masse to region for another six centuries – are the real Jews.

The recent Vatican News article about Gaza takes that process one step further.

The article does not explicitly call Jesus a Palestinian. Instead, it wraps a Gazan narrative in the language of Christ’s passion, death, and resurrection. Gaza becomes the tomb. The refugee becomes the suffering servant. The journey out becomes resurrection.

The symbolism is unmistakable.

For centuries, Christians looked to the suffering of Jesus as a uniquely sacred story. Increasingly, anti-Israel agitators are attempting to woo parts of the Christian world by recasting that story through the lens of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, with Palestinian Arabs occupying the role once reserved for Christ Himself.

The war in Gaza did not begin with suffering descending from heaven. It began with decisions made by thousands of Gazans. Hamas invaded Israel, murdered civilians and took hostages. Hamas launched a war that it knew would bring devastating consequences to Gaza as it hid it tunnels and refused to let women and children enter the shelters.

Does that resemble Jesus?

Genocidal psychopaths are being transformed into the innocent sufferer. The political and military context disappears from view. Agency gives way to symbolism.

What makes this especially troubling for many Jews is that the institution promoting this narrative is no longer just fringe anti-Israel groups or university protest movements.

It is the Vatican itself.

For two thousand years, the Church has wrestled with the consequences of separating Christianity from its Jewish roots. In recent decades, Catholic-Jewish relations made enormous progress by reaffirming the Jewishness of Jesus and Christianity’s historical connection to the Jewish people.

That progress is undermined when contemporary narratives replace Jesus the Jew with a new symbolic figure: the Palestinian sufferer who cheered Jews being burned alive.

The term “cultural appropriation” (or sometimes “cultural misappropriation” ) is defined by Dictionary.com as “the act of adopting elements of an outside, often minority culture, including knowledge, practices, and symbols, without understanding or respecting the original culture and context.” It has been used by some “social justice activists” to attack the majority culture who use certain foods, clothing or symbols of a minority ethnic or religious group in a manner that is viewed as demeaning.

How much worse is it to not just use articles of clothing or food but to abuse a group’s ancestors and history? How much more sinister is it to do it to deliberately anger and attack a group, rather than take an action meant with no malice?

Leaders of the Palestinian Authority and its founder Yasser Arafat had often declared that Jesus was a Muslim Palestinian Arab in interviews, press releases and their official TV. Their transparent goal was to make it sound that Jesus was not a Jew but a Muslim Palestinian Arab like themselves. They manufactured a fake history that not only did Jews have no history in the region, but Palestinian Arabs did, in an effort to undermine the claims of Jews as being indigenous to the holy land.

The argument was also designed to enable Muslim Arabs to assert control of Christian holy sites in the holy land, not just Muslim ones, and align themselves with billions of Christians around the world. The actual Judeo-Christian history in the holy land with Muslim Arabs as foreign invaders over six centuries later was repackaged and retold as a Palestinian Muslim Arab-Christian story, with Jews coming as the foreign invaders two millenia later in creating Israel.

But you can almost forgive the Palestinian Authority for their insults and lies. They have cornered themselves into asserting that their entire claim to the land is that they are indigenous. The much older and deeper Jewish history undermines the very foundation to their claim.

Further, the Palestinian Authority lives in a third world backwater of their own making in the Middle East. Rather than create a liberal society like Israel, they cling to their repressive brothers which afford little to no rights for women and minorities.

So how should one consider the same remarks coming from a “progressive, social justice activist” like Linda Sarsour on July 6, 2019?

Sarsour lives in the United States of America, a predominantly Christian country. She was a co-founder of the “Women’s March” in Washington, D.C. and claims to care about oppressed minorities – even Jews, the most persecuted group on the planet. She has the background to know better and speak clearer than a bunch of old Arab men in the Middle East.

So why did she choose to insult billions of Christians and a couple of million Jews with the notion that Jesus wasn’t a Jew but a Muslim Arab? Why attack the faith of billions of others?

Sarsour is part of a new wave of Muslim jihadists. Not the ones who used physical force to invade lands like the jihadists from Arabia who swept through the Jewish holy land and north Africa in the 7th and 8th centuries killing and converting non-believers. Sarsour describes herself as a jihadist in the mold of using words “of truth” to form a particular narrative. As she said in July 2017:

“What is the best form of jihad, or struggle? And our beloved prophet … said to him, ‘A word of truth in front of a tyrant ruler or leader, that is the best form of jihad. I hope that … when we stand up to those who oppress our communities, that Allah accepts from us that as a form of jihad, that we are struggling against tyrants and rulers not only abroad in the Middle East or on the other side of the world, but here in these United States of America, where you have fascists and white supremacists and Islamophobes reigning in the White House.”

Are her words “of truth”?

Jesus was not an Arab. Arabs didn’t come to the holy land en masse until they invaded in the seventh century, over 600 years after Jesus lived.
Jesus was not a Muslim. He was a Jew and father of the Christian faith.
Jesus was not a Palestinian. In the time of Jesus, the area was known as Judea. After the Bar Kochba Revolt (132-135CE), well after Jesus lived, the Roman conquerors changed the name of the province to “Syria Palestina.” The word “Palestine” didn’t even exist while Jesus was alive.

The same Roman Empire that crucified Jesus, destroyed the Jewish Temple, slaughtered the Jews of Judea and built pagan altars throughout the holy land, renamed the province to destroy the Jewish and nascent Christian spirit in the land. To call Jesus a Palestinian is not just incorrect, it is a highly charged insult which brands him with the signatures of his killers and everything he loathed.

Sarsour is seemingly happy to dress the part of Pontius Pilate, the Roman prefect of Judea who sentenced Jesus to death: destroy those who believe differently, rebrand the land, retell a new story to define a new narrative to your liking. In a “progressive social activist” world where “my truths” are more potent than facts, the alt-left audience is ripe for her fabrications. In rallying to her support, they won’t even pause to consider the outright lies or cultural appropriation.

Sarsour is not bringing words “of truth” to America, she is bringing a highly-charged jihad to destroy the Judeo-Christian roots of America.

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