Cenk Uygur, host of The Young Turks, posted on X that Jesus was a Palestinian. The implication was not only that Jesus was Arab, but also Muslim. Both are historically false. Jesus was a Jew in Judea. He lived, preached, and died as a Jew in his homeland.
If alive today, Jesus would not be celebrated by the Palestinian Authority. He would be condemned. The United Nations would call him an “illegal settler” for living in Bethlehem and Jerusalem. Palestinian leaders would brand him a “colonist” because his Jewish family had the audacity to live in their ancestral land.
This is not a new stunt. A few years ago, activist Linda Sarsour declared that Jesus was a Palestinian from Nazareth. She conveniently ignored the fact that Nazareth is in Israel, and that Jesus was Jewish—observing Jewish holidays, quoting Jewish scripture, and praying in Jewish synagogues. He was as much a “Palestinian” as King David or Moses.
Radical preacher Omar Suleiman – invited to speak before Congress by Nancy Pelosi – said the same. His goal was to peel Christian support away from the Jewish State. Evangelical Zionists needed to hear the gospel from an Islamic extremist.
Why this persistent rewriting of history? Of cultural appropriation? Because anti-Israel agitators have a larger project: erasing Jewish ties to the land of Israel. They cannot admit that Jews have been in their holy land continuously for millennia, so they try to recast Jewish history in Arab clothing. They claim Jews are foreigners and interlopers while appropriating Jewish figures for their own narratives.
The irony is striking. For all their rhetoric about “coexistence” and “justice,” the pro-Palestinian movement reveals its antisemitic moral rot in these fabrications. They would rather deny Jewish history than seek peace with the Jewish people. They would rather invent a fictional Palestinian Jesus than accept the historical Jewish Jesus.
Jesus has now become the latest Jew taken hostage—not in body, but in identity. Uygur, Sarsour, and their fellow travelers parade his name as a prop in their campaign against Jewish sovereignty. But no amount of Twitterstorms, hashtags, or revisionist slogans can undo the reality: Jesus was a Jew, in Judea, in the land of Israel.
Jesus, like every Jew before and after him, is bound up with the land that antisemitic anti-Israel activists desperately want to sever from its true indigenous people.
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