WAPO
Easter marks the resurrection of Jesus, but this year the holiday comes with a twist: Jesus resurrected as Palestinian. Never mind that Jesus was born and died a Jew in Judaea. From the pronouncement of a member of Congress to the pages of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Jesus is now heralded as a “Palestinian” or, more delicately, as a “Palestinian Jew.”
Jesus made an appearance on social media as a “Palestinian” around Christmas, and the meme has flourished since then. The gambit casts 1st-century Jews in the role of an occupying power and “Palestinians” as their victims. Just as Herod, the king of Judaea in Jesus’ time, persecuted the “Palestinian” holy family of Jesus, Mary and Joseph, so, too, goes the claim, is modern Israel an occupying power persecuting Palestinians today.
So caught up were these advocates in their own spin that they mischaracterized reality. In a Christmastime post on Instagram, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) condemned modern Israelis as “right-wing forces violently occupying Bethlehem.” But Bethlehem has been administered by the Palestinian Authority since 1995. Once a significant majority there the Christian population plunged from 86 percent in 1950 to less than 12 percent in 2016.
As for the Gaza Strip, it is even less hospitable to Christians. As the New Yorker reported in January, a count by the Catholic Church in Gaza, “once home to a thriving Christian community,” found just 1,017 Christians, amid a population of more than 2 million. After seizing control of Gaza in 2007, Hamas ended the designation of Christmas as a public holiday and discouraged its celebration. The dwindling population of Gazan Christians has been harassed, intimidated, even murdered. Were Jesus to show up in modern-day Gaza, he would find an extremely hostile environment.
Roughly 3,000 years ago, on the eastern rim of the Mediterranean, a coastal confederation of five cities stretched from Gaza into Lebanon. The Bible refers to this zone as Philistia, the land of the Philistines. In 430 B.C., the Greek historian Herodotus, translating this term, gestured toward the broader area as “Palaistinē.”
To the east, the region of the biblical highlands was called Yehudah. The name predates Herodotus by centuries. By Jesus’ lifetime, the Romans labeled this whole area, coast and highlands together, as “Judaea,” a Latinization of “Yehudah.” The people living in Judaea were called “Iudaei”: “Judeans” or “Jews.” Their temple in Jerusalem, the focus of their ancestral worship since the first millennium B.C., was sacred to Jesus, which is why the gospels depict him as journeying there for pilgrimage holidays. An ethnic Judean, Jesus was, accordingly, a Jew.
Where, then, did the name “Palestine” come from? From a foreign imperial colonizing power: Rome. Judeans revolted twice against the Romans. The first revolt, from A.D. 66 to 73, reached an awful climax with the destruction of the Jewish temple in Jerusalem. Still, Rome kept “Judaea” as the region’s designation. But in A.D. 132-135, the Jews again revolted. By that point, Rome had had enough. The empire changed the administrative name of the region to “Syria-Palestina” — a full century after Jesus’ death. It was a deliberate way to “de-Judaize” the territory by using the throwback term for the coastal Philistines.
What does this mean? It means that Jesus was not “Palestinian.” Nor was he a “Palestinian Jew.” This is so for a simple reason: There was no political entity called “Palestine” in his lifetime. If Jesus was born in Bethlehem, he was born in Judaea as a Jew. He certainly died as one, under Rome’s heavy hand — the political condition that led to the two Jewish revolts.
It was Roman colonizers who changed the name of Judaea to Palestine.
Why rehearse this well-known history? Because now, in the current crisis, even Jesus is being enlisted for attacks on Israel. Calling Jesus a “Palestinian” or even a “Palestinian Jew” is all about modern politics. Besides being historically false, the claim is inflammatory. For two millennia, Jews have been blamed for Jesus’ execution by the Romans; casting him as a Palestinian just stokes the fires of hate, using Jesus against Jews once again.
It is, further, an act of cultural and political appropriation — and a clever rhetorical move. It rips Jesus out of his Jewish context. And it rips 1st-century Jews — and 21st-century Israeli Jews — out of their ancestral homeland, turning them into interlopers. This is polemic masquerading as history.
There have already been too many casualties since Oct. 7. Let’s not allow history to be one of them.
Paula Fredriksen, Aurelio professor of scripture emerita at Boston University, is a historian of ancient Christianity and the author of “When Christians Were Jews” and “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews.”
