Jesus was Palestinian

No one should be surprised by the billboard in Times Square during Christmas week paid for by the American-Arab Discrimination Committee claiming that “Jesus is Palestinian”.

After all, it is only weeks since the Pope unveiled the Vatican’s annual nativity scene featuring baby Jesus in a crib swaddled in a Palestinian keffiyeh symbolizing resistance against Israel.

But let us return to the billboard. If Jesus, who was a Jew, is a Palestinian, then presumably all Jews are Palestinians! That must be particularly true of all Israelis. Indeed, the Christmas carol proclaims: “Noel, Noel, born is the King of Israel”.

And if that were not sufficient evidence, then it should be noted that Jews living in Israel at the time of the British mandate were designated as Palestinians.

The attempt by the so-called “Palestinians” of today to appropriate the term and even claim that Jesus was one of them is, of course, both a travesty and historically inaccurate.

Last year, the Palestinian Authority’s Advisor on Religious Affairs, Mahmoud Al-Habbash, declared: “For thousands of years, Jerusalem was a Palestinian, Arab, and Canaanite city, and it is an Islamic Christian city. We do not recognize any religious right of theirs (i.e., the Jews). Even the Al-Buraq Wall that they claim is the Western Wall is an Islamic waqf. All the claims and lies with which they [the Jews] are attempting to invent an alleged right for themselves will not change the Arab, Islamic, and Palestinian identity of the holy city of Jerusalem”.

Having denied the historical Jewish connection with Israel, Palestinian apologists now argue that Jesus was one of them! If Jesus was a Jew, then how could that be?