The Palestinian Jesus: An Old Christian Libel
On September 3, Husam Zomlot, the Palestinian ambassador to the United Kingdom, appeared at the Bradford Literature Festival in a wide-ranging conversation with former Scottish First Minister Humza Yousaf about Palestine, identity, history, diplomacy, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
It was in that broader discussion that Zomlot made a series of striking claims about Christianity and the Bible. According to MEMRI, he said Palestinian history had been “stolen,” that “the Bible is a Palestinian book,” that it had been “rewritten to be used against the people of the book,” that “we are the original Christians,” and that Jesus was “our gift to you” and “to the rest of the world.”
The conversation was not primarily about Jesus. But that is precisely what makes the remarks worth examining. They emerged from a broader account of Palestinian history and identity in which Christianity, Judaism, and Islam are all presented as fundamentally Palestinian: “All of them are Palestinians.”
This raises a larger question: what happens when a modern national identity is projected backward onto a central figure of Christianity and becomes part of a broader narrative about who belongs to the land?
The claim that Jesus was Palestinian is not new.
An Old Struggle Over History
During the 2000 Camp David negotiations, Yasser Arafat reportedly told President Bill Clinton that the Jewish Temple had never existed in Jerusalem and that the Temple Mount had instead been a Muslim site from antiquity. Clinton later recalled being stunned by the claim.
A year later, in February 2001, Hanan Ashrawi, a prominent Palestinian politician and scholar who had served as spokesperson for the Palestinian delegation to the Madrid and Washington peace talks, was reported by Washington Jewish Week as saying that “Jesus was a Palestinian.” At the time, Ashrawi was a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council representing Jerusalem; she had previously served as Minister of Higher Education and Scientific Research in Arafat’s Palestinian Authority cabinet.
These episodes do not mean that every Palestinian rejects Jewish history, nor should every Palestinian historical claim be reduced to denialism. But they illustrate how the Israeli-Palestinian conflict repeatedly extends backward into antiquity. Ancient history becomes a way of establishing who is indigenous and who is foreign.
The “Palestinian Jesus” belongs to this broader struggle over historical identity.
In December 2023, Munther Isaac, a Palestinian Christian pastor and theologian in Bethlehem, delivered his now-famous “Christ in the Rubble” Christmas sermon beside a nativity scene depicting the infant Jesus in a Palestinian keffiyeh, surrounded by rubble. The imagery was intended to identify Jesus with Palestinian suffering.
There is nothing inherently objectionable about that theological impulse. Palestinian Christians can see their suffering reflected in Christ, and Christians should take Palestinian suffering seriously.
But there is a crucial distinction between saying Jesus stands with suffering Palestinians and saying Jesus was Palestinian.
The first is solidarity. The second is a claim about historical identity. They are not the same thing.
Jesus Was a Jew
The historical evidence is straightforward. Jesus was born into the Jewish people, was circumcised, participated in Jewish religious life, worshipped at the Temple and in synagogues, observed Jewish festivals, taught from the Jewish Scriptures, and was followed by Jewish disciples. His messianic claims were rooted in the story of Israel.
For Christians, this is not merely a historical detail. Christianity’s universal claims emerge from the particular story of Israel; they do not require erasing the Jewish identity of Jesus.
There is also a chronological problem with calling Jesus “Palestinian” in the modern national sense. The modern Palestinian national identity did not exist in the first century. The Roman designation Syria Palaestina itself came only after the Bar Kokhba revolt, more than a century after Jesus’ lifetime. Using a modern national identity to describe Jesus therefore imposes a later political category onto the first century.
That matters especially when the claim is connected to a broader narrative about indigeneity and historical ownership of the land. Jewish history in Judea and the Jewish connection to the land are not later inventions that can be removed from the story of Jesus.
Christian history offers an older and darker example of what happens when Jesus’ Jewish identity is rewritten for ideological purposes. In the 1930s, the German Christian movement sought to reshape Christianity according to Nazi racial ideology, including attempts to present Jesus as an “Aryan” figure detached from his Jewish origins. Susannah Heschel has documented this history extensively.
The Palestinian national movement is not the German Christian movement, and the two should not be equated in scale, intent, ideology, or moral weight. The narrower historical lesson is that Christians should be particularly cautious whenever Jesus’ Jewish identity is subordinated to a contemporary political narrative.
Christians Should Know Better
Christianity has spent decades confronting the consequences of separating Jesus from the Jewish people.
Nostra Aetate, the Second Vatican Council’s declaration on the Church’s relationship with non-Christian religions, rejected the idea of collective Jewish responsibility for Jesus’ death and called for greater understanding between Christians and Jews.
And the Vatican’s own contemporary teaching is explicit. In a document published on September 16, 2026, the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith states that “Jesus was and always remained a Jew,” emphasizing that his Jewish identity is inseparable from the Incarnation and from Christian salvation history.
This matters because de-Judaizing Jesus can take different forms. It can appear in explicitly theological arguments, in political rhetoric, or even in imagery intended primarily to express solidarity with Palestinian suffering.
But Palestinian Christians do not need a Palestinian Jesus.
Palestinian Christianity has its own ancient and legitimate history. Palestinian Christians can speak about their communities, their churches, their ancestors, and their suffering without changing the historical identity of Jesus.
Christians can acknowledge Palestinian suffering while affirming Jewish history. They can oppose injustice toward Palestinians without denying the Jewish connection to the land. And they can stand with Palestinian Christians without turning Jesus into a symbol of a modern national identity.
Some forms of Christian Zionism have also treated Palestinians as obstacles to prophecy or minimized Palestinian suffering. Those positions deserve serious criticism. But criticizing them does not require embracing the opposite historical distortion.
Solidarity does not require historical substitution.
