The Theft of Memory: Why the "Palestinian Jesus" Narrative is Antisemitism
Over the recent holiday period, whilst millions gathered to celebrate the birth of a Jewish child in Bethlehem, a different and deeply troubling narrative was being broadcast. From a billboard in New York City to a surge of viral social media posts, the claim that "Jesus was a Palestinian" has been repeated with increasing confidence. To many, this assertion sounds like a gesture of solidarity. To a historian, it is an error. But to a Jew, it is the unmistakable sound of an old enemy returning.
This is not merely a debate about ancient geography. It is the revival of Supersessionism, or "Replacement Theology", the ancient and poisonous doctrine which taught that the Church had "superseded" the Jews as God’s chosen people. Today, we are witnessing a secular mutation of this hatred. It is an attempt to sever the Jewish people from their own history and land, rebranding Jesus to fit a modern political script.
The Mechanism of Erasure
For centuries, Christian Supersessionism argued that the "Old Israel" (the Jews) was defunct, stubborn, and blind, while the "New Israel" (the Church) had inherited all the blessings. To make this theology work, Jesus had to be extracted from his people. He could not be a Judean loyal to the Torah; he had to be invented in opposition to the "legalistic" Jews.
The modern claim that Jesus was "Palestinian" operates on the exact same structural logic. It is political supersessionism. Where theological supersessionism said, "The Church replaces Israel as God’s people," political supersessionism says, "Modern non-Jews replace Jews as the authentic heirs of the land and even of Jewish religious figures." The structure of erasure is the same. It argues that Jesus is too much of a symbol of Justice and Liberation to belong to the Jews, who are now, once again, cast as the villains of the story. Therefore, he must be stripped of his Jewishness and handed over to the "new" symbol of the oppressed, the Palestinians.
Whatever the intent, the effect of this slogan is antisemitic: it erases Jewish identity from the most famous Jew in history and replays a long pattern of Christian supersessionism. It is a demand that Jews must commit identity suicide to be accepted in the room of justice. We see this in protest chants and campus discourse where Jewish participants are told they must renounce Zionism or Jewish peoplehood to be acceptable. It implies that one cannot be a Zionist, an Israeli, or a Jew, and still represent universal morality. Therefore, Jesus must be saved from his own kin. He must be rescued. He must be relabeled.
The Historical Reality: A timeline of dispossession
We must confront the historical illiteracy required to maintain this narrative. To label Jesus of Nazareth a "Palestinian" is profound historiographical malpractice. It imposes a colonial Roman administrative designation from the second century onto a first-century Judean reality.
As every serious historian of Jesus acknowledges, and as New Testament scholarship has repeatedly emphasized, Jesus was born, lived, and died a Jew in Judea (Yehud) and Galilee. Mainstream historians such as E.P. Sanders argue explicitly that Jesus was deeply embedded in first-century Judaism. During his lifetime, the land was known as Judea. The term "Syria Palaestina" was not codified as the official political designation for the region until the Emperor Hadrian did so in 135 CE.
This date matters. Hadrian renamed the land a full century after the crucifixion. He did so as a punitive measure following the Bar Kokhba Revolt, specifically to crush Jewish national sovereignty. He chose the name of the Philistines, the biblical enemies of the Israelites, to humiliate the defeated Jews. To call Jesus a "Palestinian" today is to validate this colonial erasure. It finishes Hadrian’s work by stripping an indigenous man of his identity and clothing him in the name of his conquerors.
Those who defend this narrative often rely on three specific arguments. Each collapses under scrutiny.
1. The Geography Myth
Critics argue that because Jesus lived in the land we now call Palestine, it is just a geographical term. Some repeat this slogan thinking it is a harmless geographical update. But geography is not neutral when it is used to overwrite a people’s historical name for themselves.
When careful historians speak of "Jewish Palestine," they are usually naming a region and immediately stressing that its people were Jews. That is very different from modern slogans that strip away the word "Jew" and announce that "Jesus was Palestinian" as if he belonged to a non-Jewish nation opposed to Jews. The first is geographical shorthand. The second is historical revisionism that walks in the footsteps of Rome’s attempt to rename Judea and centuries of Christian supersessionism.
We do not retroactively rename historical figures based on current maps. Immanuel Kant was born in Königsberg, Prussia. Today, that city is Kaliningrad, Russia. Yet we do not call Kant a "Russian philosopher". We acknowledge his context. To insist on "Palestinian" for Jesus, whilst ignoring the actual name of the land in his time, reveals that the choice is ideological, not geographical.
2. The Solidarity Claim
This argument suggests that because Jesus stands with the suffering, and Palestinians are suffering, he identifies as Palestinian. This relies on a dangerous binary that equates "Jewishness" with "Oppression". Solidarity does not require a change of ethnicity. When a white civil rights activist marched with Dr Martin Luther King Jr in Selma, they stood in deep, radical solidarity with Black Americans. But they did not become Black. To claim they must change their race to support the cause is to deny their capacity for allyship. Jesus can weep for Gaza as a Jew. To say he must become Palestinian to care is to deny the Jewish capacity for empathy.
3. Playing Indian
This narrative claims that if Jesus were born today, he would be a Palestinian because he was "native" to the land. This is a reversal of history. Jesus was an indigenous Judean. If he were alive today, strictly speaking, he would likely be an Israeli Jew. Perhaps he would be a radical critic of the government, perhaps a peacemaker standing at the checkpoints screaming for justice, but he would remain a Jew. To imply that he would abandon his Jewishness to be "moral" is to reinforce the antisemitic trope that Jewishness itself is incompatible with justice.
The Theft of Memory
We have walked this road before. In the 1930s, the "Deutsche Christen" in Germany sought to align Christianity with Nazi ideology. They created the fiction of an "Aryan Jesus", arguing he could not be one of "those people". To label Jesus a Palestinian today is to walk in those same footsteps.
This is not liberation; it is theft. It takes the most famous Jewish son in history and tells his family: "He is no longer yours."
We can, and we must, have deep compassion for any suffering. My heart breaks for the pain in the region. But we do not need to lie about the past to advocate for the future. We can fight for human rights without colonising history.
Let us honour the dignity of truth: Jesus was a Jew. Denying that will not save a single life, but it will make peace harder by poisoning the past.
Sources:
https://real-phd.mtak.hu/2160/7/disszertacio_DOI_Kiss-Andras_ORZSE.pdf?utm_source=perplexity
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus?wprov=sfla1
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._P._Sanders?wprov=sfla1
https://www.scriptureanalysis.com/when-judea-became-palestine-origins-explained/?hl=en-GB
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jesus/Jewish-Palestine-at-the-time-of-Jesus?