1.
Between the celebration of the birth of a Jew who lived in the Land of Israel at the beginning of the first century CE and the start of the civil calendar year, eight days after his birth, the day of that Jew's circumcision, it is important to address a piece of false propaganda that has gained ground in many parts of the world: "Jesus was Palestinian."
Jesus was a Jewish Rabbi who was crucified around the year 33 CE in Jerusalem, in Judea. He travelled throughout the Galilee and across the Land of Israel, preaching adherence to the Torah and brotherly love. Throughout the entire Bible, both Hebrew and Christian, the name "Palestine" does not appear. The reason is simple: The Philistines had disappeared centuries earlier, by the end of the seventh century BCE. Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, who destroyed Jerusalem in 586 BCE, had already destroyed the Philistine city-states 20 years earlier, including Ashkelon, Ashdod and Ekron, and exiled their social elite, which assimilated into Babylonian society and vanished from history. This stands in contrast to the Jews, who, despite being exiled, preserved their religious and national identity and ultimately returned to their land.
So where did the name Palestine come from?
2.
Roughly a century after Jesus' death, in 132 CE, the Bar Kokhba revolt erupted in an effort to liberate Judea and Israel from Roman rule. The revolt failed in 135 CE after inflicting very heavy losses on the Romans and bringing immense disaster upon the Jews. Emperor Hadrian was so enraged that he decided to erase the name "Judea" or "Israel" from the empire's official documents and rename the region "Syria Palaestina." To that end, he also renamed Jerusalem "Aelia Capitolina," after himself and after Jupiter, whose temple stood on Rome's Capitoline Hill.
Hadrian encountered the name "Palaestina" in the writings of the Greek historian Herodotus, who had travelled through the region around the mid-fifth century BCE and referred to the coastal strip between Phoenicia, present-day Lebanon, and Egypt as "Syria Palaestina." The Philistines no longer existed, but the geographical name remained as a historical relic. Incidentally, the inhabitants Herodotus encountered in "Philistia" practiced circumcision, unlike the uncircumcised Philistines described in the Bible, suggesting that he may have encountered also Jews. Hadrian therefore pulled the name from the historical archive and affixed it to Judea and the Land of Israel. He did so for the same reason modern-day antisemites do: to sever the connection between the Jews and their historic homeland, in the belief that they would forget their land and cease rebelling.
3.
In any case, Jesus did not think in terms of the nations of the world, but of his own people and homeland, and he sought the redemption of the people of Israel in their land. He would have been horrified by attempts to associate him with a culture of murder, rape and the burning of children in which Palestinians have excelled. He would have viewed with alarm the way Islam persecutes Christians in nearly every part of the globe, and how the Christian population of the Middle East is disappearing.
The city of Bethlehem, considered his birthplace, was home in the 1990s, under Israeli rule, to about 85 percent Christians and only 15 percent Muslims. Today the situation is reversed, with only around 15 percent of the city's residents remaining Christian. Palestinians persecuted them and constrained their lives, since under Islam Christians are also considered infidels who must be Islamized and are required to live as humiliated protected subjects, dhimmis, under Islamic rule.
4.
A chilling example of this occurred on April 2, 2002, when 50 Palestinian terrorists, armed with rifles and explosive devices and led by Abdullah Daoud, the head of Palestinian intelligence in Bethlehem, barricaded themselves inside the Church of the Nativity. The terrorists took the clergy there and about 200 civilians hostage, including children. During the siege, the Palestinians set fire to sacred parts of the church, looted icons and valuables, and used pages from holy books as toilet paper. On May 9, after lengthy negotiations, an agreement was reached under which the terrorists were transferred to Cyprus or to Gaza in exchange for the release of the hostages. They left behind 40 active explosive devices inside the church. At the request of church officials, the IDF located and neutralized all of them.
Every time you hear the false propaganda claim that "Jesus was Palestinian," remember this story. The historical irony is that the only place in the entire Middle East where the Christian community is thriving, secure and experiencing growth is in the Jewish state, Israel.
