Jesus Wasn’t Palestinian
Palestinians' history, culture, and connection to the land are valid in their own right. We don’t need to appropriate or falsify Jewish history.
Few figures in Middle Eastern or world history are as contested as Jesus of Nazareth. To Christians, Jesus is their Messiah, the Son of God, and God made flesh, the cornerstone of their religion, the world’s largest. During his lifetime, he was a Jewish rabbi living in first-century Roman Judea. The idea that he would become the founder of a new religion might have seemed outlandish to his followers at the time. But that’s exactly what happened. The rapid expansion of Christianity was propelled by the rejection of Jesus as the Messiah by mainstream Judaism; the magnetism of Jesus’s universalist message, which offered salvation to believers regardless of their background or heritage; and the hard-work of followers like St. Paul after the crucifixion.
Today, Christians vastly outnumber Jews worldwide. While there are around 15 million Jews, there are over 2 billion Christians, as well as 2 billion Muslims who also consider Jesus a prophet of their religion. This numerical disparity has given rise to some peculiar inter-religious tensions, particularly within the searing cauldron that is the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, where history itself has become a battleground. In recent years—particularly since the advent of the war in Gaza—it’s become common to hear the claim, often chanted by large crowds of demonstrators, that Jesus and his mother Mary were Palestinians, and that the festival of Christmas is a “Palestinian story.”
In trying to analyse such a claim, we first have to look at what it actually means to be Palestinian. While the name “Palestine” is of ancient origin, the modern Palestinian nationality emerged out of the wreckage of the Ottoman Empire. During Ottoman rule (1517–1917), the region that became the British Mandate of Palestine was not officially known as Palestine, nor was it governed as a single polity. Rather, it was fragmented into various administrative districts (sanjaks) within larger provinces (vilayets). Most of the area that includes modern Israel and the Palestinian Territories was part of the Sanjak of Al-Quds, while other parts of the region were incorporated into the Vilayet of Damascus and the Vilayet of Beirut.
Most of the inhabitants of the region at that time were Sunni Muslims, a group who first arrived in the land via the Islamic conquests of a thousand years earlier, imposed Islamic rule, and converted many of the native people to Islam. At the same time, a variety of Christian groups, including Syriac Orthodox, Catholic, and Armenian Christians, were also present throughout the area. The Jewish community, though smaller, also had a well-established presence in cities like Jerusalem, Hebron, Safed, and Tiberias. Their numbers were swelled by immigrants who arrived in the nineteenth century at the beginnings of the Zionist movement—and in some instances even earlier, as returning to the land of their forebears had always been the desire of many diaspora Jews whose ancestors had become increasingly scattered over time due to enslavement and displacement by first Rome and then by the later empires that took control of the land in succession. Living alongside these main groups were Druze, Bedouin, and Samaritan communities, each with its own distinct identity and historical connection to the land.
Robert C. Thornett
After the Ottoman Empire was dismantled following World War I, Palestine became a British mandate. From 1920 onwards, British rule led to increased Jewish immigration to Palestine. British policymakers had been won over by the Zionist movement, whose ambition to create a Jewish homeland in Palestine was seen as a solution to the historical problems of Jewish displacement and global antisemitism.
The non-Jewish population in Palestine was strongly opposed to Zionism, however. Arab thinkers like George Antonius and Khalil Al-Sakakini highlighted the common cultural, historical, and geographical connections that united the Arab residents of the region, to create a common history and identity that gave birth to an ideal of Palestinian nationalism. Against this background, there were widespread intercommunal tensions, which ultimately erupted into violence and led to pogroms in Hebron and Safed during the 1920s and 1930s. The conflict worsened as anti-Zionist Muslim groups led by figures like Haj Amin Al-Husseini and Izz Ad-Din Al-Qassam fought against Zionist militias like Lehi and Irgun.
Jesus is an important figure in the Palestinian consciousness. Christian Palestinians, who trace their roots to some of the earliest followers of Jesus, see themselves as custodians of sacred local traditions and sites from Bethlehem to Nazareth and Jerusalem. Jesus is not just a theological figure for them but a reality linking them to their heritage and history in the land.
The Islamic view of Jesus endows him with immense spiritual importance for Muslim Palestinians. Islam reveres Jesus as a miraculous figure born of the Virgin Mary. His significance as a prophet unites Muslim Palestinians with their Christian counterparts in regarding Jesus as a symbol of justice, history, and moral authority. Indeed, Muslims claim Jesus not only as a pre-Islamic prophet but as an actual Muslim, even though the Muslim religion did not exist until hundreds of years after his death.
This shared reverence has allowed Jesus to become a unifying figure for Palestinians of both faiths in their political struggle, helping them to build a united Palestinian identity. In a region where identity has become inexorably interwoven with the fight for land and rights, the idea that Jesus was a Palestinian has gained traction as part of a spiritual and cultural claim to historical continuity. Nevertheless, while Palestinians have both geographical and religious links to Jesus, it is simply not a historically accurate claim. Furthermore, it is an attempt to appropriate a major chapter in Jewish history.
At the time of Jesus’s life, the region he lived in was part of the Roman Empire and was referred to as Judea, a Roman province established following Pompey’s conquest of the Hasmonean Kingdom in 63 BCE. Like the neighbouring provinces of Galilee and Samaria, Judea was an admixture of the Roman imperial system, Hellenistic culture, and its own distinct Jewish identity. It was a hub of Jewish religious and political identity, housing the Second Temple in Jerusalem, the focal point of Jewish worship.
There was no clear concept of Palestinian identity during Jesus’s lifetime. The name “Palestine” wasn’t commonly used until the Romans changed the name of the region to Syria-Palaestina following the Bar Kokhba Revolt of 135 CE, more than 100 years after Jesus died. The Romans renamed the place in an effort to diminish Jewish identity and ties to the land. The name Syria-Palaestina was chosen in reference to the historical enemies of the Israelites, the Philistines. This meant that, in ancient times, the term “Palestine” was strongly linked to Roman colonialism.
Claiming that Jesus was Palestinian is not only anachronistic, it is as inaccurate as asserting that he was Israeli, Ottoman, Byzantine, or a Christian Crusader—since none of these identities existed in his time. Each reflects a later historical period and different sociopolitical realities. Superimposing any of these identities onto Jesus simply does not align with the reality of the first century or describe either his ministry or his followers.
Jesus’s identity was fundamentally Jewish. His teachings, as recorded in the Gospels, were thoroughly rooted in Jewish scripture and traditions and his arguments with the religious leaders of the various Jewish sects of the time—the Pharisees, Sadducees, Zealots, and others—were internal debates within Judaism. Jesus lived in a Jewish society, addressed the concerns of his fellow Jews, and was ultimately executed by the Romans as “King of the Jews,” a title that reflects the way in which both his supporters and his enemies viewed him.
We can’t just ignore all this weighty history. The modern claim that Jesus was Palestinian is being wielded as a rhetorical tool, an attempt to downplay and delegitimise the historical Jewish connection to the land. Some might claim that historical accuracy is less important than symbolism, and Jesus is a potent symbol for Palestinians because he is an important global figure. But trying to reinterpret his life through the lens of a modern national identity means losing sight of the historical reality of first-century Judea, and instead inventing a new set of mythologies.
As a Palestinian Arab myself, I don’t feel a need to embroider our identity with falsehoods or exaggerations. Our history, culture, and connection to the land are valid in their own right, without the need to appropriate or distort the narratives of others, or to try to replace Israel with Palestine. Every group of people has a right to freedom and self-determination, regardless of whether or not they can count Jesus of Nazareth among their number. The claim that Jesus was Palestinian relies on anachronisms that do not hold up to serious scrutiny and is of no relevance to the broader idea that Palestinians should have their own self-government. It’s time to put this myth to bed and move on.
