Calling Jesus a 'Palestinian' is more dangerous than most people think.
Misrepresenting Jesus’ true origins isn’t just historical revisionism; it’s part of a broader campaign of disinformation that distorts facts, fuels conflict, and reshapes perceptions of reality.
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The first thing I saw on Christmas Eve was a tweet:
“Tonight, 2.4 billion Christians in the world will celebrate the birthday of the Palestinian prophet, Jesus. They believe this Palestinian was the son of God.”
Then came a graphic: Jesus Christ hanging on a cross, draped in a Palestinian flag, with the destruction of Gaza as a backdrop.
Then another claim: “Jesus was a Palestinian refugee.” And then an inflammatory Times Square billboard that said: “Merry Christmas. Jesus is Palestinian.”
Then a video urging viewers:
“Remember that Christmas is cancelled in His birthplace Bethlehem, occupied by the same Israeli army committing genocide in Gaza. Remember this Christmas, being Christian is to stand with the oppressed in Palestine, not Israel.”
Wannabe influencer Greta Thunberg posted on her social media: “Jesus was a Palestinian born under occupation.” Even U.S. politician Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently tried to equate Jesus with the Palestinian people:
“In the story of Christmas, Christ was born in modern-day Palestine under the threat of a government engaged in a massacre of innocents. He was part of a targeted population being indiscriminately killed to protect an unjust leader’s power.”
Enough already.
I can accept differing perspectives on what Israelis call the 1948 War of Independence, and Palestinians call “the Nakba” (Arabic for catastrophe). I can listen with an open ear to alternative narratives about Israel’s role in Gaza and Palestinian areas of the West Bank. I can even entertain (mostly for argument’s sake) the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry’s claim that more than 70,000 Gazans have died since Israel responded to the Hamas-led October 7th massacre and kidnappings.
But to brazenly misrepresent something so universally known — that Jesus was a Jew born in Judea — exposes a fundamental reality: There is virtually no common ground between the “Woke” crowd and its Red-Green Alliance with Islamists, and the rest of the West.
You see, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict isn’t just a territorial, nationalistic, or religious dispute — all of which, in principle, can be negotiated. It is a conflict over facts, where even the simplest historical truths are contested. It is about human nature itself: If we cannot agree on reality, how can we ever agree on solutions?
The Palestinians and their patrons are not merely playing a sociopolitical game; they are waging a power struggle, crystallized in a “war of information.” Deepfakes, artificial intelligence, and social media bots are now weapons in this battle. “Pro-Palestinian” messaging gains traction not just from algorithms, but because it is carefully crafted, linguistically tailored, and amplified through identity politics.
Social media overflows with heart-wrenching images and videos of Palestinian suffering, captured by quasi-journalists with massive followings. Hamas sympathizers and state-affiliated accounts from China, Russia, Iran, and Qatar further amplify these narratives. Analysts note that the proliferation of smartphones in Gaza has given Israel’s military operation unprecedented real-time exposure — more so than any contemporary conflict, including Ukraine. These devices serve as the modern equivalent of Vietnam-era television cameras, putting the world on a front-row seat.
State-linked accounts exploit the conflict to spread anti-Western propaganda. Iranian accounts glorify Hamas’ attacks as resistance against a “neo-colonial” power and accuse the U.S. of enabling Palestinian suffering, according to the Institute for Strategic Dialogue. Russian, Chinese, and Qatari accounts push similar narratives, claiming Western nations ignore Israeli war crimes.
Meanwhile, Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and their supporters rapidly disseminate misinformation across platforms. On TikTok pro-Palestinian content dominates. For every pro-Israel post, there are 36 pro-Palestinian posts, according to a hashtag analysis by statistician Anthony Goldbloom.
In the past, most people could at least agree on basic facts, even if they disagreed on solutions. Bethlehem, for instance, is universally recognized as the birthplace of Jesus. Under Israeli rule until 1995, Bethlehem’s population was roughly 80 percent Christian. After the Palestinian Authority assumed control, less than 10 percent of residents are Christian — a dramatic demographic change that reflects the Islamization of Jesus’ birthplace.
But today, in the post-truth age, the boundary between fact and fiction is erased. Facts are manufactured strategically. Emotions are valued over knowledge. Proof and evidence are often irrelevant. As historian Timothy Snyder warned:
“Post-truth is pre-fascism. Without agreement about some basic facts, citizens cannot form the civil society that would allow them to defend themselves. If we lose the institutions that produce facts that are pertinent to us, then we tend to wallow in attractive abstractions and fictions. Post-truth wears away the rule of law and invites a regime of myth.”
So many of us today can no longer distinguish between what feels comforting and what is objectively true, slipping back into superstition, dogma, and darkness — often without even realizing it. The great Spanish surrealist Salvador Dalí called this “systematized confusion,” a state fueled by paranoia and an active, yet misdirected, thought process — both of which serve to discredit reality itself.
When we examine the nature of reality, two approaches emerge: The realist perspective asserts that a single, objective reality exists independently of any individual’s perception. By contrast, the idealist perspective holds that individuals can know only their own subjective experience of the world, never its truth independent of perception.
In societies dominated by theocentric religions, like Palestinian society, religious interpretations of existence often form the consensus reality. Conversely, in largely secular societies, like much of the West, consensus reality is grounded in science and empiricism.
This divergence explains why communities and individuals can hold radically different worldviews. A fully secular society and one in which every outcome is believed to be guided by metaphysical forces will experience fundamentally different consensus realities. These differences shape beliefs about everything from science and morality to historical practices such as slavery or ritual sacrifice — all filtered through the lens of what each society perceives as reality.
The issue is not that Palestinian society thinks or feels differently than Israeli society. The problem arises when these distorted, lies-infested worldviews are exported globally through social media — and when non-Palestinians are not only convinced by them, but also encouraged to spread them within liberal democracies and their institutions under the guise of “free speech.”
Disinformation corrodes both freedom of speech and democratic governance, undermining trust in media and institutions. In the internet era, where democracy cannot rely solely on procedural legitimacy, post-truth becomes a battlefield for ideological conflicts and geopolitical power struggles that are actively reshaping the world.
The roots of this post-truth environment are deep. Collective traumas like 9/11, the financial collapse of 2008, the 2003 Iraq War, the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, and the authoritarian backlash against the Arab Spring shook the foundations of the Western ideological project. Trust in the globalized economy, once considered a reliable source of rising prosperity, eroded as jobs were shipped overseas and disruptive technologies took the world by storm.
Disenfranchised populations began rejecting the “regime of truth,” turning instead to narratives that blamed globalization and neoliberal democracy for growing inequality. Right-wing nationalist parties across Europe seized on this discontent, making significant electoral gains.
Globally, the stability of neoliberal democratic media and political institutions has been challenged by dissenting voices — from the Alt-Right in the U.S. to nationalist populists in Europe — amplified by online media ecosystems. The globalist liberal “ideoscape” now clashes with a constellation of ethno-nationalist and conservative ideoscapes empowered by social media. This disjunction presages the emerging post-truth era and signals, geopolitically, a crisis in Western globalization and neoliberal hegemony.
Globalization itself traces back to the Enlightenment, which sought to construct morality independent of faith. Before this, Western civilization was essentially Christendom. “But Christendom died,” wrote novelist and essayist Paul Kingsnorth. “If you live in the West now, you are living among its ruins. Many of them are still beautiful — intact cathedrals, Bach concertos — but they are ruins nonetheless. And when an old culture built around a sacred order dies, there will be lasting upheaval at every level of society, from the level of politics to the level of the soul.”
The vacuum left by Christendom’s collapse was filled with a combination of foreign propaganda (Soviet, Arab, Chinese), consumer capitalism, and identity politics. Then came the internet, all of which contributed to the rise of our post-truth world, including but certainly not limited to absurd claims like “Jesus was Palestinian.”
I am not Christian, but I am a subscriber to truth. And I am deeply disturbed by Palestinians and their supporters attempting to rewrite Jesus’ story as if it were a trivial, harmless game — all while Iran and its proxies have engulfed the Middle East in more than two years of hot wars, a conflict with potentially transformative consequences.
The reason these Palestinians and their supporters are so uncomfortable with Jesus’ true origins is obvious: Acknowledging that he was a Jew means acknowledging that Jews lived in Judea thousands of years ago, long before Arabs migrated from Arabia and Arabicized the region (what some might call a “settler-colonial project”).
Acknowledging Jesus’ Jewish origins also means acknowledging Jewish historical presence, continuity, and rights in the land — truths that are deeply inconvenient for mainstream Palestinian culture and society, Jew-haters, and “anti-Zionists.”
Hence, in their narrative, Jesus must be Palestinian, and history, facts, and truth simply do not matter.
This description of Jesus is nothing short of blasphemy. Any Christians knows that Jesus was a Jew and a good Jew.
As a Lutheran Christian, I truly appreciate your regard and respect for my faith. I only wish the man who launched Lutheran theology held the same regard for your faith, but here we are, 500 years on. At least my church body has refuted those writings.
Thank you for this.