Open Season’s Greetings – Taking the Jew out of Jesus and other Tricks of the Israel-Delegitimising Trade

The commercial prelude to Christmas is in full swing, and as usual there’s a brisk trade in cards. I’ve been looking at some of the cards on offer from pro-Palestinian organisations and NGOs, and in those cases the images chosen are for maximum political impact. Obviously, for some of these bodies, the Yuletide season means Open Season on Israel – or I should say an intensified, star-of-Bethlehem-tinged open season (since open season for them is throughout the year).

The Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign offers a ten-card set depicting the madonna in Palestinian colours, holding her infant; I think she’s intended to convey the impression that she and her son – no introductions are required – were Palestinian rather than Jewish. The same PSC also offers a ten-card set depicting the Three Wise Men unable to get into Bethlehem owing to Israel’s “Wall”.

In fact, that wall – or rather, security barrier, erected to protect Israeli citizens from terror attacks, looms large on cards this Christmas (some scenes are recycled from previous years). (See "Hijacked by Hatred": British NGOs Use Christmas for anti-Israel Attacks www.ngo-monitor.org/article.php?id=2202)  Here is its depiction on a card offered by Australians for Palestine, and here’s the inside message, below:

The Amos Trust has a similar card on offer, depicting a Father Christmas or Santa Claus striding beside that wall, but it also has this card, of a swaddled babe – who is he meant to portray if not the “Christ child”? – and beneath him are the words “Made in Palestine”.

The Nazis, I’ve heard tell, attempted to reinvent Jesus as an Aryan – the son of a Roman soldier. These days, he’s more likely to be reinvented as a “Palestinian”. Sometimes, this is done in a snide fashion, stopping short of actually de-judaising him. For instance, one of the captions at Rod Cox’s ever-travelling UK-wide exhibition of Israel-demonising children’s drawings from Gaza noted – at least when I saw it – that Palestine was the birthplace of Jesus; placed at the approximate eye-level of an average eight-year-old, it was apparently calculated to influence impressionable young minds.

The fiction that Jesus – the Jew, of Judea – was a Palestinian (despite the fact that Palestine was a term imposed on his country after his lifetime by Romans anxious to obliterate its Jewishness by naming it after the land of the Philistines ) is peddled by some elements within the churches, is implied in some of the literature of leftwing anti-Israel groups, and is seen in this quite shocking poem by a Christian pro-Palestinian activist in the United States (emphasis hers; I’m not linking to her blog because I’ve no desire to increase its traffic):

Christ was a Palestinian
And unto us
a new era is born
The Phoenix
rising from the flames
of "Israel"
In seeing the Israeli made myths
and violence now
as the information age explodes
We Know
We know that what was remembered then
was for power- not for truth
We know that Israel usurped land and rights – and even the story itself
Now and then
We know that Israeli crimes
are all the more wrong as they claim
to be for God
We know
Now and then
We know that the only known political fact
is simply that the prophet and saviour
Christ
was a Palestinian...
And we know that he deployed
Parables to free the people
from tyranny
of every type
Parables
to compel humankind to be both human
and kind
Parables
not guns
A dialog
not guns
Life
not death
We know that Christ is resurrection...
and we know that Palestine was then – and will be again
somehow
We know
and this faith
shall light our way
no matter what
This faith
will transcend the hate mongering
and sorrow and suffering...
This faith
will heal
the many wounds
made by "Israel"
and the many mistakes
made by all people
trying to find peace
in a troubled world
This faith will rebuild Palestine
one day
This faith will free the people
one by one
to transcend the many tyrannies
of our time
For Christ really was, is and always will be
a Palestinian....

As Israel’s deputy foreign minister Danny Ayalon wrote recently (27 November) in the Jerusalem Post, the Palestinians are not only denying the Jews’ historic rights to those holy sites the Western Wall and Rachel’s Tomb, they deny the Jewishness of Jesus:

“The myth that Jesus was a Palestinian is told to anyone who arrives on a pilgrimage to Bethlehem or other Christian holy sites under the Palestinian Authority.

However, the facts once again don’t add up. The Jewish province of Judea was destroyed by Roman Emperor Hadrian in 135 C.E. when the Romans quashed the Bar Kochba-led Jewish revolt. To sever the Jewish connection with the Land of Israel, the Roman emperor changed its name to Syria Palaestina, eventually becoming known in English as Palestine.

According to Christian scholars, Jesus was crucified somewhere between 26 and 36, a full hundred years before the term Palestine had even been coined.

The world at that time did not have a single mosque and Islam and the Arab conquest of this land was still six centuries away.

I don’t know what if anything schoolchildren are taught these days about history and religion, but it’s clear many are woefully if not wilfully ignorant.'

"Christianity was started by a young Palestinian named Jesus" is just one of one of hundreds of distortions, misrepresentations and falsehoods found about Judaism and Jewish history by a recent comprehensive study of the 28 most widely used social studies textbooks in the United States. http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/127797

Even the BBC’s College of Journalism website gets the facts only half right: “Jesus and his immediate circle of twelve disciples were all Jewish men who lived in Palestine [hey, Al Beeb, make that Judea!] about two thousand years ago.” Did I say “even?” Silly me. When she was still reporting from the Middle East for Al Beeb, the horrendous Orla Guerin made a particularly loathsome broadcast from Bethlehem one Christmas, I recall.

As that inestimable site Palestine Media Watch has demonstrated, well before the first intifada the Palestinian Authority was busily re-writing history to undermine and thus delegitimize the historic Jewish claim to the land and to Jesus. Here are some examples from its files: 

“Nazareth: The city where the Jews murdered the first Palestinian of its [Nazareth's] sons.” Al-Hayat Al-Jadida (Fatah), 24 Jan. 2000;

Yasser Abu Ciedo, Palestinian artist: "Our struggle today against the other [Israel] is an eternal one. It started 2000 years ago and continues until today. I demonstrate this through the figure of Jesus, who came to the world with a message of justice and the other side did what they did to him. Here [he shows a painting] I demonstrate the following idea: the Israeli soldiers are wearing army uniforms while Jesus has nothing except for the truth. This is the Palestinian from the beginning of the struggle until its end - if it will ever end..."  Palestinian TV (Fatah), 21 July 2000;

“The Palestinian Galilee village [in Israel] of Kfar Kana takes pride in the fact that here the Palestinian Messiah [Jesus] succeeded in turning water into wine.”  Al-Hayat Al-Jadida (Fatah), 14 Dec. 2004;

“The Shahids (Martyrs) will cry, ‘We shook the palm trees alongside Lady Earth and the lady of the people, the Virgin Mary, and with her son the first Palestinian Shahid (died for Allah).” Al-Hayat Al-Jadida (Fatah), 17 Jan. 2005;

“They [Christians] read in the holy book [the Bible] the name of 'Palestine' and the real [Palestinian] names of our villages and cities… We must not forget the Messiah [Jesus] is Palestinian, the son of Mary the Palestinian.” Al-Hayat Al-Jadida (Fatah), 18 Nov. 2005 [Palestine Media Watch  Comment: The PA assumes that few Palestinians read the Hebrew and Christian Bibles. For were Palestinians to read the Bible they would learn that Jesus was a Jew, there was no “Palestine,” and the Hebrew names used by Israel today, including the name “Land of Israel,” are the names found in the Bible];

"It was quite natural that the Palestinians rose to save their sanctuaries [in Nazareth in Galilee]… since lord Messiah [Jesus] and his mother [Mary] are both Galileans and Palestinians." Al-Hayat Al-Jadida (Fatah), 9 March 2006; “Christianity was born in our Arab countries and the Messiah [Jesus] is a Syrian Palestinian, born in Nazareth.” Al-Hayat Al-Jadida (Fatah), 28 Oct. 2006;

“Palestinians are used to death like this. The suffering of the first Palestinian – the Messiah – started with the Last Supper.” Al-Hayat Al-Jadida (Fatah), 30 April 2008;

"We must not forget that the Messiah [Jesus], peace be upon him, is Palestinian, the son of Mary the Palestinian, who is sanctified by hundreds of millions of believers in this world." Al-Hayat Al-Jadida (Fatah), 18 Nov. 2008;

Palestinian Mufti Muhammad Hussein: "We're talking about an ongoing chain [of prophets of Islam], from Adam to Muhammad, representing the call for monotheism and the mission of Islam… The prophets were all of the same religion [Islam]… [e.g.] Jesus was born in this land in Bethlehem… He also lived in Nazereth, moved to Jerusalem, so he was a Palestinian … We respect Jesus, we believe in him [as a prophet of Islam], just as we believe in the prophet Muhammad." Palestinian TV (Fatah), 21 April 2009);

"The Pope's visit is an opportunity for the Palestinian leadership to present its cause… so that His Honor [the Pope] will assume his religious and political responsibility towards the people of the Holy Land, the Arab Palestinian people, the people of the Messiah [Jesus]." Al-Hayat Al-Jadida (Fatah), 9 May 2009;

Palestinian Authority Mufti Muhammad Hussein: "Jesus was born in this land; he took his first steps in this land and spread his teachings [of Islam] in this land. He and his mother [Mary], we may say, were Palestinians par excellence." Palestinian TV (Fatah), 12 May 2009;

Dr Tayseer Al-Tamimi, PA Chief Justice of Religious Court, and Chairman of Supreme Council of Islamic Law: "Jesus is the only Palestinian prophet." Palestinian TV (Fatah), 9 June 2009;

Mustafa Barghouti ,: "We always remember that Jesus was the first Palestinian who was tortured in this land". Palestinian TV (Fatah), Christmas Eve, 2009;

Fatah Communications and Education Authority statement in honor of International Women's Day from the official Fatah website, 8 March 2010 : "If we are proud of the holiness of our land, then we are proud and pride ourselves that the first and most important holy woman among the nations and peoples is from the holy land: The Virgin Mary - the woman of love and peace - is of the nation of Palestine, whose roots are grounded in the depths of history. Our movement takes note of its pride in all the women Shahidas (Martyrs), prisoners, Palestinian fighters, who have become a model of sacrifice and a school that teaches the meaning of giving and of sacrifice." (http://www.palvoice.com/index.php?id=23043)

All this is the legacy of Arafat’s ploy in the mid-1990s to choose the Church of the Nativity to declare that "This is the birthplace of our Lord the Messiah, the Palestinian" and to thereby portray, as they did in a Nativity pageant, the Palestinians as Jesus rejected and crucified and IDF paratroopers as the Roman Legion, the Israeli government as merciless, expansionist Imperial Rome, and rightwing settlers and their supporters as the Jews who declined to accept the divinity of Jesus' message. What lent Arafat credibility in his avowals of inclusiveness for Bethlehem’s Christians – 80 per cent of the town’s population in 1948 – was his marriage to a Christian and his frequent statements that he would fly the Palestinian flag "from the churches and from the mosques," mentioning the churches first. The second intifada or Al Aqsa uprising –pointedly named for a mosque – marked the turning point, along with with a rising global tide of Islamisation.

As Dr Hanan Chehata, public relations director at Middle East Monitor (MEMO), has observed, “in the last few decades there has been a perceptible exodus of Christians from the Holy Land.... Whereas a few decades ago the number of Christians in Bethlehem, the city in which Jesus was born, was estimated to be around 70%, now they constitute well below a third of the total population.” (Some estimates say only 15 per cent.) What she does not admit is that the principal reason for their accelerated decline in numbers is flight not from Israel but from Islam; their immigration to the United States and other venues overseas is due to their sense of marginalisation as Islamification proceeds apace and their fear for their future as Islamic fundamentalists lay claim to all of the Holy Land as exclusively Islamic territory. http://www.middleeastmonitor.org.uk/.../347-the-plight-and-flight-of-palestinian-%20christians

War on Want offered this card (pictured) last year, and I wonder how many of the BDS-advocating churches will be singing alternate words to well-known carols this Christmas, such as this one, which made its debut in London in 2008 with the avid support of certain NGOs:

Once in Royal David’s City,
Stood a big apartheid wall,
People entering and leaving,
Had to pass a checkpoint hall,
Bethlehem was strangulated,
And her children segregated.

Though this city is a symbol
To the world of peace and love,
Concrete walls have closed around her,
Settlements expand above.
And apartheid Israel stands
All around on stolen lands.
David’s people once instructed
All the world in righteousness;
Prophets spoke of truth and justice;
Israel’s leaders now oppress.
All who look at Bethlehem
Must speak out the truth to them.

Or this:

On the twelfth day of Christmas, Israel sent to me
Twelve assassinations,
Eleven homes demolished,
Ten wells obstructed,
Nine sniper towers,
Eight gunships firing,
Seven checkpoints blocking,
Six tanks a-rolling,
Five settlement rings.
Four falling bombs,
Three trench guns,
Two trampled doves,
And an uprooted olive tree.


Or how about this choice example of the demoniser’s art?

The olive and the army
When they are both full-grown,
Every olive tree on the West Bank
The IDF cuts down.
O the rampaging of settlers
And the rolling of the tanks;
The grinding of the bulldozers
As the olives fall in ranks.
The olive bears a berry
As green as any grass;
When the owners go to pick the fruit
They’re not allowed to pass.
O the rampaging of settlers
And the rolling of the tanks;
The grinding of the bulldozers
As the olives fall in ranks.
This oppression bears a berry
As red as any blood,
As the owners see their livelihoods
All trampled in the mud.
O the rampaging of settlers
And the rolling of the tanks;
The grinding of the bulldozers
As the olives fall in ranks.
If you want to buy the olives,
You’ll find it very hard.
For those that make it to checkpoints
Still the way outside is barred.
O the rampaging of settlers
And the rolling of the tanks;
The grinding of the bulldozers
As the olives fall in ranks.
The olive and the army,
When they are both full-grown,
Every olive tree on the West Bank
The IDF cuts down.