It’s Christmas season again. Jesus was Palestinian, we are told—a slogan that appears on billboards, sometimes in the present tense as “Jesus is Palestinian,” but always demanding debate, outrage, and ritual moral posturing. With the same predictability as ugly holiday sweaters, a slogan descends, halo intact. Social media obliges. Comment threads bloom like poinsettias.

This is not accidental framing. The slogan circulates primarily in antisemitic discourse, where theological blame is no longer expressed in medieval terms but repackaged in the language of modern politics.

But let us take the slogan seriously. Not emotionally—intellectually. Let us do the unfashionable thing and follow it to its logical conclusion.

If Jesus was Palestinian, then so was Judas Iscariot. So were Mary and Joseph. Peter, James, John. The Pharisees and the Sadducees. The crowds. The priests. Every Jew in Judea and Galilee.

All Palestinians.

Now recall the ancient accusation that resurfaces with almost liturgical consistency: the Jews killed Jesus.

Only this time, translated into the language of the meme, it becomes: the Palestinians killed Jesus.

Which Palestinians, exactly?

The slogan collapses not because it is provocative, but because it is careless. It treats a first-century geographic term as if it were a twenty-first-century, politically fabricated Arab identity, then retrofits two thousand years of history to match a billboard-sized moral conclusion. This is not historical correction; it is semantic ventriloquism.

In antiquity, Palestina was not a UN entity. It was a Greek name—a translation choice. The Greeks translated meanings, not sounds. Eva became Zoe. Sheol became Hades. Abaddon became Apóleia. Har HaTzofim became Scopus. And Israel, rendered in Greek administrative language, became Palestina.

Same land. Different linguistic register.

So yes, Jesus can be called Palestinian—precisely because he was a Jew living in Israel. That is the part the meme gestures toward and then quietly abandons, hoping no one notices.

What the slogan actually does is more subtle. It strips the term Palestinian of its historical meaning and reassigns it exclusively to a modern, UN-administered client population, as if names were issued retroactively by humanitarian agencies. UNRWA clients are not Palestinians. That name predates them, and it does not belong to them at all.

The irony is almost elegant. The meme meant to displace Jewish history ends up restoring it.

If Jesus was Palestinian, then Palestinians were Jews.

The real question, then, is not whether Jesus was Palestinian. The real question is why the name Palestine was taken from the people who actually bore it—and handed to others as a moral cudgel.

So by all means, repeat the slogan. Just finish the thought.

Otherwise, Why did Palestinians kill Jesus? becomes less a question than a confession: not of history, but of how easily words can be emptied, repainted, and weaponized—especially at Christmas.

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See Also

Palestina, Zoe, and the Greek Art of Translating Meaning

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