On the margins of contemporary politics, where moral indignation often prevails over historical accuracy, a disturbing phenomenon is increasingly becoming consolidated: the deliberate twisting of the past to legitimize an ideological narrative of the present. The recent circulation of the mantra “Jesus was Palestinian”, amplified by global figures such as Greta Thunberg, and replicated without nuance by leaders of Argentine progress such as Juan Cabandié, is neither an innocent gesture nor a minor error. It is a media and network operation, designed to rewrite history for political purposes, and above all, to use the Middle East conflict and bring it to a binary logic where Israel embodies absolute evil, and “the Jewish” is reduced to a moral anomaly.
The Manichaean mechanism is well known: a real fact is taken—Jesus was born in Bethlehem—and subjected to an anachronistic translation. Bethlehem today is located in the West Bank administered by the Palestinian Authority; ergo, Jesus “was Palestinian.” The fallacy is evident to any reader minimally trained in ancient history. In the time of Jesus, Palestine did not exist as a political, national or identity entity. Jesus was born a Jew, lived as a Jew, preached within Second Temple Judaism, and was executed by Rome as a Jew. Denying that fact is not an academic discussion: it is a form of identity violation.
As Philip C. Almond explained in The Conversationcalling Jesus “Palestinian” is only possible from a retrospective operation: the name “Palestine” was imposed by the Roman Empire only in the 2nd century (two hundred years after the birth of the messiah), after the rebellion of Bar Kochba, precisely to eliminate all Jewish reference to Judea. That is, the category “Palestinian” was born as a colonial punishment against the Jews. Converting Jesus today into a “Palestinian” is not only historically incorrect: it reproduces, paradoxically, the same Roman logic of denial of Jewish identity.
It is appropriate to pause for a moment on a common confusion, deliberately exploited by contemporary activism: the invocation of Herodotusthe so-called “father of History”, as proof that Palestine already existed in ancient times. It is true that Herodotus – who was Greek, by the way – used the term Palaistine in the 5th century BC, but he did so in a strictly geographicalnot political or identity-based. In their StoriesHerodotus describes a coastal strip of the southern Levant—the eastern coast of the Mediterranean between Phoenicia and Egypt—which he calls “Palestine-Syria.” That name derives from the philistines (Peleshet in Hebrew), a people settled in the coastal area near Gaza, not in Judea, Samaria or Galilee.
For Herodotus, Palestine was not a nation, nor a State, nor an ethnic identity equivalent to the current one, but rather a coastal region known to the Greeks from the Philistines and administratively integrated into Syria under imperial rule. The political officialization of the name “Palestine” to designate the entire territory – including Judea – comes long after the birth of Jesus and occurs only in the 2nd century AD. Confusing Herodotus’ limited geographical use with a modern national identity is not innocent ignorance.
The problem is not just academic. In the contemporary militant ecosystem, this misrepresentation fulfills a specific political function. By “Palestinizing” Jesus, the aim is to strip Christianity of its founding figure and reappropriate it as a rhetorical weapon of the Arab world and the global left against the State of Israel. Jesus stops being a Jew from Judea and becomes an archetypal victim of the “occupation,” a retroactive martyr of the current conflict.
In this context, Thunberg and Cabandié’s posts do not operate as isolated opinions, but as pieces of a broader choral story, where the Palestinian cause dangerously merges with a long-standing anti-Jewish narrative. A specific policy of the Israeli government is not criticized – something legitimate and necessary – but rather the historical, identity and even spiritual legitimacy of Jewishness in that land is questioned. The Jew appears as an eternal intruder, even when talking about a Jew born more than two thousand years ago.
Alejandro Bimbi’s response points precisely to that core: we are not facing a humanitarian defense, but rather a pedagogy of hate disguised as progressivism. When history is simplified into binary morality, the result is not justice but propaganda. And propaganda needs powerful symbols. Jesus is probably the most effective of all.
The Manichaeism that structures this story does not admit ambiguities: on the one hand, the eternally oppressed; on the other, the absolute oppressors. There is no history, there are no contexts, there is no plurality. That there are Christian, Muslim and secular Palestinians; that there are secular, religious Jews, critics of the Israeli government; That the conflict is the product of successive layers of empires, colonial mandates, regional wars and failed political decisions, all of that gets in the way.
The figure of Jesus functions as an emotional shortcut. If Jesus “was Palestinian,” then Israel not only occupies a territory, it subjugates Christ himself. The logical leap is brutal, but effective. And like any successful symbolic operation, it goes viral quickly, is repeated without verification and is defended with religious fervor.
The paradox is total: those who claim to speak in the name of human rights reproduce a narrative that erases the history of Judaism. Those who proclaim themselves anti-racist adopt an anti-Semitic reading. Those who denounce colonialism recycle, without knowing or caring, a Roman imposition designed to punish the Jews.
In short, defending the rights of the Palestinian people does not require denying that Jesus was Jewish. It demands, precisely, the opposite: accepting that history is complex, that identities are not slogans and that suffering is not hierarchized by erasing the other. Everything else is propaganda and prejudice.
