Regardless of whether or not the historical figure of Jesus (our sages call him Oto Ha’Ish) ever existed, it’s beyond dispute that he exists as one of Western civilization’s foundational myths. And his mythology has of course found its way into the more than 100 years of conflict between Jews and Palestinians.
While online fights over to which identity Jesus actually belonged might seem juvenile at first glance, this debate is actually a useful tool for clarifying much of the tragic misunderstanding characterizing the conflict. The rival claims being put forward by pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian social media accounts that Jesus was either a Judean or a Palestinian are actually very clear expressions for how differently Jews and Palestinians tend to define our identities.
From the perspective of Israelis and most Diaspora Jews connected to the Jewish story as we’ve understood that story for generations, the issue is clear. Jesus was a Jew from Judea (or more likely the Galilee) resisting Roman oppression, as did many of the Judean and Galilean Jews of that era.
In that chapter of history, the Romans were the main antagonist our people faced. They ultimately destroyed our civilization and displaced us from our land – something that, in our people’s unique historiographic narrative, led to every painful injustice and catastrophe the Jews suffered outside our land. This is seen by the overwhelming majority of Israelis and a large percentage of Diaspora Jews as having been ultimately corrected through the Zionist movement bringing us home and restoring Jewish sovereignty to the land.
Most Israelis see ourselves as part of the same people Jesus was a part of, living on the same land, and likewise facing enemy forces bent on our destruction. We tell ourselves and our children each seder night that in every generation they rise up to destroy us. Most Israelis would argue that what was once Egypt and Rome is now Hamas and Iran, as well as Tehran’s other regional proxies.
From the perspective of Palestinians and most politically engaged outsiders, however, there’s little appreciation for the story Jews tell ourselves. From a material perspective, the issue is simply that there is two groups of humans and the power dynamics between them. As a native living in this country under Roman occupation and oppression, it’s clear that Jesus’s reality mirrored that of present day Palestinians while the Zionist state plays a similar role to that of the Roman occupiers 2,000 years ago.
This distinction in how the Jesus myth can be framed and given meaningful contemporary context directly correlates to how both groups understand national identity.
When Israelis and most Diaspora Jews connected to the Jewish national narrative speak of Jewish identity, we are for the most part speaking of an extended biological family. A clan that became 12 tribes and then a nation in our land following a shared experience of oppression in – and liberation from – Egypt. We define ourselves as the biological and ideological descendants of a specific set of ancestors buried in Hebron (plus those who joined us along the way according to an ancient ritual process that transforms outsiders into insiders).
This conception of national identity, somewhat unique to the people of Israel in the modern age, has led many Jews to mistakenly appraise Palestinians as not a real people but rather a socially constructed identity created for the purpose of disenfranchising us.
But when Palestinians speak of Palestinian identity, they don’t intend to claim a shared ancestry or previous experience of political independence. They mean the indigenous peoples of Palestine throughout time – including the ancient Israelites, Canaanites, Philistines, Arabian conquerors and even European crusaders who remained in the land and absorbed into the local population.
Just as many Israelis tend to see Palestinian national identity as artificial and malignantly designed to displace us, Palestinians and their supporters (including a significant number of young Diaspora Jews) tend to view Jewish identity as solely a religious identity. Zionism, they contend, hijacked Jewishness and gave it an artificial national component in pursuit of colonizing Palestine.
This can’t be disconnected from how both groups define the notion of indigeneity.
For most Jews promoting the idea of Jewish indigeneity to this land, the term is meant in the same way that would describe how a plant is indigenous to a place. The Jews are from here, have a history here, belong here. It’s our natural habitat. But while this might be true and deeply important for us, it can coexist with Israel playing the role of the Romans and behaving like a colonizing force (even if such behavior is a betrayal of Jewish identity). The Jews in Judea may not be the French in Algeria, but we’ve demonstrated that it’s possible to behave as if we are.
Palestinians and their supporters, by contrast, have a far more materialist and politically relevant understanding of what it means to be indigenous.
The Palestinian claim to indigeneity argues that Palestinians are the precolonial population that suffered displacement and exclusion by the settler colonial state built on top of them. In this regard, the claim that Jesus – despite being a Jew – was a Palestinian experiencing something materially similar to how contemporary Palestinians experience Zionism actually makes sense.
While both of the above perspectives are legitimate lenses through which to understand the parallels between the Roman period and today, they stem from different worldviews and lead to radically different conclusions. Today’s Israel is the same identity that the Romans displaced. We’ve miraculously come back to life. And in the process of our coming back to life, we’ve somehow found ourselves in a very unfamiliar and uncomfortable role.
Jesus was a Palestinian Jew. Whether a real historic person, a composite of several people who lived at the time, or merely a mythic figure invented to create a religion, Jesus was both a Palestinian according to how Palestinians use that term, and also a Jew according to how Jews define that identity. Perhaps the petty fights over his identity can be used as educational tools to increase our understanding of not only each other, but also the complex nature of the conflict itself.
This sounds like the kind of sophistry that Plato rejected. In the time of Jesus there were no Palestinians, the term was only created by the Romans or the Jew-haters of the time. Jesus was not a Palestinian Jew. This hyphenated identity is like being an American-Jew or French-Jew. Jesus was a Judean. That is he was not ambivalent about his ultimate loyalty; it was to God and his holy land. In many respects he was a Zionist rejecting foreign sovereignty and awaiting the malchut shamyaim or God’s sovereignty over the land and people. The term Judean embraced both faith and nationality. The identity of Jesus either the man or the myth is important. Throughout history, others like the Christians, tried to claim him and use his story as a weapon against us.