Palestinian Media Watch (PMW) reports that The Palestinian leadership’s falsification of history by presenting Jesus as an ancient Palestinian has increased in regularity as Christmas was approaching this year. In the last month alone, the PA media has transmitted six additional PA misrepresentations of Jesus as a Palestinian, including a statement by the Governor of the Ramallah district Leila Ghannam: “The Palestinian pain is one and the joy is one. We all have the right to be proud that Jesus is a Palestinian and that Palestine is the birthplace of the religions…”
A Palestinian historian, Khalil Shoka, further added on Dec. 16: “The Christian religion started here [Bethlehem]… The entire world is focused on this city because of its important historical and traditional role… because, in the final analysis, Jesus is a Palestinian.” Sheikh Muhammad Hussein, Mufti of Jerusalem and the Palestinian Territories, said on PA TV on Nov. 30: “The Palestinian nation is rooted in this land since the Canaanites and the Jebusites. The Arab presence – Christian and Islamic – on this land is uninterrupted. Jesus is a Palestinian par excellence.”
In addition, there is an attempt to connect Jesus to the Palestinian leaders themselves. Senior PA leader Jibril Rajoub, a Fatah Central Committee member, said on PA TV on Nov. 29: “The greatest Palestinian in history since Jesus is Yasser Arafat,” and an editorial in the PA official daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida referred to Arafat, Jesus and Abbas as the Palestinian “holy Trinity”: “Jesus is a Palestinian; the self-sacrificing Yasser Arafat is a Palestinian; Mahmoud Abbas, the messenger of peace on earth, is a Palestinian. How great is this nation of the holy Trinity!”
PMW has documented the ongoing PA historical revision, which falsely connects the current Palestinian-Arab population to a fabricated ancient Palestinian-Arab nation. Although there is no record of any Palestinian-Arab history and no people ever identified as being part of a Palestinian-Arab nation until very recently, the PA claims they are an ancient Palestinian people in an attempt to compete with Israel’s well-documented Jewish history in the land.
While Christian tradition and the historical writings of the period portray Jesus as a Jew living in the land of Judea in Israel, the PA consistently tells its people that they are the ones connected to Jesus. This is not only a distortion of Jesus’ personal history as reported in Christian writings, it is also an anachronism. The Romans changed the name of Judea to “Palestine” in order to punish the Jewish nation after its unsuccessful rebellion, a 136 years after the alleged birth of Jesus.