(RNS) — In Advent of last year, a Nativity scene at the Vatican briefly showed the baby Jesus wrapped in a keffiyeh, along with the spurious declaration that “Jesus was Palestinian.” This theme, which has been around for some years, has become more prominent since Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, helped in great measure by a Christmastime sermon given later that year by the Rev. Munther Isaac, a Palestinian Christian who is academic dean of Bethlehem Bible College, titled, “Christ in the Rubble.” The sermon went hand in hand with a display in Bethlehem depicting Jesus as a Palestinian baby under attack by the Israeli defense forces.
The attempt to project contemporary politics or our own aspirations onto such a sacred figure is always problematic. In this case, the parallels being made have gone from implausible to outright toxic and antisemitic.
Jesus, of course, was not historically a Palestinian, which was the name the Romans gave to Israel about a century after Jesus’ death as a sign of their imperial might. To do so would be to identify with the oppressors that had disrupted Jewish life in Israel.
It would all be silly if the identification of Jesus as a suffering Palestinian didn’t run roughshod not only over the Jews’ tragic history under Rome, but also replay antisemitic tropes denying Jesus’ Jewishness rarely heard in polite circles since the Holocaust. At times these approaches even remove Jews from their own story as God’s chosen people — even from the Bible’s Book of Exodus.
Interestingly, these tropes have reappeared under the banner of liberation theology, which emerged in left-wing Latin American Catholic circles in the 1960s and 1970s. While one can debate the nature of this movement, its application to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has done more harm than good.
Twenty years ago, Adam Gregerman, then a Ph.D. candidate at Columbia University, showed how liberation theology becomes distorted when theologians try to apply it to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
“The Exodus story — which to Jews is a narrative about God’s delivering the chosen people from bondage, bringing them to the land of Israel, and instituting a Law-based covenant — became for many liberation theologians a universal narrative of divine deliverance for all peoples,” Gregerman wrote in his landmark 2004 essay, “Old Wine in New Bottles: Liberation Theology and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.”
In so doing, said Gregerman, who today is associate director of the Institute for Jewish-Catholic Relations at St. Joseph University, “liberation theologians have only succeeded in reversing the powerful redemptive impulses in Christian theology to rid itself of the stain of intolerance of Jews that has existed in much of Christian history.”
The “Jesus is a Palestinian” trope also reprises a long-debunked view of Jews known as the doctrine of contempt, which suggests that Jews are no longer in covenant with God.
The notion that God is on the side of one group in a longstanding political conflict is especially frightening given the religious fanaticism of the terrorists who fight against Israel’s right to exist. Even so, it has been gaining attention and making its way into mainstream discourse. What began as a trickle of anti-Jewish theology during the Second Intifada, a violent Palestinian uprising of the early 2000s, has become a torrent since Oct. 7.
Simply put, if Christ lies amid the rubble, who are you blaming? The Rev. Isaac’s image of the Christ child as the victim of Israeli violence, amplified in the book “Christ in the Rubble: Faith, the Bible, and the Genocide in Gaza” (besides supporting the false notion of a genocide in Gaza), frames Jews as the killers of Jesus, the ancient blood libel that has cost millions of Jews their lives.
Rather than being lambasted for his false and hateful work, Isaac has been invited to speak at mainline Christian churches in the United States and has received a great deal of positive press. He has been joined by the Revs. Naim Ateek and Mitri Raheb in being elevated for hateful assertions about Israel and Jews.
Everyone in his conflict deserves better. We start by looking on with care, not contempt, at our present. We continue forward by seeing our past with as much clarity as possible — not projections upon it based on political ambitions and theological inconsistencies.
One can empathize with the suffering of Palestinians and acknowledge that Palestinians have developed national identities and connections to the land. But one must not do so by resurrecting anti-Jewish tropes and erasing the continuous Jewish connection to and presence in the land of Israel since Biblical times. Doing so is antisemitic and undermines Christianity itself.
Erasing Jewish history and the continual connection of Jews to the land of Israel — both physically through continual presence in Israel and emotionally through holidays, rituals, prayers and theologies — defies credulity and undermines the importance of Jesus’ story.
(Bishop Robert Stearns is founder and executive director of Eagles’ Wings and pastor of The Tabernacle in Orchard Park, New York. Rabbi Joshua Stanton is Jewish Federations’ associate vice president for interfaith and intergroup initiatives. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)