Jesus. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

A recent op-ed in the Palestinian Authority’s official daily publication called Jesus a “virtuous patriotic Palestinian forefather” and claimed Easter is “not a holiday for Christian Palestinians only but a holiday for Palestinian nationalism, because Jesus, may he rest in peace, is a Canaanite Palestinian,” Palestinian Media Watch reported.

Christian tradition affirms that Jesus was born Jewish, but the May 6 op-ed in Al-Hayat Al-Jadida states Palestinians are Jesus’s descendants and “rose from the ashes, like the phoenix, from the ruins of the Nakba (the Palestinian term for the 1948 establishment of Israel) and the Naksa (the Palestinian term for Israel’s victory in the Six Day War).”

The resurrection of Jesus, which Christians celebrate on Easter, “reflects the Palestinian narrative, which struggles against the descendants of modern Zionist Judaism, in its new colonialist form, that conspires with the Western capitalists who claim to belong to Christianity,” the op-ed says.