Worshipers pray ahead of Christmas morning mass at Saint Catherine’s Church, in the Church of the Nativity, in Bethlehem in the West Bank, December 25, 2021. Photo: REUTERS/Mussa Qawasma

Each December, as holiday decorations go up and familiar music fills the air, another relatively new holiday ritual returns with equal predictability — social media fills with declarations that “Jesus was a Palestinian,” often joined by the equally fictional assertion that he was a “Palestinian refugee.”

These claims appear every Christmas season as reliably as ornaments and carols, as though the propagandists believe that repeating the lies might someday transform fiction into fact. 

But this isn’t just a harmless anachronism — like depicting Moses checking Google Maps while wandering in the Sinai. It is part of a longstanding effort to erase Jews from their own history, an effort that has resurfaced in recent years precisely because it is politically useful.

The Truth Has Never Been in Dispute

Jesus lived and died as a Jew from Judea. He was born into a Jewish family, observed Jewish law, taught in synagogues, quoted Jewish scripture, and was addressed as “Rabbi” by his followers. Christian scripture traces his lineage directly to the kings of Judah.

No credible historian debates this. There is not a single academic school, anywhere, that regards Jesus as anything other than a Jew living in the Jewish homeland.

Denying the Jewishness of Jesus is not a new mistake. It is part of a familiar form of appropriation — including supersessionism (replacement theology) — that has targeted Jews for centuries.

The Colonialist Name Activists Pretend Was Ancient

The assertion that Jesus was “Palestinian” collapses instantly under the simplest timeline. During the first century CE, the land was known as Judea, Samaria, the Galilee, or the Land of Israel. At that time, there was no place or nation called “Palestine,” no “Palestinians,” and no political or cultural identity by that name. No person during Jesus’s lifetime ever referred to himself as a “Palestinian.” Claiming otherwise is like insisting that a Pilgrim stepping off the Mayflower in 1620 called himself an “American.”

Notably, the first political or national entity in history to use the word “Palestine” emerged nearly 2,000 years after Jesus, in 1920, when the British Empire established the “British Mandate for Palestine.”

And the Roman Empire only introduced the geographic term “Syria Palaestina” in 135 CE — a century after Jesus’ death — to punish Jews for the Bar Kokhba revolt and to try to break their connection to their own land.

Today, anti-Israel activists echo that Roman attempt at erasure and call it solidarity.

The “Refugee” Myth Is Modern Politics Masquerading as History

Equally absurd is the claim that Jesus was a “Palestinian refugee.” The concept of refugee status did not exist in the ancient world. Applying modern political labels to a first-century Jewish family living in Judea under Roman control is not historical analysis. It is propaganda designed to map today’s conflicts onto a completely different era. 

It is emotional manipulation masquerading as moral clarity. 

This annual rewriting of Jesus’s identity is not isolated. It fits alongside ongoing efforts to detach Jews from their history: branding Jews as “colonizers” in their indigenous homeland; denying Jewish archaeological sites; questioning whether the Jewish Temples ever existed; claiming Jews descend from Khazars; and appropriating Jewish holidays and symbols.

The logic behind this pattern is straightforward: rewrite the Jewish past to delegitimize the Jewish present.

Why Jews Push Back Every December

When Jews correct these narratives, it is not pedantry. It is protection. Jewish history is not a suggestion. It is documented, excavated, remembered, and lived.

Jews are the indigenous people of the Land of Israel. Our language, traditions, texts, and collective memory all originate in the same land where Jesus lived and died as a Jew. To strip Jesus of his Jewish identity is to participate in the same erasure Jews have resisted for centuries.

This is not an academic disagreement. It is not merely historically illiterate. It is an antisemitic political act. 

The facts remain simple:

Jesus was a Jew.
From Judea.
Living in the Jewish homeland.

He was not Palestinian.
He was not a “Palestinian refugee.”

These claims are not mistaken; they are deliberate. And when they return this Christmas season, they should be called out for what they are: an attempt to erase Jews from their history and replace fact with ideology.

Micha Danzig is an attorney, former IDF soldier, and former NYPD officer. He writes widely on Israel, antisemitism, and Jewish history and serves on the board of Herut North America.