In my last Spanish post, I said that Jesus was a Palestinian. Uly insistently replied that he was just a Jew from Galiliee. I said that Egypt had different names in ancient times but that doesn't mean my ancestors weren't Egyptians. The name changed but people didn't.
Why was Egypt different and why was comparing Palestine to it something different to Uly?
In a different context, that wouldn't bother me. However, considering the genocide in Gaza and the long colonization of Palestine in general, I paused.
Telling the truth requires two necessary steps. First, it must challenge dominant narratives, narratives imposed by colonialists and imperialists. Secondly, it's to seek perspectives that might make us uncomfortable.
One of the dominant narratives is that there was no Palestine. Palestine didn't exist politically as an entity as it is now. However, according to geopolitics, it did exist.
Digging into history, we can find evidence that Palestinians were there.
The very first traces of the name Palestine come from the time of Ramses II and III, roughly around the mid-12th century BC. There is an inscription dated to around 1150 BC at the Medinet Habu temple in Luxor which refers to the Peleset (PLST) among those who fought against Ramses III. Today we know the Peleset as the Philistines.
In addition, the word Palestine appeared in the fifth century BCE, in the writings of the Greek historian Herodotus. He wrote about a Syrian district called "Palestine" between Egypt and Phoenicia. Palestine was called Palestine before being called Judea, before the Roman colonization.
Colonizers tried to strip Palestine away of its identity of being a nation so the indigenous people who lived there could be stripped away of their land. Next, they called Palestine a land without a people so they could give it to a people without a land. This land wasn't literally empty but it wasn't a land according to their terms, the terms they made up to deprive us our land and our rights.
Changing rulers doesn't change populations. How those populations identify themselves might change throughout history, but they are the same people, more or less.
Palestinians might call themselves Arabs but that doesn't mean they came from afar, the Arabian Peninsula. Over many centuries, they slowly adopted the language and religion of the Arabs who conquered Palestine. Arabs, or any other group, never fully replaced the whole local populations in Palestine, Egypt or Andalus -- as it was the case with European colonialism of the Americas where indigenous people were erased.
The following paragraph is a part of an article I totally agree with:
If we reject the “we were there first” argument, and not treat it as a legitimizing factor for Israel’s creation, then we can focus on the real history, without any ideological agendas. We could trace how our pasts intersected throughout the centuries. After all, there is indeed Jewish history in Palestine. This history forms a part of the Palestinian past and heritage, just like every other group, kingdom or empire that settled there does. We must stop viewing Palestinian and Jewish histories as competing, mutually exclusive entities, because for most of history they have not been.
In the end, I'd consider Jesus a Palestinian. And he was the first Palestinian martyr, as Yasser Arafat used to say. This is my personal perspective which has nothing to do with history.
In my opinion, it's not a matter of nationality or historical fact but a matter of resistance. Jesus is a symbol that many people look up to. An icon that gives them hope that Palestine will be liberated one day. All the oppressed nations will be liberated, no matter what their ethnicities, beliefs, and languages are.
Freedom to Palestine, Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, Sudan, Congo and all the oppressed. Long live resistance around the world.
Headline image by ashley_hayes on Unsplash
I understand your pain. However, I have to disagree about the colonization of the Americas. Central and South America are predominantly inhabited my indigenous people—do they look Spanish to you? It was the Americans and the Brits that wiped out the native population in North America. And you know why that didn't happen in Latin America? The Pope ordered the Spanish Crown to treat indigenous people like any other subject (i.e., they're also humans, so don't mass kill them.) Of course, things didn't go smoothly, but it was nothing compared to the mass killings in North America.
I know. I know. Why didn't the Pope say anything about black slaves from Africa? I have no excuse for that. However, even if the Pope had said something, he would've had little sway over the Brits, the Americans, and the Dutch since they were mainly protestant.
@Double-Zee I think we are talking about two different things: history and symbolism.
Historically speaking, Jesus was a Jew from Galilee. He lived within Jewish society, followed Jewish law, read the Hebrew Scriptures, and participated in Jewish religious life. That point isn't really debated among historians.
It's also true that the name Palestine has ancient roots. Greek writers like Herodotus used the term for a region of the eastern Mediterranean. But a geographic name isn't the same thing as a national identity. The people of the region in the first century identified themselves as Jews, Samaritans, Greeks, Romans, and others. Jesus himself clearly belonged to the Jewish people.
So saying that Jesus was Jewish is simply a historical statement about the society he lived in. Calling Him “Palestinian” is a modern interpretation or a symbolic statement. As you said yourself at the end of your post, it's a matter of resistance and symbolism, not of historical fact.
Those two kinds of statements shouldn’t be confused.
Dz, I mean no offense, so please don't take what I'm about to write the wrong way. Although I sympathize with the Palestinian cause from a humanitarian perspective, I don't think it's appropriate to think of Jesus as a symbol of resistance. I understand your point about Jesus being a Palestinian martyr. I assume that the logic behind that statement is that Jewish people caused his death, which is true, just as they're causing the deaths of Palestinians in Gaza.
However, Jesus was culturally and religiously Jewish. Modern palestinians are Muslims. When you say that Jesus was a Palestinian martyr, it's just feels wrong. Jesus wouldn't have thought of himself as a Palestinian. First and foremost, though, Jesus didn't sacrifice himself for the Palestinian cause—whatever the interpretation—he did it for his own religious cause and to save everyone from damnation, regardless of their religion.
I hope I've presented my thoughts clearly. I want you to know that I'm not attacking you. I'm just pushing back on some of your points. I don't claim to hold the absolute truth.
@Simone- Beautifully put!
Thanks for sharing your perspective, @CocoPop!
No offense at all, @Simone-! We are learning from each other through such discussions. As far as I know, there were kilings of indigenous people in South America, maybe not at a horrible scale as that ocurred in North America and Australia.
Jesus was a Jew, this is a fact I don't deny. Being Jew is following a specific belief that has nothing to do with the place where he came from. He could be a Jew from Alexandria or a Jew from Baghdad. But he happened to be a Jew from Galilee, which is part of Palestine now. It didn't matter back then but it does matter now. You might disagree with me but this is how I see it. As I see Ramses II and Akhenaten as Egyptians although Egypt wasn't called Egypt at that time. If Jesus lived in Palestine now, he would sacrifice himself for Palestine and the whole humanity. In the end, it's interpretations which vary from one perspective to another.
**I had to add that Modern Palestinians are Muslims, majority, and Christians, and there were Jews but I have no idea what became of them now.