ADC recently took out a billboard in New York City’s Times Square, wishing people a “Merry Christmas” and reminding everyone that “Jesus is Palestinian.” Zionists were pissed. Several Zionists on X (formerly Twitter) absurdly accused Palestinians of appropriating Christmas and Christianity. But Palestinians are Christian, too, and one cannot appropriate their own culture. Celebrating Christmas is a part of Palestinian culture.
Other Zionists tried the tactic of claiming that Jesus was Jewish and therefore not Palestinian. But Israelis do not venerate or worship Jesus; only Palestinian Christians do.
The source of their hysterical overreaction is, very simply, that the existence of Palestinian Christians gets in the way of Zionist propaganda to portray Israel as the vanguard of Judeo-Christian civilization against the alleged threat of Islam and Muslims.
In the wake of the still ongoing genocide in Gaza, and the stark decline in support for Israel in the Western world, a commissioned survey found that Israel would have little success trying to convince people that it isn’t a genocidal apartheid state — but there was one angle that might bear fruit: Portray Israel as the frontline of crazy Muslims hell-bent on conquering the West. This is a fiction since even Hamas’s goals are solely confined to Palestinian nationalism and not some global cause. But Zionists believe this fiction is their only shot at restoring support for Israel.
The Palestinian Christians pose a challenge to this strategy. The fact is that they, akin to Palestinian Muslims, are oppressed by Israel, but Israel needs to portray itself as a saviour of Christians in the Holy Land (ironically). Zionists have no intention of allowing Palestinian Christians to relate their experiences and ambitions in their own words — they intend to speak over them.
The historic reality is that Zionists, as we have related before, have long sought to pit Muslims and Christians against each other to advance Zionism:
Consider that as early as 1920, Chaim Weizmann, who would become the first president of Israel, and other Zionists, promoted such divisive politics, as related by Israeli historian Yonatan Mendel:
In 1920 Chaim Weizmann, then president of the Zionist Movement, called for the ‘provocation of dissension between Christians and Muslims’. Chaim Margaliot Kalvarisky, head of the Zionist Executive’s Arab Department, created the Muslim National Association with the purpose of widening divisions between Palestinian Muslims and Palestinian Christians.
These were the early seeds of a Zionist divide and rule strategy that prevailed after 1929.
Palestinian Muslim and Christian infighting would only weaken both communities against what should be — and, in fact, is — a common struggle against a common enemy determined to rid Palestine of all its people, Christian and Muslim alike. Palestinian Christians and Muslims know where their interests lie:
Palestinians were not so easily divided. In fact, the very first manifestations of Palestinian nationalism and resistance to both British rule and Zionist colonial-settlerism were the Muslim-Christian Associations that popped up all over Palestine.
From Issa al Issa, who started the newspaper Falastin in 1911, to activist Hanan Ashrawi, and too many to mention in between, Palestinian Christians have recognized the common threat Zionism poses to all Palestinians and have struggled to secure the inherent rights and liberties of their long-oppressed people.
