Ed Morrissey:
However, this is utter nonsense, not least because ‘Palestine’ did not exist at that time. At all. One would think that a Catholic priest would know the history of the region better than that. That name didn’t even come into being until about a century after the death of Christ, when the Romans put down the last of the Judean rebellions and drove many of the Hebrews from the region. That took place in 132 AD (or Common Era, if you prefer), 99 years after the Crucifixion. At that time, the Romans renamed Judea as Syria Palestina after combining it with Galilee, a name retained until the empire began its long collapse and withdrew from the region in 390 AD.
But even after the Romans renamed the region Syria Palestina, Jews maintained a significant population within it, although many more dispersed to other parts of the region. Christians emerged as a dominant population initially, first after the acceptance and endorsement of the Romans under Constantine, and later after the Roman retreat in 390. The area became more Christianized over the next couple of centuries through evangelization and other cultural phenomena rather than conquest, but Jews remained in the former Judea, Samaria, and Galilee. The Arabs, fueled by Islam, didn’t come in significant numbers for another couple of centuries after that — and even then, they didn’t identify themselves as “Palestinians” under the Roman rubric, which would have been unthinkable to them at the time.
Furthermore, while Bethlehem is today in the West Bank where ‘Palestinians’ want a state, that’s not where Mary or Joseph originated or lived before Jesus’ birth. They came from Nazareth, which not only wasn’t part of a mythical Palestine at that time, it’s not even part of the proposed Palestine today. Nazareth is within Israel proper and will remain so, regardless of any “two-state” settlement. Therefore, even if one accepts a backward projection of a modern claim to a period where the claimants’ ancestors wouldn’t control for another six or seven centuries, it’s very clear that Jesus would not have been a “Palestinian” at all, especially as the term is defined now. He was a Nazarene, a Judean, a Hebrew, and an Israeli in modern terms, and so were Mary and Joseph. And while Jesus and the Holy Family did flee Bethlehem as refugees into Egypt, they returned to Nazareth rather than Bethlehem after the death of Herod … which is again part of Israel, not part of a proposed “Palestine.”
None of this “parallels” our current world situation. Jesus was born under an occupation, but that’s because the Romans had occupied the land of the Jews. Today, the Jews have control of their own historic lands, having literally bought it from the peoples that had colonized it in the succeeding centuries, especially the Arabs, and then defended it in several wars in which Arabs invaded Israel in attempts to conquer and destroy it. Mizrahi Jews — natives of the region — comprise a majority of its population, thanks in large part to the ethnic cleansing of Arab and Persian nations in the first half of the 20th century and immediate post-independence period in the second half.
This argument is even more foolish than the “Jesus was an illegal immigrant” argument, and only slightly less silly than a claim by CNN’s Christopher Lamb (also flagged by Twitchy) that Jesus would have been born “in Gaza under rubble” today. Bethlehem was the city of David, the place where the prophets foretold that the Messiah would be born — and Bethlehem is nearly a hundred miles from the Gaza border. (Lamb had the good sense to delete his tweet after getting roundly criticized for it.)
The real message of Christmas has nothing do with any of these political questions. It has nothing to do with national or international relations. The real message of Christmas has to do with Christ bridging the gulf between the Lord and fallen humanity, and the forgiveness of sins and extension of the grace necessary for each of us to live in God’s eternal love. Anyone who claims otherwise is selling something … and these days, that’s usually a progressive media narrative meant to distract from reality.
# posted by Ranger @ 4:42 PM
