Twenty-seven billboards across Times Square went dark and then lit up with a single message: “Jesus is Palestinian.” The digital ads, funded by the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, appeared during the height of the Christmas season, drawing immediate backlash from holiday tourists who recognized the message for what it was—an inflammatory political statement disguised as religious dialogue.
The billboards represent more than a seasonal controversy. They embody a calculated attempt to rewrite history and erase Jewish identity from the land where that identity was forged. When Adeb Ayoub, the organization’s National Executive Director, claimed the subject of Jesus’s identity was “up for interpretation,” he revealed the intellectual dishonesty at the campaign’s core. History is not interpretation. Geography is not negotiable. Facts matter.
Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea, lived in the Galilee, and died in Jerusalem—all within the land of Israel. The New Testament records His birth during the reign of Herod, King of Judea, when Caesar Augustus ordered a census of the Roman Empire. The Gospel accounts place Jesus squarely within Jewish society: He was circumcised on the eighth day according to Jewish law, presented at the Temple in Jerusalem, celebrated Passover, debated Torah interpretation with Pharisees and Sadducees, and was called “Rabbi” by His followers.
The term “Palestine” as a designation for this region did not exist during Jesus’s lifetime. After the Bar Kokhba revolt in 135 CE, Roman Emperor Hadrian renamed Judea “Syria Palaestina” specifically to sever the Jewish connection to their ancestral homeland. The renaming was an act of colonial erasure—an attempt to wipe Jewish identity from the map after crushing Jewish independence. To call Jesus “Palestinian” requires ignoring two thousand years of documented history and accepting Roman imperial propaganda designed to erase Jewish presence from the very land where Jesus walked.
The Hebrew Bible records the covenant God made with Abraham: “On that day the LORD made a covenant with Abram, saying, ‘To your offspring I give this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates'” (Genesis 15:18). This covenant was confirmed to Isaac and Jacob, establishing an unbreakable bond between the Jewish people and the land of Israel. Jesus, called Yeshua in Hebrew, was a Jew born into this covenantal relationship. He was not Palestinian—a national identity that did not exist until the modern era—but a member of the tribe of Judah, from the lineage of King David.
The historical record is unambiguous. First-century Judea was populated by Jews, not Palestinians. The Gospels reference Judeans, Galileans, Samaritans, and Romans—never Palestinians. Archaeological evidence throughout Israel confirms a continuous Jewish presence for millennia. Synagogues, ritual baths, ossuaries inscribed in Hebrew and Aramaic, and coins bearing Jewish symbols all testify to the indigenous Jewish population to which Jesus belonged.
In any case, the author’s contention that Jesus was a Palestinian seems absurdly anachronistic when taken at face value. The Daily Wire succinctly explained this out-of-time aspect.
The name Palestine for the area that was home of the Jewish people only came into existence after the Romans exiled the bulk of the Jewish people from Judea in the second century A.D., long after the period in which Jesus lived. Eager to erase the Jewish identity to the land, the Roman emperor Hadrian did something that had heretofore been unheard of for the Romans, who never changed the name of provinces: he named the area “Palestina” after the Jews’ ancient enemies, the Philistines. The Philistines had been defeated by King David in his memorable defeat of Goliath; they were again defeated by David’s descendant, King Hezekiah. They eventually were completely defeated by the Assyrians and had ceased to exist long before the Jews fought with Rome.
This became the official PLO platform as evidenced by their frequent reference to Jesus as “the first Palestinian martyr” and whose annual Christmas statement reads, “Every Christmas, Palestine celebrates the birth of one of its own: Jesus.”
The Times Square billboards represent more than historical revisionism. They embody Liberation Theology, a politicized distortion of Christian teaching that has infiltrated mainline churches and even gained acceptance at the Vatican. This theology redefines Jesus as a Palestinian revolutionary living under Israeli occupation and transforms Christianity into a human rights movement centered on Palestinian national aspirations.
Islam has a strong belief in the Muslim Issa (Jesus) as the last and greatest prophet of Muhammad. In Islam, Jesus is not the son of God or divine, and did not die on the cross. Jesus ascended to heaven and is waiting for the Mahdi (Messiah).
The arrival of the Mahdi will coincide with the arrival of Jesus, who will be the Mahdi’s assistant in fighting the Masih ad-Dajjal, the false messiah, or anti-Christ. According to Muslim tradition, the Mahdi will reappear along with Jesus, who will declare himself a Muslim and kill Christians who refuse to convert. After this, Issa will be rewarded with a natural death and be buried alongside Muhammad in the fourth reserved tomb of the Green Dome in Medina.
Liberation Theology contends with the validity of the Torah, dismissing it as a “Zionist text.” It rejects the books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings—all of which confirm God’s gift of the land to the Jewish people. Instead, Liberation Theologians construct their narrative beginning with 1 Kings 21, casting King Ahab as modern Israel, murdering Naboth, and stealing Palestinian land. They declare that God will punish the Jews and return the land to its “rightful owners”: the Palestinians.
Shelley Neese, vice president of The Jerusalem Connection Report, identified Liberation Theology as worse than Replacement Theology. “Replacement Theology teaches that the Church superseded Jews as the beneficiary of God’s covenants,” Neese explained. “PLT goes one step further, saying that the Jews never had a place of favor in the first place. In some cases, they erase Israel from the Bible altogether. Many Palestinian Churches that teach PLT have changed the Psalms by removing every reference to ‘Israel’ and Zion.”
The theological vandalism extends beyond Scripture. Tricia Miller of CAMERA observed: “Palestinian replacement theology rewrites history by claiming that Jesus and the first Christians were all Palestinians, and that the Palestinians—not the Jews—are the indigenous people in the land. This assertion means that the Palestinian people are the rightful owners of the land, which serves their political agenda very nicely by delegitimizing the existence of the Jewish State.”
The movement’s origins trace to Yasser Arafat’s Christian adviser Hanan Ashrawi, who declared in 2001 that “Jesus was a Palestinian.” The PLO adopted this fiction as official policy, regularly referring to Jesus as “the first Palestinian martyr.” In 2019, Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh called Jesus “a Palestinian guerrilla fighter”—a grotesque distortion that weaponizes Christian faith for political warfare.
The Vatican’s embrace of this theology was displayed last Christmas when Pope Francis attended a nativity scene featuring Baby Jesus lying on a keffiyeh—the traditional Arab headdress that Arafat transformed into a symbol of Palestinian terrorism. The scene, crafted by Palestinian artists and presented by Palestinian officials in Vatican City, represented the institutional church’s surrender to political propaganda over historical truth.’
Melanie Phillips identified the intellectual pathway: “Replacing faith in God by faith in humanity to better its lot, they fell under the influence of the liberation theology promoted by the World Council of Churches, whose neo-Marxist, anti-capitalist, anti-West attitudes paved the way for liberal Christians to embrace the ‘social justice’ agenda. Since this agenda demonizes Israel as a colonialist oppressor, the progressive churches fell into line with this ‘new anti-Semitism’—the demonization of the collective Jew in the state of Israel.”
The Times Square billboards will disappear, but the damage of Liberation Theology continues. When history becomes malleable, when facts yield to political agendas, and when religious institutions sacrifice truth for fashionable causes, civilization itself erodes. Jesus was a Jew from Judea. No billboard campaign, no matter how prominent or persistent, can change that reality. The sources speak. The archaeology confirms. The covenant stands. Those who traffic in historical fiction may dominate Times Square for a season, but truth outlasts propaganda.
