In a sad moment in the history of Jewish-Christian relations in the U.S., the leaders of the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME) have issued a statement accusing Israel of genocide, while also condemning American support for Israel. Mark Tooley notes that, near its end, the statement declares, “We remain in solidarity with Jesus Christ of Nazareth, a Palestinian Jew, and the Prince of Peace.” This reference to Jesus as a Palestinian reflects a disturbing new trend:

Sojourners, a storied religious-left journal, . . . published an article insisting Jesus was Palestinian. The author, who identifies as a Quaker Palestinian in North Carolina, lamented “various fictional accounts found in the Bible, like the story of the Exodus, which some use to justify Zionism and the current apartheid.”

The AME bishops, echoing the Sojourners author, call Jesus a “Palestinian Jew.” Would Jesus have understood Himself in this way? He never referred to it, and Palestine is never cited in the New Testament. Roman soldiers mocked Jesus as “King of the Jews.” He was from Judea. Hebrews of His time did not refer to their land as Palestine. . . . Denying or minimizing Jesus’ Jewishness is unhistorical. It also leads to erasing the Jewish people historically and politically.

Marina Rosenberg, meanwhile, shows us where such attempts to de-Judaize Jesus naturally lead:

During Christmas last year, there was a concerted effort by some Palestinian factions and their supporters worldwide to [convince people that] the current Israel-Hamas war is in fact a Jewish-Christian issue. In the Arab press and across social media, there were invocations of the age-old anti-Semitic trope of deicide—the accusation that Jews killed Jesus—by depicting baby Jesus being targeted by the Israeli army, including when he was born. . . .

These depictions of Jesus also carry the deeper message that as a Palestinian, Jesus was not a Jew.

Such arguments have long been found in the Christian tradition, although they have been routinely rejected by the mainstream. They stretch from the heretical 2nd-century theologian Marcion—who, believing the God of the Hebrew Bible was a wicked lesser deity, wanted to expunge the Old Testament from the canon—to 19th-century German anti-Semites, who argued on pseudo-scholarly grounds that Jesus was not “racially” Jewish. It’s clear that, whatever their form, these trends have always resulted in hatred of Jews.

In 2001, in the immediate wake of al-Qaeda’s attacks on America, Jonathan Rosen was asked to write something about anti-Semitism. So many of the points he raised in the resulting essay, reproduced in full at the link below, ring true today, and make clear just how predictable so much of the global reaction to October 7 has been. Rosen reflects on what he wrote then from the standpoint of 2024:

It is worth remembering that the Nazis saw the Holocaust as self-defense, though Jews were a minuscule fragment of a giant militarized nation. This was irrational, of course, even as they spoke the language of science, redefining Jews as a biological menace, like a virus, making the murder of babies and the elderly necessary, too, because like a microbe only extermination was the cure. It was the existence of Jews that made them a provocation, just as the existence of Israel, in any borders, inspired the Hamas massacre, as its 1988 covenant, never revoked, makes abundantly clear. The towers were a similar provocation.

It was back in 2001 that Rosen found himself “awakened to anti-Semitism,” as he wrote at the time:

I am not being chased down alleyways and called a Christ-killer. . . . But in recent weeks I have been reminded, in ways too plentiful to ignore, about the role Jews play in the fantasy life of the world. Jews were not the cause of World War II, but they were at the metaphysical center of that conflict nonetheless, since the Holocaust was part of Hitler’s agenda and a key motivation of his campaign. Jews are not the cause of World War III, if that’s what we are facing, but they have been placed at the center of it in mysterious and disturbing ways.

I felt this in a different form reading coverage of Israel in European papers. Though public expressions of anti-Semitism are taboo in a post-Holocaust world, many Europeans, in writing about Israel, have felt free to conjure images of determined child killers and mass murderers. Earlier this year, the Spanish daily La Vanguardia published a cartoon depicting a large building labeled “Museum of the Jewish Holocaust” and behind it a building under construction labeled “Future Museum of the Palestinian Holocaust.”