Since Christmas a new thing has been going on in my social media feed. It doesn’t stop these days, there’s something new every few days. This time, as Christmas was approaching, it was about Jesus. This is an opinion piece, not a scientific article. It is born out of tiredness, sadness, anger, and some other emotions. I had to get them off my chest, and it’s been a moment that things have been adding on.

The new thing that is going on (actually, not that new) is that Jesus supposedly is a Palestinian. Actually, the whole thing is ridiculous and sad at the same time. On one hand, I wouldn’t mind, since there are also depictions of Jesus as a black person to illustrate his solidarity with suffering black people for example, or as an indigenous person.

From that point of view, I wouldn’t have been particularly bothered if some of the statements about „Jesus the Palestinian“ hadn’t slipped into anti-Semitism. However, some of the posts were hair-raising and fit quite seamlessly into the good old tradition of other anti-Semitic statements: Jesus would have been born a Palestinian, exposed to child-murdering Jews, later killed by Jews as an adult – same old, same old accusation of deicide (can’t anyone invent something new?) and that this would somehow match the present-day existence of Palestinians who are exposed to genocide by the „fascist colonial state of Israel“, which again murders children full of bloodlust. It’s not difficult to recognize the well-known anti-Semitic myths here in thinly veiled new packaging of course.

Denying that Jesus was a Jew is nothing new – already Joseph Goebbels wrote in his novel „Michael“ that „Christ couldn’t have been a Jew. I don’t even need to prove that scientifically, that’s the way it is.“ Nothing new under the sun.