Christians and Jews share a common inheritance. We have origins, history and traditions rooted in the Hebrew and Christian scriptures, transmitted across millennia. Yet, I have witnessed, society at large has witnessed, a growing historical distortion that places both our histories – our houses – under attack.
This assault derives from the language and actions of official institutions, both diplomatic and religious, which is then promoted via social media content and news media reaching tens of millions, even hundreds of millions, of people who – for better or for worse – take these messages as fact. What is taking place is historical revisionism. It is deliberate, purposeful, and aimed at a specific target: the erasure of the Jewish people’s documented connection to their own land, their own history, and the figure at the centre of the Judeo-Christian inheritance. It is, in the famous words of Shakespeare, a curse upon both our houses.
At the centre of this erasure stands Jesus himself: as a historical person, a first-century Judean Jew who read from the Torah scroll in Hebrew, observed Passover, Sukkot, and Shavuot, attended the synagogue as a matter of weekly habit and custom, and was circumcised on the eighth day in accordance with the covenant of Abraham. The Gospel of Luke captures this plainly: “He went to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, and on the Sabbath day he went into the synagogue, as was his custom.” Three words that carry particular weight – as was his custom. This was not an occasional visit. This was a weekly ritual based in Jewish law and Jewish communal life.
The biography of the Jewishness of Jesus is the hermeneutical key to the entire body of the Christian scriptures. The Last Supper is a Passover Seder. The Sermon on the Mount is saturated in Torah verse. The cry from the cross quotes the Psalms. Detach Jesus from his Jewish context and none of these historical, theological and thematic elements would make sense. The Christian who accepts a de-Judaised Jesus does not thereby possess more of him. They possess less. And yet that de-Judaisation is precisely what a growing body of official communications, institutional rhetoric and actions, and viral social media content is achieving today in a post October 7 world.
The revisionism [is part of a] broader project to sever the established historical connection between the Jewish people, the Christian community, and the land from which the entire Judeo-Christian inheritance emerged.
An official diplomatic Easter communication in 2026, issued by a Palestinian diplomatic mission to Australia and widely circulated online, asserted that “Jesus Christ was born in the Palestinian city of Bethlehem and resurrected in the Palestinian city of Jerusalem.” This is a deliberate statement that carries the weight of formal authority. It also constitutes an act of historical revisionism.
Jesus was a Judean Jew. He was born in Bethlehem and died in Jerusalem, both located in the Roman province of Judea, named for the Jewish people who had inhabited the region. The toponym Syria Palaestina was not applied to this territory until 135 CE, when the Emperor Hadrian deliberately renamed the province to sever Jewish association with the land. Even then, “Palaestina” was a Roman administrative designation – not the name of a people or a political community. To apply the term “Palestinian” when referencing Jesus is an anachronism of the most consequential kind: a twentieth-century national identity projected back nineteen hundred years to distort the past. And if we were to extend the Palestinian Embassy the benefit of the doubt on that diplomatic communication, the depiction of Jesus in a keffiyeh removes all doubt about the intention.
Beyond the question of nomenclature, the visual dimension of this revisionism carries mass consequence. Across social media and in official institutional contexts, depictions of Jesus wearing a keffiyeh – the black-and-white checked garment used as a symbol of modern Palestinian national identity – have proliferated. These images appear in devotional paintings, Christmas nativity scenes, and advocacy communications from international organisations including the United Nations. They circulate widely and the intention is deliberate – erase the Jewish nature of Jesus.
Jesus himself would never have worn a keffiyeh. First-century Jewish life saw Jewish men wearing the sudra – a rectangular linen cloth, worn as a turban or neck covering, attested across the Mishnah, the Babylonian Talmud, the Peshitta, and the Christian scriptures itself. Jewish teachers at the time of Jesus wore this garment habitually, as a mark of reverence before God. It was, notably, banned in certain Muslim-controlled territories at later periods precisely because of its identification with Jewish religious practice.
To clothe Jesus in a keffiyeh is not only to dress him in a garment that postdates him by nineteen centuries, it is an act of appropriation of the most egregious kind – especially when it is endorsed by institutions of significant authority, such as the highest of religious institutions. When Pope Francis inaugurated and prayed before a nativity scene in the Vatican in which the infant Jesus lay on a keffiyeh, it required Jewish protest to prompt its removal. That it was installed there at all tells you everything you need to know about its intention.
These actions and images shape the understanding of millions of people who accept them as fact. If Jesus can be retrospectively claimed by a twentieth-century political identity, then by the same logic, so can the Temple in Jerusalem, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the entire archaeological, literary, genetic, and linguistic record of Jewish presence in the Land of Israel – a record that is, in fact, among the most thoroughly documented in human history. The revisionism does not stop at Jesus, the Jews or the Land of Israel. It is the leading edge of a broader project to sever the established historical connection between the Jewish people, the Christian community, and the land from which the entire Judeo-Christian inheritance emerged.
For Christians, a distorted Jesus is not some insult to be taken lightly. It is an assault on the reliability of the text Christians hold to be divinely inspired. The integrity of the Christian witness and the integrity of the Jewish historical record are not separable questions. They stand or fall together. Christians lose the authentic context of their own faith when these distortions spread. Both Jews and Christians lose the common historical ground on which genuine dialogue between the traditions becomes possible. And the Zeitgeist – the dominant moral and intellectual mood that shapes which ideas are rewarded and which are rendered unsayable – moves steadily in the direction of this distortion and promotes our deterioration.
To defend the historical integrity of the Jewish connection to their land and to Jesus, whom Christians hold as the Son of God and saviour of the world, is an act of fidelity to truth and to scripture. To honour that text faithfully is to resist every attempt to erase it. That is not a political position. It is a civilisational one.
Hava Mendelle is a writer and commentator with a focus on identity, politics, and faith. A graduate in Political Science from the University of Queensland, she brings an international perspective shaped by living and schooling in four continents and attending ten different schools before the age of sixteen. Her professional background spans over a decade in the Australian Defence Force and frontline healthcare, before stepping into advocacy. Having engaged closely with Jewish communities in Israel and across the Diaspora, her writing explores the intersections of politics, culture, and belonging.
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