COMMENTARY: Yasser Arafat’s carefully calculated Big Lie

c. 1996 Religion News Service (Rabbi Rudin is the national interreligious affairs director of the American Jewish Committee.) (RNS)-About 15 years ago the Palestine Liberation Organization leader, Yasser Arafat, began a propaganda campaign by describing Jesus as”a Palestinian.” At first, I thought he was kidding. Surely, I naively believed, no one would swallow Arafat’s utter […]

c. 1996 Religion News Service

(Rabbi Rudin is the national interreligious affairs director of the American Jewish Committee.)

(RNS)-About 15 years ago the Palestine Liberation Organization leader, Yasser Arafat, began a propaganda campaign by describing Jesus as”a Palestinian.” At first, I thought he was kidding. Surely, I naively believed, no one would swallow Arafat’s utter nonsense of rhetorically claiming Jesus for posthumous PLO membership. But I was wrong. This distortion of history became an effective weapon in Arafat’s conflict with Israel.


And when Israel turned over Bethlehem to the Palestinian Authority last Christmas, Arafat, a Muslim, proudly proclaimed:”This is the birthplace of our Lord the Messiah, the Palestinian.”Unfortunately, the international media happily bought into Arafat’s carefully calculated Big Lie.

Indeed, the PLO leader originally had even more grandiose plans for Christmas. As part of the holiday festivities in Bethlehem, Arafat wanted a laser beam display projected into the nighttime sky over Manger Square featuring Jesus and himself walking together in harmony as brothers. However, when some Italian journalists reported that Arafat”has stolen the show from Jesus,”church officials nixed the laser show.

But sadly, there have been almost no Christian protests about Arafat’s continuing claim that Jesus was”a Palestinian.”Do Christian leaders care that Jesus has been cynically hijacked for a narrow political purpose? Have they conveniently forgotten the New Testament accounts of Jesus as a Jew who lived in the land of Israel, and who was killed by the Roman occupation authorities in Jerusalem, the City of King David?

Have Christians forgotten the New Testament’s very first chapter where Matthew enumerates the 42 generations of the Jewish people from the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob through David to Jesus? Have Christian leaders forgotten that the name”Palestine”is never mentioned in the New Testament?

Have they forgotten it was the second-century Roman emperor Hadrian who first applied the term Palestine to the land? He did it to eradicate the name Judea and to taunt the Jews, including followers of Jesus, after the destruction of the Second Temple.

Unfortunately, Arafat’s cunning expropriation of Jesus is an old story. It is the modern political version of what a young Christian named Marcion tried to do in Rome around the year 144. Marcion attempted to break Christianity’s connection with Judaism, and he wanted no part of the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, or the history of Israel. For Marcion, Jesus had no human birth, but suddenly appeared as a mature 29-year-old adult.

The church officially condemned Marcion’s extreme ideas as a heresy, but vestiges of these intense anti-Jewish teachings still exist even today among some Christians. Clearly, that Jesus lived and died as a Jew was an acute embarrassment for Marcion and for the people who share his views.

Even the great Protestant reformer, Martin Luther, who had his own negative feelings toward Jews and Judaism near the end of his life, felt compelled in 1523 to write an important pamphlet entitled,”That Jesus Christ Was Born a Jew.”And, happily, many modern Christian theologians consistently emphasize the Jewish roots of Christianity and stress how essential it is for Christians to affirm and study the dynamic Jewish religious milieu into which Jesus was born.


Of course, Arafat’s cynical assault on Christian belief and history is more political than theological. But Marcion and the PLO leader do have something in common. If they can successfully delegitimize Jews and Judaism, they will have advanced their goals.

Marcion desired an amputation of Christianity from Judaism and the people of Israel. He wanted to eradicate the roots of his faith and pretend that Christianity developed in a religious, cultural and historic vacuum, free of its Jewish origins. Marcion tried, but he was declared a heretic.

Arafat’s agenda is to make Jesus an honorary member of the PLO, but it is also an effort to remove the Jews and their religion from the Middle East, and to undermine the inextricable bond linking the Jewish people to the land of Israel. If Arafat can make the world believe that Jews are a kind of foreign element, an interloper in the Middle East, he will have scored an enormous political victory.

It is time for both religious and political leaders to speak out against Arafat’s modern heresy that Jesus is”Our Lord the Messiah, the Palestinian.”A mindless condoning of Arafat’s distortions has given him encouragement to continue his campaign of historical falsification.

And the bloody 20th century has taught all of us that a Big Lie always starts as a small one, and if it is not publicly challenged and corrected, it festers like a cancer destroying not only truth, but human beings as well.

MJP END RUDIN

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