The British Messianic Jewish Alliance

Winter 2002 Issue 216

Moving the Goalposts

Richard Gibson

Fifty years ago, saying that someone was “gay” meant something altogether different to what it means today. There came a period of transition in which the term was understood in two ways. Today, however, the original meaning of the word has been eclipsed and everyone has had to modify their understanding of “gay” and the way they use it.  

            A similar shift of meaning has taken place with the word “ Palestine ”. Many Bibles still contain maps of “ Palestine in Jesus’ Time”, which is both anachronistic and confusing. “Palestine” was not a word in use at the time of Yeshua; it came into use seventy years later when the Roman legions of Titus destroyed Jerusalem and sought to wipe out all Jewish association with the land they previously called “Judea”. This was done by renaming the land after Israel ’s ancient enemies, the Philistines. “ Palestine ” was, in fact, a designer anti-Semitic word introduced by the Romans.

            If you read older commentaries you will find phrases like “the Jews of Palestine” or “Palestinian Judaism”, which were innocuous and non-political phrases at the time they were written. Though Bible scholars used the name Palestine to refer to the biblical Promised Land, they were in no way suggesting that there was once a sovereign country called Palestine with an ethnic Palestinian people living in the area now occupied by the Jewish State of Israel. Palestine was a scholarly term used to describe a land that had been endlessly conquered, reconquered, named and renamed. Scholars needed a name and Palestine was the word chosen. To illustrate how far things have gone in the way the term Palestine is used, in the British Mandate period The Jerusalem Post used to be called The Palestine Post, the Jewish population were called Palestinian Jews. We recently saw the film Exodus, in which Paul Newman plays the main character, a “Palestinian” commander. Newman’s character is not a member of the PLO or Hamas, he is a Hagganah officer.

            The term is not restricted to the realm of politics; there is even a “Palestinian” Talmud!

 The Politicisation of “ Palestine ”

What we have seen is the hijacking and politicisation of the word “ Palestine ”; the goalposts have been moved so far that they are not even on the pitch anymore! Before the re-creation of the Jewish State of Israel, all who lived in the British Mandate of Palestine were called Palestinians, including the Jewish community that always had a presence there through all the changing rulers of the land. The PLO’s own definition of a Palestinian is set out in two articles of the 1968 Palestinian National Charter. 

Article 5: The Palestinians are those Arab nationals who, until 1947, normally resided in Palestine regardless of whether they were evicted from it or have stayed there. Anyone born, after that date, of a Palestinian father - whether inside Palestine or outside it - is also a Palestinian. 

Article 6: The Jews who had normally resided in Palestine until the beginning of the Zionist invasion will be considered Palestinians. [My italics]

According to the definition laid down by Palestinian National Charter, a Palestinian can be any Arab, from any Arab country. But a Jewish person will be considered to be Palestinian only if they lived in the British Mandate of Palestine before 1947. This is not quite the picture that the media has presented to us!

In March, 1971 the Dutch newspaper Trouw published a revealing interview with PLO executive committee member Zahir Muhsein, in which he stated: “The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity. In reality today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct ‘Palestinian people’ to oppose Zionism.”

(http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=28222)

The “Palestinianization” of Jesus

Inaccurate claims made by Palestinian nominal Christians that Jesus was “a Palestinian” must be challenged. Such claims feed on the confusion and ambiguity of the word Palestinian that exists in the minds of many Christians. Other unsubstantiated and inaccurate claims are made, such as: “Palestinian Christians are the ‘Living Faithful’, who were among the first to follow the teachings of Jesus Christ”. (http://www.bethlehem.org)

Liberal Ecumenical Palestinian Liberation Theologians falsely claim that Palestinian Christians “are descendants of the first Christians whose faith goes back to Apostolic times”. (www.sabeel.org/news/newsltr1/index.htm#LiberationTheology) Such deliberate distortions of history and the Biblical text are championed by self-defined “evangelicals” such as Anglican vicar, Steve Sizer. Sizer has been so busy being anti-Christian-Zionist, (even calling Jews for Jesus a “Christian Zionist group” rather than an evangelical missionary society, in an article he wrote for a Muslim journal!) that he has long ago sacrificed the Bible as the foundation for his views and has adopted a politicised liberationist revisionist interpretation of history. Any Bible reader knows that all the first “Christians” were Jewish people living in Judea and the rest of the Roman Empire . They were not “Palestinians”; such a people-group did not then exist.

 Confusing Philistine and Palestinian

Who were the Philistines? They are not the ancestors of today’s Palestinians. The word “Philistine” means “immigrants”. The Philistines were the inhabitants of Philistia ; descendants of Mizraim who emigrated from Caphtor ( Crete ) (Amos 9:7; Jeremiah 47:4) to the western seacoast of Canaan . They were a tribe allied to the Phoenicians (Genesis 10:14 ).  In the time of Abraham they inhabited the south-west of Judea , Abimelech of Gerar being their king (Gen 21:32 ; 34; 26:1). Jerusalem was never a Philistine capital and there was almost perpetual war between them and the Israelites. These hostilities did not cease till the time of Hezekiah (2 Kings 18:8), when they were subdued. They were finally conquered by the Romans, who chose to rename Judea after the name of Israel ’s old enemies precisely because of this very ancient antagonism.

            The goalposts have changed and Christian preachers will only add to the confusion if in their preaching they continue to use the word “ Palestine ” to refer to the biblical Promised Land. “ Palestine ” is no longer an impartial scholarly term; it has become a politically charged word. We must appeal to all who love the Bible to adjust to this new reality. Palestine was not the name given by God to the Promised Land. The term served its purpose in times past but it no longer serves the Truth to talk about “ Palestine at the time of Jesus”.

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