r/JewsOfConscience • u/Educational_Board888 Non-Jewish Ally • 15d ago
News Vatican removes nativity display featuring baby Jesus lying on keffiyeh
https://www.thejc.com/news/world/vatican-removes-nativity-display-featuring-baby-jesus-lying-on-keffiyeh-fvrdcbbfThe wooden statue was criticised by Jewish groups for reinforcing the trope that Jesus was a Palestinian.
The backlash came almost immediately from religious entities and individuals worldwide.
On Monday, B’nai B’rith International described feeling “disturbed by the Vatican display of a Palestinian-made nativity scene featuring Jesus on a keffiyeh and the pope’s appearance with it.” The group said the display “isn’t just politicisation, but revisionism. It presents (only) Palestinians as innocent victims—and Jesus as a Palestinian, not a Jew.”
In response to the display’s removal, David Parsons, senior vice president and spokesman for the International Christian Embassy Jerusalem, noted that “we are relieved at reports that the Vatican has decided to remove the provocative nativity display with an infant Jesus resting on a black-and-white keffiyeh, which is an unmistakable symbol of Palestinian nationalism.”
He said “This crèche not only denigrated Jewish heritage, it also undermined core tenets of the Christian faith. Indeed, millions of Christians worldwide were instantly incensed by this exhibit ahead of the Christmas season. The Vatican did the right thing in taking it down.”
Parsons described the display as “theological malpractice for the Holy See to allow this display to remain. For if Jesus was a Palestinian Arab, then he would not have qualified to be Christ, the promised messiah and savior of the world.”
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u/WellActuallllly Non-Jewish Ally 15d ago
Jesus was a Palestinian Jew so removing it is an act of cowardice.
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u/justadubliner 15d ago
I'm disappointed that they caved but not surprised. Zionists get their way no matter how evil the rest of the world sees them as. The world must be gagged while forced to watch atrocities day in and day out.
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u/oncothrow 15d ago
I am surprised. Surely when they did it they knew that the Israelis were going to throw a hissy fit? They can't have been that naive, it was a deliberate social message, wasn't that the whole point?
It presents (only) Palestinians as innocent victims—and Jesus as a Palestinian, not a Jew.
What even is this objection? Theologically? Judaism rejects Jesus as Messiah. The whole point is that the Christians of Bethlehem are Palestinian. The message was he was born in Bethlehem, and that just as Jesus was born under the oppression of the Roman Empire, a modern Jesus would be born under the oppression of another state.
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u/Perfectshadow12345 Catholic communist with a Sephardic surname 14d ago
Also one can be both Jewish and Palestinian. There were Jews which were part of the Palestinian people before Zionist colonisation.
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u/suaveponcho Jewish Anti-Zionist 14d ago
There are still Jews today in the West Bank (albeit not many) who identify as Palestinian Jews rather than Israeli Jews
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u/inex_frami Non-Jewish Ally 14d ago
really? any sources on that? (im sorry if this sounds obnoxious, to ask for sources, im just curious)
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u/suaveponcho Jewish Anti-Zionist 14d ago
I interviewed a Palestinian woman from Nablus last month who told me all about growing up next to her Samaritan neighbours, who never saw themselves as Israeli. Here’s one article about them below. Although in this article it says they don’t see themselves as Jewish either, I’m not sure this is universal.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/22/world/middleeast/samaritans-israeli-palestinian.html
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u/inex_frami Non-Jewish Ally 14d ago
thank you so much, I'll look into it!
what language do they speak?
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u/suaveponcho Jewish Anti-Zionist 14d ago
Pretty sure these days the ones still in the West Bank speak Arabic while the ones that have moved to Israel speak Hebrew. They also have their own old version of Hebrew. Don’t ask me any more questions lol you’ve pushed me to the limit of what I know
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u/inex_frami Non-Jewish Ally 14d ago
maybe a tip on where to find more info on them? some ethnographic work?
that's the last question, swear to god hahah
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u/Zellgun Non-Jewish Ally 15d ago
I’m curious, isn’t this whole nativity scene, celebration and everyone involved, specific to the religion of Christianity? Am I wrong to question why another religion is getting involved with an entirely Christian situation?
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u/WJG1988 15d ago
I went to Catholic school, and am still a practicing Catholic. We were taught that Jesus was definitely not white, and would have looked more Arab/ typical middle eastern. None of us cared because he's still Jesus, and he's the shit. When asked why he was displayed as white, we were shown early artwork of him as a brown man, then he was gradually bleached. The reasoning was pretty basic. It's easier to sell a white man a white God, since it was/is in the mindset that anything else is lesser. When I hear millions of "Christians" are upset, I hear millions of ethno-supremacists refusing to believe in a God that isn't the same colour as them, despite the setting of the book they claim to have read.
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u/IWantFries21 Non-Jewish Ally 14d ago
It was such a beautiful display. So cowardly and ridiculous to go back on it
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u/blishbog 15d ago
Wasn’t Jesus a Palestinian Jew objectively?
They exist. Like that rare one who took years to officially convert by all the proper channels and then Israel killed him
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u/Ok_Editor_710 Non-denominational 14d ago
You are absolutely right. Jesus was a Palestinian Jew, not a Zionist/Israeli Jew!
It's all tied to the cult-like mentality of Zionist society that sees any acknowledgement of Palestinian existence or Heritage as a nullification of the fiction they have used to prop up Israel.
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u/loselyconscious Traditionally Radical 14d ago
I mean, that's a little bit like saying, wasn't Julias Ceaser objectively Italian? It's not entirely wrong, but it's a bit of playing with the fact to tell a story (not a story I have any problem with)
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u/DeadlyPython79 12d ago
It was called Palestine back then too though, Italy wasn’t called Italy yet
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u/loselyconscious Traditionally Radical 12d ago
It wasn't called Palestine by the people that lived there or the people that ruled it, and Italy was used as a geographic term referring to the peninsula
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u/SirPansalot Non-Jewish Ally 12d ago edited 12d ago
I’m sorry, but it objectively was: https://talesoftimesforgotten.com/2023/10/23/no-the-roman-emperor-hadrian-didnt-invent-palestine/
Tibullus, Elegies 1.7.17–18:
“Quid referam, ut volitet crebras intacta per urbes alba Palaestino sancta columba Syro” This means:
“Why should I tell how, through the packed cities, the white dove sacred to the Palestinian Syrian flutters unharmed?”
“Although Tibullus’s use of the name Palaestina is geographically ambiguous, other Roman authors before the time of Hadrian use the name in a way that clearly encompasses the entire land between the Jordan and the Mediterranean. Some even, like Herodotos, refer to Jews as “Palestinian Syrians.”
Ovid, Ars Amatoria 1.416, 2 CE: references the “culta Palaestino septima festa Syro” (“seventh-day feast observed by the Palestinian Syrian”), (Jewish Shabbat)
Ovid, Fasti 2.461–464, 8 CE:
“terribilem quondam fugiens Typhona Dione, tunc cum pro caelo Iuppiter arma tulit, venit ad Euphraten comitata Cupidine parvo inque Palaestinae margine sedit aquae.”
“Once Dione, fleeing the terrible Typhon, at the time when Iuppiter bore arms on behalf of heaven, went to the Euphrates accompanied by little Cupid and sat on the brink of the waters of Palestine.”
This also includes Jews who lived in the land from the river to the sea (minimum definition of Palestine since 5th century b.c.e)
”Jewish authors writing in the Greek language before the time of Hadrian also frequently use the name Palaistínē to refer to the geographic area between Phoinikia and Egypt.”
Philon of Alexandria, Every Good Man is Free 75: (describes a big chunk of Jews as living in Palestine Syria)
“ἔστι δὲ καὶ ἡ Παλαιστίνη Συρία καλοκἀγαθίας οὐκ ἄγονος, ἣν πολυανθρωποτάτου ἔθνους τῶν Ἰουδαίων οὐκ ὀλίγη μοῖρα νέμεται.”
“And even Palestine Syria is not barren of kalokagathia [i.e., the Greek ideal of aristocratic beauty and cultural refinement], where a not small portion of the much-peopled nation of the Jews reside.”
Notice how he does not say that a majority of Jews resided in Palestine as the Jewish diaspora was huge by this time, even if a huge number of them resided there.
Titus Flavius Iosephus, conclusion, Antiquities of the Jews: (AJ 20.259)
“τῶν ἡμῖν συμβεβηκότων τοῖς Ἰουδαίοις κατά τε τὴν Αἴγυπτον καὶ Συρίαν καὶ Παλαιστίνην”
“the things which befell us Jews in Egypt and Syria and Palestine”
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u/loselyconscious Traditionally Radical 12d ago
Ok not sure why you think this contradicts what I said. This was not politically know by that name and it was not a name used by jews.
Like I said the word Italian also was used at the tike, but was still not the would have used to describe themself
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u/SirPansalot Non-Jewish Ally 12d ago edited 10d ago
You said that the people who ruled it or the people who lived there “didn’t call it Palestine.”
“It wasn’t called Palestine by the people that lived there or the people that ruled it, and Italy was used as a geographic term referring to the peninsula”
Unfortunately, there’s no mention of added political dimension to the comment I’m replying to.
You’re right about Italy though. Fun fact: The Romans did call themselves Ausones, (an italic people) especially the later Romans/Byzantines in the Middle Ages. They did not identify with the Greeks much at all - they called their language not Greek but Romaïc (Roman tongue) and identified themselves and their ancestors as Ausones rather than Greeks/Hellenes. (See Anthony Kaldellis, Romanland)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ausones
You were indeed correct that nobody identified as Palestinian in the modern national sense. Then again, nobody identified as anything in the modern national sense back then.
But Jews who lived there absolutely did called the region Palestine as my examples show. (Josephus or Iosephus)
Okay, fine. Maybe those guys were Romanized elites and aren’t the most representative of Jews. These guys lived during a time when the Roman Empire was still Roman citizens native to Italy dominating over non-Roman subjects. But they also lived in a time when the category of Roman as expanding rapidly, as more and more people of culturally, religiously, and ethnically diverse communities became Roman citizens - Arabs, Berbers, Germanic people, Galatians, (Celtic people who used Greek as their main script who lived in Turkey) Greeks, Syrians, Egyptians, etc. This culminated in all free non-Romans becoming Romans citizens in the 3rd century by Caracalla, and as the state expanded to fit the needs of these new Romans, Greek became solidified as the lingua Franca of the Eastern Mediterranean.
Most Jews in the Eastern Mediterranean spoke a fishery of languages from Aramaic to Greek to Hebrew. From 200 to 400 C.E, Hebrew fully died out as a spoken language amongst Jews, becoming a scared liturgical language. Thus, Aramaic and Greek became the dominant international languages of the Jews of the East. Greek fully solidified its dominance as the lingua Franca right around when Hebrew was gasping its last breathes as a spoke language. The expansion of the state meant that literally everyone who lived in the empire had to speak some level of Greek in order to make dealings with the expanded Roman administration.
Therefore, the vast majority of Jews living in the huge Eastern Mediterranean region eventually grew to speak Greek in addition to Aramaic, and thus spoke of Palestine, since Palestine was the name for the land between the river and the sea. (although they obviously knew and cherished the name of Eretz Yisrael too)
This integration of non-Romans into Romanitas was extremely successful. It eventually led to the disappearance of distinct peoples and languages like that of the Thracians and the Galatians as anything not associated with Rome. A medieval Arab source stated that the Greeks became wholly absorbed by the Romans (finally) after hundreds of years of autonomy and independent identity. The name Hellene and Hellenism was associated with paganism in the christianized Roman Empire (Roman sources call the Persians Hellenes in this way) while the term “Greek” and Greece” became wholly geographical terms. While later Romans acknowledged Greekness as a core part of Romanness - they spoke of “the Ancient Greeks” like they didn’t exist anymore. They regarded “the ancient Romans and Ausones” as OUR ancestors, implying direct linear continuity.
The Jews were WAY too religiously distinct as Roman identity shifted to include Christianity as one of its core features. After the disasters of the 7th century and the loss of Egypt, Syria, and Palestine, Roman identity shedded non-Orthodox denominations of Christianity, linguistically diversity in Syriac, Aramaic, etc, and the culturally distinctiveness of Syria, Palestine, and Egypt.
Basically: by the 9th century, if you were a Greek-speaking Orthodox Christian, you were firmly, without a doubt Roman. (and treated fully equally by both state AND society)
But the changes of Hellenization in late antiquity over the peoples of Rome included the Jewish people within and outside the borders of Romanía. (Romanland, the homeland of the Romans that merged as a term in the 4th century to designate the Roman Empire) But the Jews living in the conquered territories by the caliphate eventually adopted Arabic in addition to Greek (as a trading international language), fashioning a dish t Judeo-Arabic. The dominance of Greek meant that the Arabic term for Palestine was well… Palestine. (Filastīn)
Thus, for more than a thousand years and a half years, the Jews of the Byzantine/Ottoman Empire (Romanīa or Vasileia Rhomaion or Politeia Rhomaion/Sublime Ototman State or Dynasty of Osman or the Well-Protected Domains or Ottoman Realms) and of the eastern Islamic world spoke of Palestine and thought of Eretz Yisrael in prayer.
See Hellenism in Byzantium, Anthony Kaldellis, 2014
Romanland, Anthony Kaldellis, 2019
Anthony Kaldellis, the New Roman Empire, 2023
A History of the Byzantine State and Society, Warren Treadgold, 1998
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u/MassivePsychology862 Non-Jewish Ally 15d ago
Who is this person you are speaking about?
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14d ago
They’re probably referring to this person, David Ben Avraham:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_David_Ben_Avraham
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u/Dry_Bumblebee1111 15d ago
Jesus?
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u/MassivePsychology862 Non-Jewish Ally 15d ago
He tried to convert?
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u/Dry_Bumblebee1111 15d ago
Sorry, I misread that the comment you replied to was talking about someone else as well as Jesus. My bad!
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u/MassivePsychology862 Non-Jewish Ally 15d ago
Yea but who!!! lol. I’m racking(sp?) my brain. I feel like this would be someone well known?
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u/ZipZapZia South Asian Muslim 14d ago
I don't think the person OP is talking about is well known/famous. I think it was a reference to an event that happened in the news last year. There's was a Palestinian man in the West Bank (if I'm remembering correctly) who converted to Judaism and was killed by the IDF for some BS reason. I remember it sparking debates of how even if you convert, Israelis aren't going to see that/treat you well because of it. If I can find an article about the incident, I'll try and edit it to my comment
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u/MassivePsychology862 Non-Jewish Ally 14d ago
Oh. Eek. Now I feel a bit gross. That’s awful. I never realized the conversion process took a long time until recently. It seems like a lot of branches have their own distinct traditions and timelines.
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u/Dry_Bumblebee1111 15d ago
I think it's funnier if the answer stays as Jesus.
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u/MassivePsychology862 Non-Jewish Ally 15d ago
Agreed. Thank you for making the call 🫡
Edit: I hope the commenter never answers.
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u/GlitteringPotato1346 Non-Jewish Ally 14d ago
By citizenship he was Roman with a lesser citizenship because of his parentage, religion, and land of birth.
His ethnicity was Aramaic. (No longer exists but neither Palestinians nor Israelis as we know them today existed back then)
His religion is pretty obvious given that he was frequently seen at the og temple.
All that can be said for certain is that he was a non white Jew who was taller than an average infant and smaller than the temple, the Roman government did not like him, and a bunch of stuff he probably said
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u/loselyconscious Traditionally Radical 14d ago
His ethnicity was not "Aramaic." Arameans had not been around for a long time, and the concept of ethnicity is a historical. He was a Jew who spoke Aramaic and lived under Rome and its Judean clients. (I don't think there is any evidence he was a citizen. Word like "Palestinian" or "Israeli" would be meaningless to him and the people fo that time.
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u/specialistsets Non-denominational 15d ago
Jesus would have been born in Judea before the region was referred to as Palestine. People then identified with their town or region, hence "Jesus of Nazareth" or referring to Jesus as a "Galilean"
In Ottoman and British Mandate Palestine, "Palestinian Jews" was used to refer to all Jews of all kinds living anywhere in Palestine, though it wasn't a distinct identity on it's own.
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u/EmmThem Non-Jewish Ally 15d ago
Palestine as a name comes from Phillistine, which is the name for the people of that region via the Ancient Greeks, specifically Herodotus used the term, several hundred years before Christ. The name Palestine then became even more official during the Roman period. So… Jesus was before AND after the region was called Palestine.
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15d ago
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u/kylebisme 15d ago edited 14d ago
Per Martin Noth, while the term in Greek likely originated from an Aramaic loanword, its Greek form showed clear derivation from παλαιστής, palaistês, the Greek noun meaning "wrestler/rival/adversary". David Jacobson noted the significance of wrestlers in Greek culture, and further speculated that Palaistinê was meant as both a transliteration of the Greek word for "Philistia" and a direct translation of the Hebrew name "Israel" – as the traditional etymology of which also relates to wrestling, and in line with the Greek penchant for punning transliterations of foreign place names.
And furthermore:
By the time the Septuagint (LXX) was translated, the term Palaistínē (Παλαιστίνη), first popularized in written form by Herodotus, had already entered the Greek vocabulary. However, the term was not used in the LXX to describe Philistia. Instead, the term Land of the Phylistieim (Γη των Φυλιστιειμ) is used from the books of Genesis through Joshua.
Also, as explained further down the page, when Herodotus wrote around 450 BCE of circumcision being practiced by "the Syrians of Palestine" he was likely referring to Hebrews, and Ovid was surely referring to Jews when he wrote of "the seventh-day feast that the Syrian of Palestine observes" right around the same year Jesus was born. Also, when Aristotle's described exceptionally salty "lake in Palestine" around 350 BCE he almost surely wasn't referring to anything near the coast but rather to the Dead Sea, and Philo of Alexandra, a Jew himself, within a decade after Jesus's death made clear references to Jews of Judaea as living in Palestine when he wrote:
Moreover Palestine and Syria too are not barren of exemplary wisdom and virtue, which countries no slight portion of that most populous nation of the Jews inhabits. There is a portion of those people called Essenes.
So, describing Jesus as a Palestinian Jew is historically accurate.
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u/Thisisme8719 Arab Jew 15d ago
though it wasn't a distinct identity on it's own.
Yes it was. "Palestinian" was already an identity by the late Ottoman period. It was not only an identity in Palestine during the Mandate period, it was even how parts of the Palestinian diaspora in places like Honduras and Chile identified themselves when they were petitioning for Palestinian citizenship
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u/specialistsets Non-denominational 15d ago
I am referring to the term "Palestinian Jews", which wasn't a distinct/unified identity
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u/Thisisme8719 Arab Jew 15d ago edited 15d ago
Oh yeah, that's mostly true. Though there actually were a handful of Jews who did refer to themselves as Palestinian (mainly the Arabic speaking intelligentsia). Avraham Elmaliah used the phrase "Yahadut Falastinit" in his eulogy of Shimon Moyal
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u/Carlsen021 Anti-Zionist 15d ago
These guys feel abused by the keffiyeh as much as I feel disgusted by the Yeezreali flag. So I can understand it.
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u/touslesmatins Non-Jewish Ally 14d ago
The difference is I definitely couldn't go up to my nearest American synagogue and meddle in their affairs and tell them to take down their Israeli flags because it makes me feel unsafe. The gall of the people who would go to a church and complain about how they recognize their religious figures. The audacity.
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u/Carlsen021 Anti-Zionist 14d ago
Synagogues display Yeezreali flags? Lol.
It’s desecration.
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u/touslesmatins Non-Jewish Ally 14d ago
All the ones around me do
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u/Carlsen021 Anti-Zionist 14d ago
They wouldn’t dare in Europe. They know the feelings. It would be provocative and asking for trouble.
One journalist for that pro-Yeezreali rag the Daily Telegraph, ran through Oxford city centre in the UK) with a Yeezreali flag. And then came back and wrote a long whine on the ‘warm’ reception she received and the ‘anti-semitism’ at the University. What did she expect, claps and hugs?
The dislike for what is going on in Gaza runs deep. You don’t want to be wearing Yeezreali emblems or flags.
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u/touslesmatins Non-Jewish Ally 14d ago
I find that hard to believe, just knowing how brazen zionists are. You're honestly telling me that European synagogues don't display Israeli flags?
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u/Carlsen021 Anti-Zionist 14d ago edited 14d ago
Well actually I don’t know where the synagogues are where I live, or mosques for that matter. Haven’t felt the need to visit them.
I think it’s very unlikely that synagogues and schools would display them. These are European Jews, different from the U.S. variety who have more support amongst the populace.
They can’t be too brazen. Yeezreal is poison at the moment, and that’s likely to stay for some decades imo.
I mean no one goes around targeting Jews, it just doesn’t happen, but it’s wiser for Jews to keep a lower profile while the Yeezreali killings are beamed into living rooms every day.
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u/touslesmatins Non-Jewish Ally 14d ago
I think you're living in an alternate reality. The synagogues, JCCs, Jewish schools etc all around me are awash with Israeli flags, hostage posters, yellow ribbons, and other such symbols. I bet if you actually saw the ones around you you'd see the same. There's nowhere in the Western world right now where such displays are toxic in any way.
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u/Carlsen021 Anti-Zionist 14d ago
You live in the US. I am speaking about Europe.
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u/touslesmatins Non-Jewish Ally 14d ago
Yes and Europe is as pro-zionist as the US, if not more so.
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u/KS-ABAB Jewish Ancestry 15d ago
I don't support what happened here, but I find it funny that the very institution that ordered the crusades was forced to back down from a political statement over a fear of upsetting Jews. Like that time a few decades ago that Josef Ratzinger had to apologise to Muslims for quoting an anti-Islam medieval text.
Pope Urban II would be rolling in his grave!
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u/loselyconscious Traditionally Radical 14d ago
I don't think they were afraid of upsetting Jews. I think they were afraid of upsetting pro-Israel (mostly American) Catholics
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u/ashweeuwu Non-Jewish Ally 14d ago
it bothers me so much that a core part of Zionism is refusing to acknowledge “Jewish” and “Palestinian” identities co-existing, 1. as if they are somehow antonyms? and 2. as if people with multiple heritages/ethnicities don’t exist???
Jewish Palestinians existed before the creation of the modern state of Israel. Jewish Palestinian families exist in the modern diaspora.
Jesus was not Jewish or Palestinian, he was Jewish AND Palestinian. he was a brown Jew born in Bethlehem. he would fit into our modern understanding of both of these identities. that is not controversial or reviSiOniSt to say.
like we don’t go around insisting to Russians that they’re actually Soviets, or the Turkish that they’re actually Anatolian or whatever. lands and languages and identities are constantly changing and that is totally fine…
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u/SirPansalot Non-Jewish Ally 14d ago
Yeah, exactly!
To be clear, this is very much a political statement identifying Jesus with the oppressed, the marginalized, the sick, the hungry, the thirsty, blah blah blah.
No modern national identities existed back then, (Israeli or Palestinian national identity) but Jesus was indeed Palestinian in that he was an Aramaic-speaking middle-eastern Jew native to Palestine, a part of the Jewish culture associated with the land of Palestine, and was thus Palestinian in the geographical sense, as well as in the endonymic and exonymic sense.
We don’t how Jesus would have identified, as information is scarce, the categories of identification we use are modern, and the very concept of identity is distinctly modern and does not fit pre-modern conceptions.
These people need to get a grip and realize that Palestine was a term denoting the land is extremely old as well; going as far back as 3,000 years.
https://talesoftimesforgotten.com/2023/10/23/no-the-roman-emperor-hadrian-didnt-invent-palestine/
There are two general definitions of historical Palestine over time:
(1) It is true that the Greek name Palaistínē is most likely either etymologically derived from or cognate to the Hebrew name פְּלֶשֶׁת (Pəlešeṯ), which is commonly rendered in English as Philistia. In Hebrew, this name refers specifically to the slim coastal territory controlled by the five Philistine city-states of Gaza, Ashkelon, Ashdod, Gath, and Ekron. Today, writers in English sometimes refer to these five city-states collectively as the Philistine pentapolis or Philistine confederacy.”
However, this OG meaning that only referred to the slim slip of coastal territory ruled by the Philistines changed after in 604 B.C.E, King Nebuchadnezzar II and the Neo-Babylonian Empire conquered the Philistine city-states and annexed their territory, as well as most of the region.
(2) The first Greek attestation of Palestine was 2 centuries after the conquest by Nebuchadnezzar II in classical antiquity. “[F]rom the very first attestation, Greek sources clearly use this name to refer to a much broader region than just the relatively small territory that the Philistine cities once occupied.”
The one and only Herodotos being behind this. In his view, the Hebrews or even Jews were “Syrians who are in Palestine who practice circumcision who learned the practice from the Egyptians.” Syria-Palestina) Philistines were included in this broader ethnic category of “Syrian Palestinians.”
The new definition of Palestine used in Greek and Latin encompassed well… all the lands from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.
“Herodotos describes the geography of West Asia in his Histories 4.39.2 and, in doing so, makes reference to “Συρίη Παλαιστίνη” or “Syria Palaistínē” as the coastal land that lies between Phoinikia (i.e., Phoenicia, in what is now Lebanon) and Egypt:
“μέχρι μέν νυν Φοινίκης ἀπὸ Περσέων χῶρος πλατὺς καὶ πολλός ἐστι: τὸ δὲ ἀπὸ Φοινίκης παρήκει διὰ τῆσδε τῆς θαλάσσης ἡ ἀκτὴ αὕτη παρά τε Συρίην τὴν Παλαιστίνην καὶ Αἴγυπτον, ἐς τὴν τελευτᾷ:” This means (in my own translation):
“The land from that of the Persians to that of the Phoinikians is wide and great and, from Phoinikia, this headland extends through the sea along Syria Palestine and Egypt, to where it finishes.” Later, in his Histories 7.89.2, Herodotos explicitly defines the name Palaistínē to encompass the geographic region of the southern Levant along the Mediterranean coast extending from Phoinikia to Egypt, writing:
“οὗτοι δὲ οἱ Φοίνικες τὸ παλαιὸν οἴκεον, ὡς αὐτοὶ λέγουσι, ἐπὶ τῇ Ἐρυθρῇ θαλάσσῃ, ἐνθεῦτεν δὲ ὑπερβάντες τῆς Συρίης οἰκέουσι τὸ παρὰ θάλασσαν: τῆς δὲ Συρίης τοῦτο τὸ χωρίον καὶ τὸ μέχρι Αἰγύπτου πᾶν Παλαιστίνη καλέεται.”
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u/SirPansalot Non-Jewish Ally 14d ago edited 10d ago
Roman Latin usage:
“By the late first century BCE, the Romans had adopted the name Palaistínē into Latin as Palaestina. In a relatively early Latin use of the name, the Roman poet Tibullus (lived c. 55 – c. 19 BCE) in his Elegies 1.7.17–18 asks the rhetorical question:
“Quid referam, ut volitet crebras intacta per urbes alba Palaestino sancta columba Syro” This means:
“Why should I tell how, through the packed cities, the white dove sacred to the Palestinian Syrian flutters unharmed?” Although Tibullus’s use of the name Palaestina is geographically ambiguous, other Roman authors before the time of Hadrian use the name in a way that clearly encompasses the entire land between the Jordan and the Mediterranean. Some even, like Herodotos, refer to Jews as “Palestinian Syrians.”
“[T]he name Palestine etymologically derives from the Greek name Παλαιστίνη (Palaistínē), which Greek-language authors were already regularly using as a name for the geographic region of the southern Levant that lies between the Mediterranean Sea and Jordan River as far back as the fifth century BCE—over six hundred years before Hadrian. Roman authors writing in Latin and Jewish authors writing in Greek were likewise already using this name long before Hadrian was born.“
TL;DR - Palestine in all usages and cases encompassed all the land from the river to the sea, could encompass the country of Syria, and even the entire geographical region that extended as far as the Euphrates River!
Some authors refer to Jews as Syrians living in Palestine. This general terminology of Jewish people living in Palestine is also used by educated elite Jewish authors who knew how to write in multiple languages. As the Jewish diaspora expanded during classical antiquity (Hellenistic period), hellenization during the Hellenistic period that started with Greek colonization kickstarted a new era of Greek as the lingua Franca of the eastern Mediterranean and near east. This means that so many key Jewish intellectuals who became “Hellenized” or adopted new customs in this context, used and knew not only the name of Eretz Israel - but also the Greek term Palestine in their writings. These include some of the most beloved and iconic writers in the entire Jewish canon:
“Jewish authors writing in the Greek language before the time of Hadrian also frequently use the name Palaistínē to refer to the geographic area between Phoinikia and Egypt. The Jewish Middle Platonist philosopher Philon of Alexandria (lived c. 20 BCE – c. 50 CE), who died over half a century before Hadrian was born, in his treatise Every Good Man Is Free 75 describes “Palestine Syria” as the land where a large portion of the Jewish people reside:
“ἔστι δὲ καὶ ἡ Παλαιστίνη Συρία καλοκἀγαθίας οὐκ ἄγονος, ἣν πολυανθρωποτάτου ἔθνους τῶν Ἰουδαίων οὐκ ὀλίγη μοῖρα νέμεται.” This means:
“And even Palestine Syria is not barren of kalokagathia [i.e., the Greek ideal of aristocratic beauty and cultural refinement], where a not small portion of the much-peopled nation of the Jews reside.”
Titus Flavius Iosephus (lived c. 37 – c. 100 CE) states in his conclusion at the end of his Antiquities of the Jews (AJ 20.259) that, in accordance with his original intent when he began writing, he has recorded
“τῶν ἡμῖν συμβεβηκότων τοῖς Ἰουδαίοις κατά τε τὴν Αἴγυπτον καὶ Συρίαν καὶ Παλαιστίνην” (“the things which befell us Jews in Egypt and Syria and Palestine”).
Some problems with the claim that Hadrian was the first to name the land from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea as “Palestine” as part of an explicit campaign to demoralize and punish the Jews post Bar-Kochba revolt by erasing Judea are:
(A) He could have done it to deemphasize Jewish ethnic connection to the land, but the above claim does not match Roman precedent. There is no source explicitly stating this was the goal, and there is no case of a Roman emperor renaming a province to punish a particular group; if this actually was the case, it would have been a very strange aberration
(B) It wouldn’t even have worked. Most people who lived in the ancient world used informal region names anyway (rather than very formal official province names) meaning that changes to official nomenclature wouldn’t affect popular usuage. The name Judaea is still consistently used after Hadrian’s rebranding well into the Middle Ages. So much for erasure.
(C) the timeline is fuzzy, and Hadrian could have renamed the province 2 years before the revolt broke out, when he visited Judaea in 130 C.E. Some scholars have argued for this interpretation (Syme, “The Wrong Marcius Tubro,” 90).
(D) Its very unlikely that Hadrian gave a flying crap about what some random Jews in Palestine thought about provincial nomenclature. His actual audience were elite Roman and Greek citizens of the empire, senators and equestrians. “Thus, he may have approved the new name in part as a form of propaganda to signal to Roman citizens that Judaea, which had been a notoriously rebellious province in the past, would be so no longer.”
(E) Hadrian loved Greek shit
“Whatever the case may be, Hadrian’s formal renaming of the province followed upon centuries of Greek, Roman, and Jewish informal use of various forms of the name Palestine to describe the region. He did not invent the name or apply it to a larger territory than what speakers of Greek and Latin had applied it to before him.”
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u/SirPansalot Non-Jewish Ally 14d ago edited 10d ago
I cannot emphasize just how dominant Greek was as the universal language of the Eastern Roman Empire by the 5th century. (See Warren Treadgold’s A history of the Byzantine state and society and a concise history of Byzantium. See also Anthony Kaldellis’ 2023 the new Roman Empire) The Late Roman Empire of the East, had inevitably vastly expanded its centralized state control over the various independent city councils - an era of “big government” made possible due to the universal endowment of **Roman citizenship to all free people within the confines of the Roman Empire in the 3rd century. That meant more laws, more jurists, more judges, more governors, more bureaucrats, more everything to accommodate and integrate these new Roman citizens. Diocletian had utterly obliterated any last traces of systematic privileges given to native Italy and its population as in the earlier days of Roman domination over non-Romans.
See Anthony Kaldellis, Romanland
The fundamental Roman quality of quality, that is legal fiction/societal imagination and treating something as something else, allowed for the Romans to establish a Nova Roma in the East that replicated the old one
“The Byzantines inherited it directly from ancient Roman law and practice and they applied it to many domains of their life, political, social, and religious. Calling it a mode of thinking is perhaps not entirely accurate, for it was in addition “a power that transforms the order of things, that remodels them,” 5 and so was an activating force behind the history of Byzantium in many areas. But at heart it was a conceptual move that originated in a feature of Roman law that I call “quasity,” from Latin quasi. This was the ability of Roman law to treat a thing fully “as if it were” a different species, to subsume it under a category to which it did not belong “by nature” and thereby normalize it within a preexisting order. This legal fiction enabled the court (or other controlling legal authority) to act on the basis of a state of affairs that was not, strictly speaking, true, but that served the purposes of policy or convenience, or extended the domain of a certain rule or power into territory that it could not otherwise claim. “Legal fictions” are a recognized, albeit minor problem in the philosophy of law. 6 Quasity therefore has two fundamental components: an act of the imagination that enables one to fictively transfer a thing between categories within a taxonomy, followed by a legal and social practice which treats that conceptual transference as an accomplished fact and respects it as fully real. It is aware of, but pragmatically overlooks, its fictive origins. A mere thought experiment or literary metaphor does not count, for the fictive act must also become a social fact. The ancient Romans deployed quasity to treat non-citizens as if they were citizens for the purposes of adjudicating a dispute; to adopt non-kin and treat them as if they were kin; to create pro-magistrates, who did not hold a certain office but were treated as if they did; to cope with the complex diversity of cults and social orders among the subjects of their empire; and in other contexts where a faulty interface between reality and legal norms created dark spaces that needed to be bridged by legal fictions.” (p. 2)
This allowed the Romans to make non-Romans into Romans very casually and swiftly.
“Gatherings of Romans outside of Rome took various forms. There was the army, almost half a million strong by the time of Constantine, strung like a ribbon along the frontiers. For over a century, the emperors had likewise spent little time at Rome, traveling with their mobile courts and armies along the frontiers and through the provinces. Before that, colonies had acted as miniature extensions of Rome in the provinces—some of them claiming that they too had seven hills 15 —until the non-Roman spaces between the colonies and the metropolis were filled in by Caracalla’s universal grant of citizenship in 212. 16 Now Rome was everywhere because Romans were everywhere.” (p. 232)
Rome was wherever Romans were, since Rome was a people - not a place. The multiplication of emperors and of armies and of entire capitals was made possible by this and the legal fiction associated with the Roman people. The Romans had always, from the days of the republic, tinkered and experimented with the idea of there being duplicate Romes, mobile Romes, copies of Romes, miniature Romes, and new Roman homelands. Whenever Romes split, and
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u/SirPansalot Non-Jewish Ally 14d ago
The gradual decline of the city of Rome politically was inversely linked to the Romanization of the periphery - the Oikoumenê, the entire known world under Roman domination. Slowly, the Roman people that now constituted the majority of the inhabitants of the empire grew to call (by the 4th century) the Roman Empire Romanía - land of the Romans or Romanland.
This was done by taking the Greek Romaios and combining with the suffix ía to create an abstract noun or entity that acts as the abstract representation of the word. Therefore, Romanía (not to be confused with modern Romania) meant area (Res Publica or politeia) pertaining to the Romans. This meant that everyone, including Jews, had to deal with the central government and its bureaucracy and administrative apparatus, unlike in previous centuries on a semi-regular basis at the least. They too adopted Greek as one of the core languages at their disposal.
The dominance of Greek helped by the creation of a center of Roman imperial power (Constantinople), and the dealings of this vast concentration of Greek-speaking Romanía with the caliphate led to Palestine being the dominant word for the lands between the river and the sea by early Arab geographers in Arabic. Greek continued to be a trading lingua Franca and major language of the Ottoman Empire, and thus Palestine was used to describe the lands between the river and the sea as the dominant term for the region by gentiles and Jews alike in the eastern Mediterranean for many centuries.
Conclusion: The supposed incompatibility of Palestine with Eretz Israel, and of Palestinian identity with Jewish identity, and of people having more than one name to refer to a region, is quintessentially a modern creation that is fundamentally the result of a modern political conflict and nation-state formation/identity invention after the discontinuity and situation of 1948.
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u/SirPansalot Non-Jewish Ally 10d ago
A common theme is emerging. Alternative Romes tended to spring up in the imagination of the Romans during periods of civil conflict, when the body politic was divided into rival factions, each equally Roman in its own eyes. This was not the only context in which an altera Roma could be conceived, but it was the most prolific one. In such conflicts, one side was usually in physical possession of the city of Rome, so its rivals necessarily constituted a kind of competing or alternative Rome, hoping that it would be temporary. The civil wars of the late Republic produced some curious episodes in this regard. They will be familiar to historians of the late Republic but appear in a new light when seen as premonitions of Constantinople, especially when they are compared to the striking developments of the later empire, including the creation of a universal Roman society. (p. 245)
Rome was a city of walls, earth, and homes. Yet from the late Republic to the later empire, it was also a place of the political imagination, defined by the senate, the people, or the emperors and it followed them when they left Italy. This Rome was highly portable. But emperors, senators, and Roman citizens multiplied in number during the centuries of the empire, causing it to become a vast Roman world, Romanía. In this context, the emergence of other Romes was inevitable. Rome was always in a state of turmoil and renewal, of movement and real or imagined dislocation, and the Romans were always anxious about how stable the ‘seat’ and ‘hearth’ of empire was. In the story of Rome, the imagination finally prevailed over the walls, earth, and homes. (p. 247)
Rome was not a palace, Pompey said, but an idea: it meant “freedom” to him.
After all, the Romans often thought of themselves as Trojans spacing a fallen homeland in Troy.
(p. 233 - 250)
Rome was not just a capital; It was the center of the world, with a particular history rooted in Italy, with distinctive traditions and associations, unique. It could be duplicated becuase Rome was an abstraction. (pp. 230 - 231)
“Its duplication was possible because, over time, Rome had ceased to be just a physical city rooted in a particular topography. It had become an idea, the matrix of a global community of Romans spread throughout the empire. Unlike physical cities, ideas can be reproduced easily, almost infinitely. In this case, the prime vectors for the spread of the Roman idea were the assimilation of provincials into the global Roman community and their acceptance of Rome as signifying a normative political order. 13 This idea of Rome had been replicated on a vast a scale across the empire before Constantine focalized it on Constantinople. ‘Rome’ could, in this sense, already be found wherever there were Romans.” (p. 231)
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u/EgoIdVeto Armenian Jew 14d ago
"For if Jesus was a Palestinian Arab, he would not have qualified to be Christ"
Talk about a mask-off moment, claiming that the reason Jesus was holy was partially due to his racial background...
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u/GetThaBozack Non-Jewish Ally 15d ago
I’m so sick of this cowardice. When are we going to learn to stop giving into these bastards?
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u/ubernik 15d ago edited 14d ago
Baby Jesus is obviously anti-Semetic because cloth.
(/S)
ETA: I'm sorry, but every time I get a notification about this post and have to remember what and why I've written what I have... I'm absolutely incensed.
Too few people are asking the right questions including things like: "What and who is a Semite and why?" "In the year '0,' in what country was Bethlehem?" "Why are they trying SO hard to change our minds?"
The irony within the answers to these questions might get me killed.
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u/JadeEarth Jewish Communist 14d ago
Yes it is political, but i don't think "revisionism" was intended. Christianity has a tradition of identifying Jesus with the most marginalized of society, and in this example, it is Palestinians. It could also have been other groups. I think it's less about a statement about the true origin or ethnicity of historical Jesus.
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u/Anarcho-Flanders 13d ago
True but it is a statement about the Vatican’s inability to stay strong in support of those in need. :(
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u/JadeEarth Jewish Communist 13d ago
Oh yeah, it's terrible. I was responding more to some of the complainers about the original act.
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u/Discoid 14d ago
Respectfully I don't know what business a Jewish organization has lecturing Christians about depictions of Jesus in the first place.
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u/Anarcho-Flanders 13d ago
They don’t but there is a documented history of examples where public “pressure” has had the church change its ways - heck one can make a claim Jesus was kind of a socialist/communist (though that was not a thing back then); but cold war era nonsense has the USCCB portraying catholicism impossible if one is communist.
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u/CosmicNixx Ashkenazi 13d ago
Do these people not understand the difference between ethnicity and religion? You can be Palestinian and Jewish. In fact, around that time, most Palestinians were Jewish. Like I don't understand this thought process at all. Palestine now is predominantly Muslim but wtf do you think they were before they were Muslim? THEY WERE NATIVE TO THE SOUTHERN LEVANT YOU DIPSHITS
Edit: also we're Jewish who cares???
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u/MeanMikeMaignan 15d ago
If the crib had been covered in an American or Italian flag would they also have complained because that's not historically accurate?
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u/bearoscuro Non-Jewish Ally 14d ago
We all know baby Jesus was given a McDonalds Hamburger by the 3 wise men, and his first words were "mamma mia!" so the US and Italian flags are completely accurate 😤
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u/KeyLime044 Non-Jewish Ally 14d ago
Or with Jesus wearing a red MAGA hat. I guarantee you it's somewhere, either as a constructed nativity scene or as an AI image
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u/matterforward 14d ago
Like they may have taken it down but you know they still meant it soooo what’s the point?
Pls hide that you hate us- dumbass Israel lmao
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u/touslesmatins Non-Jewish Ally 14d ago edited 14d ago
Reminds me of the lines in Susan Abulhawa's speech at the Oxford Union debate, addressing zionists:
"You will never know how it feels to be loved and supported by those who have nothing to gain from you, and in fact, everything to lose. You will never know the feeling of masses all over the world pouring into the streets and stadiums to chant and sing for your freedom"
Zionists, however, will know the feeling of whining, tattling, lying, bullying, and threatening to get their way.
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15d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/GarryMcMahon Non-Jewish Ally 14d ago
The Jews
What the fuck?
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14d ago
Yeah.. it’s pretty disappointing seeing things like this getting upvoted here. Regardless of whether this person is Jewish or not, this feels gross and their comment history is pretty ugly.
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u/motherofcorgidors Jewish Anti-Zionist 14d ago
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u/Bezirkschorm 14d ago
It was the geographical area of Palestine but that wasn’t the countries there at the time, shitty they caved to Zionist complaining about a geographical location but it doesn’t have ties with the modern political groups that rule the land now
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u/Informal_Snail 10d ago
Usually the manger is left empty until Christmas Eve after the unveiling of the nativity and only Mary and Joseph remain. While they removed the manger this time, I think this has been exaggerated
https://apnews.com/article/vatican-pope-palestinians-nativity-scene-8c612e88d8c0144aaac1025a0b789a3f
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