The global rejection of the genocide in Gaza had begun to carve its way into political decision-making circles in the “West,” where Israel has always received its impunity. Five countries — the UK, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and Norway — imposed sanctions on Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, the Israeli ministers most explicit in their genocidal intent. Spain had announced the suspension of arms sales to Israel, and France was preparing for an international conference to recognize Palestine as part of the two-state solution. None of this alleviated the agony of Palestinian children in Gaza. But it indicated that the world had begun to see Palestinian suffering.
Then Israel attacked Iran.
The fact that Gaza moved to second place in the news cycle was expected — the regional war everyone had been fearing was finally at everyone’s doorstep. But what was particularly impressive, if not surprising, was how those same Western countries immediately fell back on their traditional unconditional support for Israel.
After 19 months of Israel’s systematic instigation of new conflicts in the region, which it has done to avoid stopping its genocide in Gaza, one would think that Israel’s allies would have been more prudent. But the way in which Germany, the UK, and France stated their support for whatever Israel was doing in Iran was almost visceral, with France even suspending the international conference it had planned to support a two-state solution.
As a Palestinian, I couldn’t avoid wondering whether all the “concern” these countries had expressed about the humanitarian situation in Gaza was sincere. And I couldn’t stop thinking about the overwhelming support Israel had received immediately after the October 7 attacks.
Even as Israeli officials openly threatened to unleash “hell” on Gaza, cutting off water, electricity, food, and fuel to over two million people, the solidarity extended to Israel was swift and unquestioning. Not just against Hamas, but against Gaza itself and Palestinians as a people.
At that moment, the dehumanization of Palestinians became state policy across much of the so-called “West.” The history of Palestinian suffering was erased, and the attacks of October 7 were seized upon as justification for unleashing even more suffering on a captive population.
Geopolitical arguments that try to prove that Iran is a threat or that Israel had no choice but to attack first can stir debate forever. But beyond these arguments, there is one issue that is often overlooked: the cultural, ideological, and even cognitive factors that underlie unconditional Western support for Israel.
In 1978, Palestinian-American philosopher Edward Said proposed his reading of Orientalism as a new understanding of an old concept. It didn’t focus on Israel, but rather on the established ideology in Western political, academic, and media institutions.
Said argued that, for many years, the peoples of what Europe labeled as “the Orient” or “the East” have been imagined, described, and framed as different beyond recognition, mysterious, exotic, and hostile. This image has become the canonical idea of “Eastern” peoples.
When Samuel Huntington presented his theory of the clash of civilizations in the early 1990s, he was making Orientalism into a political doctrine, serving as a playbook for a U.S. government that saw itself as the new leader of the world. That doctrine, according to which Arabs and Muslims, along with the Chinese, are masses of human existence at conflict with the “enlightened” West, never left the minds of American and European politicians.
Civilization and its exclusions
Some months ago, I had a discussion with a European journalist who has been reporting from Palestine for many years. They were telling me how much they disagree with Palestinians when we say that Jesus was a Palestinian, too. I argued back that our land has been called “Palestine’’ for 4,000 years, which includes the time when Jesus walked our villages and towns. I said that the culture he lived in and drew upon is the same culture from which our people are descended.
But my devout Catholic (European) colleague said there is good reason to reject the characterization of Jesus as Palestinian. “When you say that he was Palestinian, you are ignoring that he was Jewish.”
When I replied that, before Zionism came, you could be Jewish and Palestinian, just as you can be Muslim or Christian and Palestinian, they replied that we, Palestinians, can have the Canaanites, the Jebusites, and all the other ancient cultures that used to live in this land — but we cannot claim Judaism as part of our history and ancestry, and we shouldn’t.
The obvious question for me was: what difference is there between the Canaanites and the ancient Hebrews that made the latter unfit to be part of Palestinian heritage? Although it might be uncomfortable to admit, the difference has nothing to do with the actual people who lived in that land over thousands of years. It has to do with the mindset of those who imagine them today.
Canaanites are irrelevant to how a traditionally-minded European thinks of themselves. They are only interesting as a subject of anthropological study. Judaism and Jesus, however, are different — they are part of a civilizational identity that is integral to European Catholics or American Evangelicals.
Claiming Jesus and ancient Hebrews as part of my heritage as a Palestinian would make me too similar to my European colleague, and that would disturb their worldview, which views us as each descending from distinct “civilizations.” In this worldview, Israel is the redemption for my colleague’s historic guilt over centuries of antisemitism in Europe, culminating in the Holocaust.
But images of human suffering coming from Gaza for almost two years have been too much to ignore — even for this worldview. The West has seen too many babies killed, making the old Orientalist lens a bit uncomfortable to keep on.
But this doesn’t mean that the lens is dropped for good. It only means that Western policy-makers need a better, more “perfect villain” to take the place of the displaced and starving families crowded at the beach of Khan Younis.
And there is no better villain for an indoctrinated mind than an “Islamic theocracy” armed with ballistic missiles that doesn’t recognize Israel and calls the U.S. “the great Satan.” Israel’s new war on Iran saved Western leaders from their own humanity, making it comfortable again to cheer for another military campaign in the name of Western “civilization.”
But reality is completely different. There is no “East” or “West” because the Earth is round. There is only one human civilization, to which every people has added, building upon what other societies have laid down before them. Arabs and Muslims are an essential part of this one civilization because they are human, and humans are all made the same, from Japan to Palestine to Canada and Iran.
Israel’s new war on Iran doesn’t change the fact that the genocide in Gaza is still ongoing.
The only thing we can hope for now is that it won’t take thousands more dying on camera before Western governments begin to feel uncomfortable again.
[2] Did Jesus Consider Himself a Palestinian?
So why is there resistance to acknowledging that Jesus lived in and would have called his homeland Palestine? The answer lies in the political appropriation of sacred geography. Modern Zionism, born in the late 19th century, seeks to fuse ancient theological terms with modern nationalist claims. By resurrecting “Eretz Yisrael” as a contemporary geopolitical term, Zionism imposes a mythical frame on a very real and ongoing racial supremacist genocidal colonial project. This rhetorical move distracts from the historical reality of Greco-Roman Palestine and its multi-ethnic, multilingual, and religiously diverse populations.
Recognizing the term “Palestine” as historically accurate is not a denial of Jewish history—it’s a correction of nationalist mythmaking. Jesus was not a citizen of the State of Israel, nor did he claim such an identity. He lived under Roman rule, in a land widely known to its inhabitants and rulers as Palestine.
By reclaiming historical precision, we can begin to untangle religious heritage from political ideology—and confront more honestly the human cost of weaponizing sacred history.
[1] Did Jesus Consider Himself a Palestinian?
Was Jesus of Nazareth a Palestinian? While the question may seem provocative to some, it is historically grounded. The term “Land of Israel” appears only twice in the New Testament, and both times not as a contemporary geographic designation, but as a literary device used to parallel the Exodus of the Israelites from Egypt with the return of Jesus’s family from exile in Matthew 2:20–21. The overwhelming terminology of the period—Roman, Jewish, and Hellenistic—recognized the region as Palestine, not “Israel.”
Indeed, analysis of the New Testament suggests that “Israel” is used as a cultic or theological identity, not as a political or geographic one. It represents a covenantal people, not a state. In this context, the “Land of Israel” resembles mythic geographies like Atlantis or Never-Never Land—important in meaning but not rooted in territorial claims.
By contrast, “Palestine” was the widely accepted term in the Greco-Roman world. It was used by historians, administrators, and even religious scholars. Philo of Alexandria, a leading figure in Hellenistic Judaism in the first century CE, consistently referred to the land as Palestina. The Hasmonean and Herodian dynasties also adopted this designation in Greek contexts, even though their territorial control was limited to smaller regions like Judea and Idumea. Roman governors administered the area under that name.
Matthew’s Gospel (2:13–23) recounts how Jesus’s family fled to Egypt, a land whose Jewish communities largely spoke koiné Greek, the lingua franca of the Eastern Mediterranean. These communities were composed primarily of Hellenistic converts to Judaism, not agrarian Judeans. Jesus likely heard and spoke Greek in his early years, and in that language, the land he returned to would have been called Palestine.
Even epigraphic evidence supports this view. First-century Samaritan inscriptions refer to the region as Eretz ha-Philistim—the Land of the Philistines—the same term used millennia later by the Ottomans (Ard Filastin). It is likely that this was the common term among Aramaic- and Hebrew-speaking populations. The Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible from the 3rd century BCE, even avoids the term “Philistines” in the Books of Judges and Samuel, using allophylos (Ἀλλόφυλοι, “other tribes”) instead—possibly to avoid confusing them with contemporary inhabitants of Palestine known by that name.