Joseph and Mary

During the Christmas holiday season there have been articles written by leftist commentators that suggest that the “Israeli occupation of palestinian lands” would have created problems for Joseph and Mary as they made their way toward Bethlehem. For example, one writer shows us just how clever he can be by suggesting that Israeli checkpoints would have slowed their progress toward Bethlehem.

David Bernstein deconstructs these idiotic pieces:

Well, since Joseph and Mary were Judeans, i.e., Jews, from Nazareth, they wouldn’t need to be afraid of Israeli roadblocks needed to combat Palestinian terrorism, but of being murdered by terrorists from Hamas or Fatah.

Seriously, this sort of historical revisionism, treating ancient Jewish Judeans as if they were Palestinian Arabs, and then analogizing modern Israel to the oppressors of Jesus and his family, a common trope in the UK, would be laughable if it were not so pernicious. Pernicious not simply because it’s a ridiculous distortion of history, and not simply because it’s often accompanied by a large dose of anti-Semitism, with Palestinians playing the role of Jesus and the Israelis being the foreign oppressors crucifying him. But pernicious because it goes to the true heart of the Arab-Israeli conflict–the failure of the Arab side to recognize that the “Zionists” are not the “European settler-colonialists” of Third Worldist imagination, but a people with a three thousand year plus tie to the Land of Israel, whose religion was born there, who ruled two separate kingdoms there, who have prayed toward Jerusalem for two thousand years in their ancient Hebrew language, and so on.

Such denial, coming frequently from even “moderate” Palestinian Authority officials, that there was ever a Jewish kingdom or temple in Jerusalem, or that the Jews otherwise are natives to the area, means that the Arab side can’t see any potential peace agreement as a historic reconciliation between two peoples with strong claims to the land, but as at best a humiliating capitulation to foreign occupation that would have to eventually be reversed. Until that mindset changes, there won’t be long-term peace, regardless of paper agreements, and regardless of their terms–even a radical one-state solution with an Arab majority wouldn’t work if that majority thought it was being forced to cohabitate with foreign colonialist interlopers. Writers like Hasan [the author of one such Joseph and Marry article] are quite simply the enemies of peace.

There have been rumors that in 2016, Barack Obama and his foreign policy Team of 2s, led by John Kerry, are going to make one last ditch effort to coerce Israel into a “peace agreement” with the Palestinians. That would be the same peaceful-loving Palestinians who continue to murder Israeli civilians in random knife attacks. The same peaceful-loving Palestinians who continue to launch rockets across the Israeli border. The same peaceful-loving Palestinians, who, as Berntein wryly observes, would have considered Mary the target of an honor killing because she was “pregnant out of wedlock.”

Something tells me that Joseph and Marry would not be amused by anyone, John Kerry included, who tried to force a peace agreement with a murderous group that wants to kill Jews.