Israel’s Foreign Ministry put the digital smackdown on a comedian who tweeted that Jesus was a “Roman-era Palestinian.”
The world got a good laugh recently when a comedian who runs a satirical Twitter account called “The Tweet of God” tangled with Israel’s Digital Diplomacy Team.
“The Tweet of God” account has 6.1 million followers and has poked fun at various targets for years, including Israelis and Palestinians, tweeting in 2012 that “the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the result of two peoples who literally worship the ground I walk on.”
The account caught the Foreign Ministry’s attention recently when it tweeted a picture of a Caucasian Jesus with the caption, “Privilege doesn’t get much whiter than making a Roman-era Palestinian look like this.”
The reference came against the backdrop of racial strife and civil unrest in the United States related to police brutality.
It also reflected the ridiculous claims by Palestinians that Jesus was “Palestinian” instead of a Jew from Judea.
Such claims are part of Palestinians’ attempts to erase Jews from the history of the Land of Israel, which the Romans renamed “Palestine” hundreds of years before Arabs arrived during the Muslim conquest of the region in the first half of the 7th century.
The Foreign Ministry team posted back a tongue-in-cheek response with a short dialogue between God and Jesus:
“Tweet of God Account: Jesus was a Palestinian.
Jesus: Hey Dad, remember when you gave that speech about Jewish values at my Bar Mitzvah?”
There is a common consensus among historians and researchers that Jesus was Jewish, was born in Bethlehem, grew up in Nazareth and lived in Roman-occupied Judea.
Apparently the comedian behind this satirical Twitter account failed to see the absurdity of claiming that a modern-day group of Arabs who named themselves “Palestinians” in the 20th century are connected with a Jew from the Land of Israel in Biblical times.
