Palestinian Christian History: An Invented Past?
Palestinian Christian Anachronism and Historical Revisionism - Part One
Yousef Khoury, a ‘Palestinian Christian from Gaza’ gave a series of talks in New Zealand, along with colleague Lamma Mansour. This is part of a series that seeks to address the narrative promoted by these Christian Palestinians. This article addresses the first part of AlKhoury’s presentation in Hamilton New Zealand, July 2026.
At the heart of AlKhoury’s message is the claim:
‘Palestine is a story of a settler colonial project. Where the settlers came to replace the natives’.
AlKhoury’s statement is a signal that he will be applying settler colonial theory to his story of ‘Palestine’, in which he will argue that ‘Palestinians are the natives and Jews the settlers’. He does this by trying to demonstrate the long-standing presence of Palestinian Arab Christians in the land, and to show that Jews are recent foreign colonisers. He seeks to ‘showcase that Palestinian Christians are subjected to a process of displacement and replacement in the Holy Land or in their homeland, Palestine’. Applying the SC framework to this narrative produces a moral judgement that the establishment of the state of Israel is wholly illegitimate from its foundation.
The problems with his arguments:
Through the application of Settler Colonial theory, the framework itself becomes self-confirming: the designations settler and native are assigned and thereafter assumed. Subsequent historical evidence tends to be highly selective and is interpreted through those categories.
Repeated use of anachronism - projecting later concepts, identities, institutions, or terms backwards onto people who would not have or recognised themselves in that framework
Or in historiographical terms, he engages in presentism: interpreting the past primarily through categories, assumptions, and political identities belonging to the present.
Problems with the Settler Colonial framework
‘Settler colonialism’ is an analytic framework developed to distinguish forms of colonialism in which settlers establish permanent societies on inhabited territory from forms primarily concerned with imperial administration, extraction or the exploitation of Indigenous labour. One of its main proponents, Patrick Wolfe, stated “Settler colonizers come to stay: invasion is a structure not an event.” His point is that settler colonialism should not simply be understood as an initial historical act of conquest. The struggle over land can continue to structure relations between settler society and Indigenous peoples long after the original settlement.
Wolfe further argues that the Indigenous population represents an obstacle to settlers’ acquisition of territory, which leads to the ‘logic of elimination’. ‘Elimination’ does not necessarily mean killing. It can operate through many mechanisms; forced removal or relocation, confinement to reservations, seizure or redistribution of Indigenous land, assimilation, removal of Indigenous children, suppression of Indigenous political institutions, breaking up collective landholding into individual titles, redefining Indigenous identity so that people cease legally to count as Indigenous or incorporation of Indigenous people into settler society.
While settler colonial theory has in some cases yielded helpful insights into the plight of Indigenous peoples, the model can become totalizing, homogenising and ultimately harmful, when pushed beyond the historical context. Critics such as Adam Kirsch argue that it recasts present-day societies as permanently illegitimate because of founding acts of centuries past, treats non-Indigenous presence as perpetual ‘settler’ guilt analogous to original sin, and treats ‘decolonization’ as the required remedy. As mentioned, the framework itself becomes self-confirming: once settler and native have been assigned, subsequent historical evidence tends to be interpreted through those categories. The danger is not simply reductionism, but analytical foreclosure: the theoretical categories determine in advance which historical actors can possess indigeneity, which can exercise legitimate national self-determination, and how their actions must subsequently be interpreted.
When applied to Israel, Jewish history is distorted. Ignored are the ancient origins of Jewish peoplehood in the land; continuous, though fluctuating Jewish presence; the preservation of territorial attachment throughout the diaspora; the emergence of Zionism as a modern Jewish national movement prior to the development of Palestinian Arab nationalism; Jewish migration from both European and Middle Eastern societies and Jewish expulsion from Arab lands. AlKoury’s use of settler colonialism to explain the plight of Palestinian Christians functions as an accusation of Israel as a project of displacement and replacement of Palestinians.
How Anachronism distorts history
AlKhoury employs an anachronistic approach to the category ‘Palestine’ and ‘Palestinian Christians’. He employs these words as if they were constant categories, when in fact the meaning of Palestine and Palestinian shifted throughout the centuries.
It is important first to clarify the historical setting for the naming of the land Palestine. Following Rome’s suppression of the Jewish Bar Kokhba revolt in 135 CE, the Roman emperor Hadrian refounded Jerusalem as Aelia Capitolina, barred Jews from the city, and the Roman province formerly known as Judaea subsequently became known as Syria Palaestina. The revolt and its suppression resulted in enormous loss of life, enslavement and displacement among the Jewish population of Judea, but it did not constitute the expulsion of all Jews from the land. Significant Jewish communities remained, with Galilee becoming an especially important centre of Jewish life and scholarship. The territorial designation, Palestine, subsequently persisted in various forms, and during the British Mandate (1920–1948) ‘Palestinian’ could describe inhabitants of the territory, including Jews as well as Arabs. Although a specifically Palestinian Arab national identity was beginning to develop during this period, there has never historically been a nation called Palestine.
AlKhoury's argument centres on the idea that Palestinian Christians have a long-held history in the land, while Jews are recent foreign colonisers. AlKhoury constructs a narrative for the long history of Palestinian Christians by aggregating a number of discrete facts - ‘my bedroom was built between 425 to 450AD. That's where my great grandfather served in the Orthodox Church in Palestine. His family served in the priesthood of the Orthodox Church in Palestine for nearly 36 generations; the Latin translation of the Bible in the fourth century took place in Bethlehem’. There is no attempt to substantiate these claims, demonstrate the causal or genealogical links or contextual information. The sympathetic listener does the work of providing the connecting argument.
The individual propositions may be true, partly true, defensible, or untrue, but they do not by themselves establish the larger conclusion that modern Palestinian Christians constitute an unchanged Indigenous population continuously inhabiting the land since antiquity, while Jews are foreign colonisers. Even if a family can establish 36 generations of local ancestry, that takes it back approximately 900–1,100 years. This does not establish that a modern Palestinian national identity existed continuously throughout those periods. Roughly 1,700 years are compressed into a single narrative in which the ‘Christian Palestinian community’ is made to appear to be the same collective actor throughout. This obscures major transformations in language, political identity, religious institutions, demography and self-identification. Byzantine Christians, medieval Arabic-speaking Christians, Ottoman Arab Christians and twentieth-century Palestinian Christians cannot simply be treated as an unchanged national community.
In modern day parlance, most people understand Palestinian Christian to mean Palestinian Arab Christians who live in Israel, Judea, Samaria (aka West Bank) and Gaza. However, the history of Christians in Palestine, since the inception of Christianity is more complex.
Eusebius records leaders of the Jerusalem Church all being “of Hebrew descent” up to 135CE. He gives their names.
By c. 450 CE, Palestine had been under Christian Roman rule for more than a century. The ecclesiastical, administrative and much of the literary culture of Byzantine Palestine was predominantly Greek, but the linguistic and ethnic composition of the population was considerably more complicated.
Palestinian Christians included speakers of Greek and varieties of Western Aramaic, while Jewish and Samaritan communities possessed their own Palestinian Aramaic traditions. There is also evidence for Arabic-speaking populations in and around Palestine before Islam, particularly in the regions adjoining Arabia and Transjordan, some of whom had adopted Christianity. Palestine also attracted monks, clergy and pilgrims from across the Christian world, including Armenia, Georgia, Syria, Egypt, Asia Minor and the Latin West. It would therefore be anachronistic to describe the Christian population of fifth-century Palestine simply as “Arab Palestinian Christians” in the modern ethnonational sense.
Following the Muslim conquest of Palestine in the 630s, much of the existing Christian population remained in place. Over the succeeding centuries, however, the linguistic and cultural character of the population changed substantially. Arabic progressively displaced Greek and the Palestinian Aramaic vernaculars, while conversion to Islam gradually altered the religious composition of the population.
So while there has certainly been a presence of Arab Christians in the land since 450AD, the history does not follow the trajectory that Alkhoury is trying to construct, of long-standing Arab Palestinian community, displaced by foreign Jewish colonisers in the 20th century. It is significant for AlKhoury’s settler colonialist narrative of coloniser versus colonised, that he neglects to mention the more than 3,500 thousand year continuous Jewish presence in the land. In fact Jewish history in the land is ignored altogether, the silence designed to affirm his central thesis.
The Latin Bible in Bethlehem
Alkhoury’s reference to the translation of the Latin Bible in Bethlehem is curious considering the fact that the significant, indeed revolutionary nature of Jerome’s translation was that he translated the Old Testament directly from Hebrew into Latin. Jerome studied Hebrew and consulted Jewish teachers and informants to understand difficult Hebrew passages. Recent scholarship stresses that his translation was not simply a mechanical translation of a Hebrew manuscript: he drew upon Hebrew-Aramaic texts alongside Greek and Latin textual traditions and Jewish interpretative knowledge. The history of the Latin Bible does not support AlKhoury’s argument for Arab Christianity.
AlKhoury claims that ‘the Christian Palestinian community survived the Romans, the early Byzantines, Islamic invasion, the Crusades, the Ottomans, the British, and now they are surviving also Israeli settler colonialism’. This statement retrospectively organises the preceding history around a coloniser/indigenous binary. The Romans, Byzantines, Muslims, Crusaders, Ottomans, British, Israelis become successive external powers, while ‘Palestinian Christians’ occupy the narrative position of an enduring native population. The additional rhetorical effect is that Israel becomes the latest entry in a succession of foreign empires. Calling the contemporary situation ‘Israeli settler colonialism’ therefore does considerably more argumentative work than merely describing Israeli settlement in the West Bank.
AlKhoury’s claim regarding Palestinian Christians’ survival in the face of many colonisers is historically problematic; from the anachronistic label ‘Christian Palestinian’ to the denial of Jewish history in the land to the politicised nature of the term ‘Israeli settler colonialism’. While there were Christians living in Roman and Byzantine Palaestina, they did not possess a ‘Palestinian’ national identity in the modern sense. They could identify through locality, city, religious community, language and Roman/Byzantine political identity. The modern Palestinian national identity emerged much later, arguably in the early 20th century but more properly following 1967. Continuity of Christian habitation is easier to demonstrate than continuity of national identity.
The question is not whether there is continuity of Palestinian Christian life in Palestine. Clearly, Palestinian Christians have deep historical roots.
But why is the same criteria of historical connection not applied to Jews?
If ancient religious presence, cultural attachment, ancestral memory, continuous minority presence and return establish a people’s relationship to a territory, Jewish history supplies extensive evidence of all of these. Jews were present in the land before Christianity emerged. Christianity itself arose within Jewish society. Jewish communities continued in Palestine through Roman, Byzantine, Islamic, Crusader, Mamluk and Ottoman periods, although their size fluctuated enormously.
AlKhoury’s conspicuous silence on these questions betrays the political nature of his narrative. It is designed to assign guilt to Israel and cast Palestinians as hapless victims. His application of Settler Colonial theory to the history of Palestinian Christians in the land fails to meet the most basic standards of academic rigour and historical accuracy.