Stupid recent academic paper #2: "Bridging the Jesus Event and the Nakba"

This piece of drivel was published last month in Political Theology:

Reclaiming History and Memory: Bridging the Jesus Event and the Nakba

Abeer Khshiboon

This article examines the interconnected histories and memories of two Palestinian points in time: the historical Jesus event and the Nakba. It critiques colonial-imperial narratives that have historically disconnected the Jesus event from Palestine, often interpreting it as a divine sacrifice that signified Europe’s transition into a new era: Christianity. Inspired by Ahn Byung-Mu’s work on the minjung or ochlos (the sheep without a shepherd, the dehumanized and alienated crowd in the Gospel of Mark), this study draws on critical historical Jesus scholarship, seeking to reevaluate the journey of the ochlos between exile and redemption. It offers a postcolonial interpretation of the Jesus event through the concepts of collective memory and trauma, arguing for the importance of revisiting the past to address and reframe present injustices and disenfranchisements. The conclusion discusses the relationship between remembrance and belongingness, emphasizing its potential to challenge memory erasure and trauma denialism.

The author appears to be an Arab Israeli Christian who is now a doctoral student in Berlin. Her paper praises the antisemitic "liberation theology" of today's Palestinian Christians.

This goes beyond the Christmas memes of Palestinians as Jesus. The "scholar" not only compares today's Zionist Jews to all the bad guys in her view of history - she claims Palestinians are the real Jews.

To recapitulate, the Galileanness of Jesus, inspirational on many levels, helps us to reconstruct the notion of belonging in the context of Palestine today. Just as Galileans were rendered enemies under the temple-state of Jerusalem, so too are today’s Palestinians cast as such under Zionism, where they are denied the right to belong to their biblical memory, history, culture, and homeland and denied recognition as Ām HaĀretz. More liberatory and decolonial theologies enable us to better think through and thus to reclaim the oneness of history and memory, of the Jesus event and the Nakba. Whether it is in stories of Galilee’s struggle against Jerusalem, Jesus’s against David, Biblical Israel’s against Roman Palestina, the crowd of sinners’ against the laos, or Filastin’s against the Zionist regime, each time we find the ochlos anew, exiled from human rights, and persistently yearning for a single sense of home. ... Here and now, it is indispensable to reread Palestine’s disenfranchised stories from Solomon’s Temple to Khurbān HaBāyit all the way to the Nakba; they seem to carry exiles that are yet to be remembered as one.

I see a lot of "scholarship" that pretends to find parallels between disparate situations and extracts meanings from them. In reality, you can throw two darts at any history timeline and find parallels between any two events as long as you ignore the differences. 

It is not actual scholarship; it is reading tea leaves. And in this case, it is doing so in the service of promoting hate against Jews. 

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