On July 10, 2026, Rama Duwaji — wife of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani — co-hosted an Islamic women’s “spiritual wellness” retreat on the French island of Corsica. The event framed the Virgin Mary as a “Palestinian woman” living under occupation.
Judea was under Roman occupation at the time. But Mary could not have been Palestinian. The label didn’t exist yet.
Mary, the mother of Jesus, was a first-century Jewish woman from Judea and Galilee — not a “Palestinian” in any ethnic, national, or political sense.
Her Historical and Biblical Identity
Mary — Miriam in Hebrew — was born a Jewish woman in Nazareth, Galilee, around the late first century BCE. She married Joseph, a descendant of David who is never described as “Palestinian” anywhere in the New Testament, and she became the mother of Jesus. Historical consensus and the New Testament both place her within the Jewish community of Roman-occupied Judea, observing Jewish law, Temple practices, and the Sabbath.
Her identity was fully Jewish — by ethnicity, religion, and culture — rooted in the land of Israel.
“Palestine” Didn’t Exist Yet
The land Mary lived in was never called “Palestine.” That name didn’t exist. It was Judea — officially, the Roman province of Judaea. Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea; his family lived in Nazareth of Galilee. Both were Jewish regions under Roman occupation.
Rome renamed the province “Syria Palaestina” around 135–138 CE, after crushing the Bar Kokhba revolt, a major Jewish uprising. The name change was deliberate and punitive, an attempt to sever the Jewish connection to the land by invoking the ancient Philistines, non-Semitic enemies of ancient Israel, instead of “Judea,” which tied the territory to the Jews. This happened more than a century after Mary’s lifetime (roughly 18 BCE to the first century CE).
Calling first-century Jews “Palestinians” retroactively slaps a later Roman punitive label — and a modern national identity — onto people who never used it. Ancient Jews called themselves Israelites and Judeans. The name imposed on them later was designed to erase that connection, not describe it.
Ancient Claims, Modern Invention
The term “Palestinian” as a national identity is a modern invention, promoted starting in the 1960s as part of a broader effort to delegitimize Israel and undercut American influence in the region. Even prominent Arab leaders have acknowledged that Palestinian identity has no distinct history or culture of its own, and that “Palestinians” largely descend from immigrants who arrived from surrounding Arab countries and had no connection to the land.
No historical record shows anyone at the time of Mary calling themselves “Palestinian.”
Bottom Line
Mary and Jesus were Jews from Judea — not members of a separate “Palestinian” people. Equating them erases the continuity of Jewish history on that land. That erasure looks like exactly the point of Duwaji’s framing.
This is the latest attempt to rewrite history by borrowing someone else’s religion and culture. Because Palestinian nationalism has no history of its own to draw on, the strategy is to graft itself onto other traditions and pretend it existed long before it did. It didn’t. And doing this to the New Testament is disrespectful.
Sources
Fox News, FIRM, Matthew , BibleHub, Hoover Institution, Informing Science, Sage Journals, Israel Reclaiming the Narrative, Wikiquote, Middle East Forum
