New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s wife, Rama Duwaji, skipped America’s 250th birthday festivities to co-host a women-only “spiritual” getaway that recast the mother of Jesus as a modern-day Palestinian political symbol.
The event at a monastery retreat in Corsica was organized by the Muslim travel outfit The Women Sanctuary, The New York Post reported. Tickets for a private cottage run as high as $5,260. Organizers say the gathering will “honor” Mary as a figure revered in Islam, with one past attendee going so far as to describe her as a “Palestinian woman who gave birth under occupation” — the kind of framing critics justifiably call a wholesale rewrite of first-century history.
Duwaji’s own history adds fuel to critics’ fire: she has previously liked social media posts celebrating Hamas and produced illustrations for anti-Israel pieces.
Historians note the claim about Mary collapses under basic chronology. Jesus and Mary were Jews living in Roman-controlled Judea; there was no Palestinian nation, people, or identity in existence at the time. The very name “Palestine” wasn’t applied to the region until the second century, when Rome rebranded Judea as “Syria Palaestina” specifically to erase its Jewish association after crushing a Jewish revolt.
In 2013, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas called Jesus “a Palestinian messenger,” and in 2019, U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) shared a social media post that stated, “I was once asked by a relative who is a Palestinian Christian why the Christian right in America largely supports their oppression. ‘Don’t they know we’re Christian too? Do they even consider us human? Don’t they know Jesus was a Palestinian?’”
As former Republican speechwriter Peter Wehner has written, “In fact, although many Palestinians today are Christians, Jesus himself was not one. He was born to Jewish parents in Judea, he lived as a Jew, and he died as a Jew. In the time of Jesus, Palestine didn’t exist — as a place, an entity, a word, or a concept. In the second century, Judea, which was the epicenter of large-scale Jewish rebellions against Roman rule, was renamed Syria Palaestina — later simply Palaestina — by the Romans.”
This isn’t the first time the Holy Family has been repackaged as Palestinian. In December 2024, the Vatican itself courted controversy when Pope Francis toured a nativity display created by Palestinian artists that dressed the infant Jesus in a keffiyeh. A Palestine Liberation Organization official used the occasion to thank the pontiff for backing the Palestinian cause. Francis had already drawn fire for calling Israel’s military response to the October 7, 2023, Hamas massacre “immoral” and for suggesting an investigation into whether Israel’s conduct in Gaza amounted to genocide — remarks that fueled accusations he was tilting against the Jewish state.
.png)
.png)
