Christians and Muslim Palestinian-Israelis protested a satiric sketch on Israel television which insulted both religions.
A satiric sketch on Channel 10 television prompted dozens of Christians in the Galilee to demonstrate against the channel this weekend, while the heads of local Christian churches published a denunciation of their own.
In their denunciation, the clergymen accused the skit of fomenting interreligious hatred. The skit, which aired on Lior Shlein’s nightly program, was called “Like a Virgin,” after the Madonna song.
Juan Cole wrote on the blog “Informed Comment: Thoughts on the Middle East, History and Religion” wrote:
So what did we learn here? A Jewish-Israeli attack on the holy figures of Christianity provoked outrage among Muslims as well as Christians, and was denounced by Palestinian-Israelis (20% of the population) as racist and as anti-Semitic.
One background for this Palestinian-Israeli response is that the crucified Christ is often taken by Palestinian Christians as a symbol of their displacement and expropriation at the hands of Israelis. So the attack on that symbol (‘died young of being obese’) by a representative of the Jewish majority was doubly painful, since it repeated on a symbolic level the Israeli denial of the 1948 Catastrophe and even of the existence of the Palestinians.