Popular American game show Jeopardy has been plunged into controversy after a contestant was told she had the wrong answer after identifying Jesus’s place of birth, the Church of Nativity in Bethlehem, as Palestine.

The incident took place in round one of the game broadcast on Friday, when Katie Needle was given the clue: “Built in the 300s A.D., the Church of the Nativity”, under the category “Where’s that Church?”.

Needle, a retail supervisor, from Brooklyn, answered Palestine, but was told her answer was wrong.

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One of the other two contestants, Jack McGuire, then buzzed in with the reply “Israel”, which host Alex Trebek accepted as correct.

The Church of Nativity, declared a world heritage site, is located in Bethlehem in the occupied West Bank, which is internationally-recognised as part of Palestine.

Israel occupied the West Bank and East Jerusalem in the Six-Day War of June 1967, in a move the international community has never recognised.

Christian pilgrims and tourists from across the globe visit Bethlehem throughout the year, specially on occasions like Christmas.

Jeopardy producers were not available for comment at the time of publication.

‘Inexcusable’

The episode was picked up by people on social media, with many criticising the show’s producers and host and demanding that they apologise.

Omar Ghraieb, a Palestinian writer based in Gaza, told Al Jazeera that: “What happened is inexcusable. Jeopardy should apologise and give a clear explanation. This shouldn’t just pass calmly and be forgotten.”

“This [jeopardy incident] just shows how normalised the occupation and cleansing of the Palestinian people from the historical record has become,” Imraan Siddiqi, executive director of Council of American Islamic Relations Arizona chapter, told Al Jazeera.

James Zogby of Zogby Analytics, and an American public opinion pollster, said the incident was “an insult to history, reality, the thousands of oppressed Palestinians of Bethlehem”.

Zogby recently wrote that: “Suffering under Israeli military occupation since 1967, Bethlehem has slowly been strangled. It has lost most of its land to settlement construction. It is hemmed in by a 30-foot-high concrete wall, stripped of its resources, and denied access to external markets.”

The United Nations says Israeli settlements in Bethlehem and other parts of occupied West Bank are illegal, and has called them a “flagrant violation” of international law.

‘Ahistorical propaganda’

Tamara Nassar, an associate editor at Electronic Intifada, told Al Jazeera that the Jeopardy incident contributes to the “settler-colonial ideal of erasing Palestinians from their own cultural and religious sites – both in consciousness and in physical fact”.

“While the audience is fed ahistorical propaganda, Israel often bars Palestinian Christians from Gaza from worshipping at Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity,” Nassar added.

Christians in Gaza who plan to travel to the West Bank for Christmas or Easter have to apply for a temporary single-use permit to Israel from its Coordinator of the Government Activities in the Territories, which often arbitrarily denies many seeking the permit.

“Perhaps nothing resembles this engineered absence from the American public imagination more poetically than the way contestants are bound to form their responses as questions: What is Palestine?” Nassar noted.
Christians celebrate Christmas in Bethlehem

SOURCE: aljazeera.com

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