cross‐posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/3702299

Pictured: ‘Knight of Judaea’, by Richard Cronin (1919).

Many people (such as my mother) have characterized the situation in Palestine as an ‘ancient conflict’. There is some truth to that summary, but not necessarily in the way that people think.

The present iteration of violent domination can be traced all the way back to the 1880s at the earliest; ‘ancient’ only in a colloquial sense of the word. Nonetheless, it is ancient in that it parallels previous European attempts to dominate Palestine, hence why some of us cynically refer to this as ‘the Zionist crusade’:

Both the Crusades and the Zionist projects although centuries apart resemble one another in more than one aspect. It may even be argued that Zionism is the continuation of the crusades or a new form of it and that Zionism is the heir of the Crusade. Many authors have looked at the parallels between these two historical movements, both foreign invaders coming from the west committing heinous crimes, establishing a colony in the heart of the Muslim World surviving for a period of time before their inevitable fall.

[…]

A joint Christian–Jewish initiative for the occupation of Palestine was presented by David Reubeni to Pope Clement VII in the early sixteenth century in March 1524.[8] The Pope who saw this as an opportunity to mobilize Jews who were in need for arms to occupy Palestine under European auspices wrote letters to some European monarchs to support such an endeavor, such as the King of Portugal. [9] This may be the first time such an initiative was put forward for a colonialist settler Jewish state through relocating Jews to settle with European support. Although this did not materialize, it was the template that was followed a few centuries later by Theodore Herzl and succeeded with European support.

Elsehow, the continuity between the Crusades and Zionism is, perhaps, not as slim as it may first seem. Quoting Alexander Schölch’s Palestine in Transformation, 1856–1882, pages 73–5:

[O]f the many colonization projects and enterprises, only two had any success: the settlements of Templars since 1868 and those of [proto‐Zionist] immigrants since 1882. The Templars, a pietistic sect from Württemberg, had set for themselves the goal of “bringing together the people of God” in Jerusalem. […] The number of Templars settled in Palestine never exceeded a maximum of 2,200 souls.¹⁷⁰ […] Thus the historical rôle of the Templars was reduced to having proved to their more successful competitors and successors, the [proto‐Zionist] settlers, that European colonization in Palestine could actually succeed. The [proto‐Zionist] settlers tried to learn from the experience of the Templars.

(Emphasis added.)

Update: I found an interesting (if relatively minor) parallel between Benjamin Netanyahu and Pope Urban II at Clermont in 1095. Quoting Christian Hofreiter’s Making Sense of Old Testament Genocide: Christian Interpretations of Herem Passages, page 173:

At the conclusion of his speech, Urban draws another typological parallel based on an OT warfare text, a text that does not itself include the term herem but contains God’s prediction of utter destruction, later reiterated in terms of herem. The OT text in question is the battle against Amalek.⁷⁴

Urban tells the crusaders: ‘Moreover, you who are to go shall have us praying for you; let us have you fighting for God's people. It is our duty to pray, yours to fight against the Amalekites. With Moses, we shall extend unwearied hands in prayer to Heaven, while you go forth and brandish the sword, like dauntless warriors, against Amalek.’⁷⁵

(Emphasis added.)

I am not the first to spot this similarity, though almost nobody else has, even in articles linking the first crusade to the Zionist one.

Likewise, Elliott Horowitz’s Reckless Rites, page 121:

Urban was not the first Christian to refer to the Arabs as Amalekites. The Byzantine chronicler Theophanes, who died early in the ninth century, referred to the Muslim conquerors of Palestine (in the seventh century) as “the desolate Amalek.”⁴⁶