The Crusader-Zionist Analogy

Although the Israelis have held Judea and Samaria since 1967 and have had partnership in the nuclear club for many years, the crusader anxiety has not abated, even if it is not very self-aware. This anxiety represents a hidden traumatic fear that the Zionist project and the Israeli place might end in destruction. Unlike other negative and threatening myths, the crusader myth is not marked by days of remembrance or pilgrimage sites. It is not based on any direct historical memory, and except in intellectual and literary circles, it does not figure in the public discourse with sufficient intensiveness to become popular and widespread. Yet this cannot detract from the crusader anxiety that exists in Israel behind the scenes. It is present in the historical consciousness, because the all-too temporary nature of the First Temple and the Second Temple are historically factual. It also exists in the political consciousness of many Israelis who identify the Iranian nuclear bomb as an existential threat to the “Zionist crusaders.” In many ways, it even overshadows the horror of the Holocaust, for the Israeli place, feared to be temporary and dangerous, was established as a healing response to the European place, the previous great geohistorical arena of many Jews that turned into a valley of slaughter. Is the crusader threat destined to be one of those profound myths that serve as precedents and tragically recur? Does the crusader myth suggest that what once was will always be again, only this time as a testimony to the failure of Zionism to solve the Jewish problem?

The crusader narrative also has a magnetism that still survives. It has been a mythical Rashomon, in which each group has created its own narrative. The historians made it into a Christian narrative with a beginning, middle, and end and shifted the narrative to the Muslim Orient, or, as the crusader kingdom historian Joshua Prawer called it, a tale of “Europe overseas.”¹ For the religious, it was a parable and symbol of the power of believers, whether it was Christians leaving their territorial base in order to defend a spiritual homeland, or whether it was Muslims whose unity of heart and sword defeated the Christian infidels after two hundred years. For modern Arab nationalism, it was a political myth that enlisted the forefathers for the benefit of the heirs, and here the historical episode became an inspiring model for the descendants who were encouraged to expel the Jewish infidels from Palestine in the twentieth century. For poets and writers, it was an inexhaustible source of romantic inspiration; for Israeli patriots, it was a historical lesson that demonstrated that the healing must precede the blow; for post-Zionists, it was a historical example of mediaeval colonialism and a foreshadowing of modern national colonialism; and for fundamentalists, it was a pretext for attacking the globalization, modernity, and secularism of the beginning of the twenty-first century. Each one has had his own crusader myth.

We will look at four groups of writers in Israeli society who have dealt with the crusader narrative: historians, statesmen (and politicians), writers, and publicists. Each group has related to the historical parallel in accordance with its own concepts and in its own symbolism and language. Their joint scrutiny has cast light on major aspects of the Israelis’ self-perception, and has thrown into relief certain elements of their collective identity as it has developed in the second half of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first; that is, for the first sixty years of the state of Israel.

The historiography of the confrontation between the East and West has a history of its own. The Muslim revolt against mediaeval colonialism has been used in modern times in support of the rebellion of the Arab peoples against European colonialism, but the European colonialists also used historiography for political purposes. The French imagined the campaigns of Charles X and Napoleon to be French crusades, the Germans made Frederick II Barbarossa into a national hero at the time of the unification of Germany, the Belgians adopted Godfrey de Bouillon, whose birthplace was not Belgium in the Middle Ages, but became so in the nineteenth century. After the Great Exhibition of 1851, the British transferred the statue of Richard the Lionheart to a new site near the Palace of Westminster, where it has stood to the present day. In nineteenth-century Europe, the pan-European narrative of the crusades began to split up into rival national narratives: Each people produced on its own soil its own crusader narrative. Each nation chose to tailor its history to the territory in which it now resided.

The crusades did not have any centrality in Arab historiography or the Arab consciousness until the twentieth century, but rather were viewed as part of a history of clashes and conquests from ancient times until the modern period. In the introduction to the first book in Arabic on the subject, The Cautionary Tale of the Crusader Wars (Reference El-Hariri1899), the Egyptian historian Said Ali el-Hariri observed that the aggressiveness of the European rulers toward the Ottoman rulers “bears an amazing resemblance to the actions of the crusaders in the past.”² Close to the time of the War of Independence, a book called The New Crusader-Phenomenon in Palestine (1948) was published in Damascus, comparing the Christian colonialism of the Middle Ages with the Anglo-French and Zionist colonialism. The conclusion was that “we shall cleanse Palestine of the star of David just as we cleansed it of the crusades.”³ The Arab anticolonialism was represented as a war of Muslims against crusaders; the expellers of the crusaders such as Saladin, Beybars, and Nureddin, who were actually Turks and Kurds, were regarded as Islamic heroes; the religious aspect of the conflict was played down and the national aspect was emphasized; a moral duality, generally structured on belligerent myths, was created between barbaric crusaders and chivalrous Muslims; and the mythological construction was made of a Zionist “crusader” invasion, an ideological construction in which the past was used for the purposes of the present. Zionism was depicted as a religious movement nationally oppressive of the local population and economically exploitative toward them. This foreign regime, alien to the locality, was said to have no culture of its own and to lack all national authenticity; and thus, this vanguard of the degenerate western civilization would collapse as soon as a united front was presented against it.

Before the outbreak of the Six-Day War in 1967, the president of Egypt, Abdul Nasser, was compared to the legendary leader Saladin, who in the distant past had defeated the foreign invaders.⁴ The weekly journal El-Howdat informed its readers that “since Salah ed-Din el-Iobi (Saladin), the Arabs have not had a leader like Abdul Nasser.”⁵ Saladin was viewed as a mobilizing symbol of the liberation of Jerusalem, “of Muslim unity, religious sacrifice, selfless struggle and the victory of faith.”⁶ A brigade of the Palestinian Liberation Organization’s (PLO) Army For the Liberation of Jerusalem was called Hattin (the battleground where the crusaders were defeated); section 15 of the Hamas charter praised Saladin as a model; the 1973 War was described as the first Arab victory since Saladin; the civil war in Lebanon was called the “tenth crusade,” in which the Maronites were compared to the Franks; the First Lebanon War (1982) was said to be the “twelfth crusade,” in which Beirut did duty as the feudal fief of the crusader Iblin dynasty; and in the Gulf War (1991), Saddam Hussein proclaimed: “Salah ed-Din el-Iobi now loudly cries Allah Akbar (God is Great)!”⁷ From the day PLO leader Yasser Arafat returned from the Camp David talks in the summer of the year 2000, the Palestinian media never stopped praising him by comparing him to the legendary commander. From the beginning of the Al-Aqsa intifada (2000), Arafat continually declared in his speeches, “We shall return to Jerusalem and Al-Aqsa, entered by Salah ed-Din el-Iobi.”

Emmanuel Sivan discerned three main schools of thought in the treatment of the crusader phenomenon in Arab historiography. The first school of thought, previous to the Second World War, was concerned with the religious confrontation of Islam and Christianity and the Christian crusader threat to retake the territories that Islam conquered in its early days; the second school of thought, after the Second World War, saw the crusades as the beginning of European imperialism; and the third saw the crusades as an important phase in the ongoing confrontation between East and West in the Middle East from the fifth century BCE onward.⁸

The myth of Saladin has long been present in Arab history.⁹ Originally directed against European colonialism and western civilization, in the last sixty years this mobilizing symbol has been utilized for the Arab-Israel conflict and has been mainly directed against the “Zionist entity.”¹⁰ It is not surprising if in the Israeli-crusader discourse an effort has been made on the Israeli side to confront the mass of images and parallels associated with the crusader myth.¹¹ It is interesting to note that there has been no such confrontation with the Zionist-crusader analogy on the Arab side, and the debate on the validity of the historical comparison has not taken place there. The Israeli discourse on the crusader phenomenon has been kept within the Israeli context and remains an internal debate dealing mainly with questions that have no connection with the Arab neighbors: the relationship between religion and the state, the lessons to be drawn from the settlements, the self-image of a foreign entity in the East, and the revision of the “tearful” approach to Jewish history in the exile that focused on the disturbances of 1096.

From the Crusades to the Swastika

Jewish and Israeli historiography has to this day shown little interest in the slaughter and massacre of Jews by the crusaders in the cities of Palestine, but on the other hand has shown much interest in the massacres of Jews in mediaeval Germany. This raises a number of questions. Is there behind this dual tendency a veiled “Zionist” intention to stress the dangers of the exile for the Jewish people? Are the persecutions of 1096 seen in the Israeli discourse as foreshadowing the Holocaust of European Jewry in the twentieth century? Is a distinction made between these two points in time (the twelfth and the twentieth centuries) that emphasizes the refuge provided for the Jews in Israel? Robert Hazan, in his book The First Crusade and the Jews, 1096, claimed that if the events of 1096 did not receive the attention of the nation whereas Massada became a symbol of Jewish national revolt, it was perhaps because “Massada represents true heroism in the homeland, while the saints of the Rhineland, despite the fact that they are the embodiment of the myth of the strong, committed Jew, remain an exilic phenomenon.”¹²

Whatever the case, martyrdom remains the chief impression left by the disturbances of 1096: the massacre of the Jewish communities of Germany by the crusaders on their way to Palestine, and especially the slaughter of the communities of Speyer, Worms, Mainz, Cologne, Trier, and Metz. The Jewish martyrology was nourished for centuries by the image of Jewish murder victims and suicides, and the religious fervor that motivated the perpetrators of the massacres left its mark on the Jewish consciousness of the relationship between the Jews and Christians. In the historiographical discourse on the disturbances of 1096, one may discern three phases. In the first phase, the great Jewish historians of the nineteenth century and of the beginning of the twentieth, such as Zwi Graetz and Shimon Dubnow, stressed the negative influence on the Jews of Christian monastic mysticism, resulting in a readiness to commit suicide for fear of forced apostasy.¹³ According to Moshe Gidman, this primitive influence postponed the emergence of the Jewish Haskalah (Enlightenment) in Germany because fears, delusions, superstitions, and the preoccupation of Ashkenazi devotion with hidden mysteries took the place of the rationalistic and healthy ways of thinking among the Jews of Spain.¹⁴ Graetz added that despite the tragic results of the disturbances of 1096, the crusades also had some positive consequences for the history of the West.

The new Jewish historiography of the twentieth century discovered new sources that complemented the former findings and saw 1096 as a crossroads in mediaeval Jewish history. One should remember that these historians witnessed the emergence of the Yishuv, the Holocaust, and the founding of the state of Israel. Shalom Baron, the first critic of the “tearful” approach to Jewish history, identified 1096 as a turning point in Jewish-Christian relations.¹⁵ Like the earlier historiography, the new historians saw the Jewish martyrdom of the Middle Ages as “a conscious rejection of Christian cultural norms at the same time as an unconscious adoption of them.”¹⁶ These studies revealed the influence of the Christian environment on the extreme tendency to self- sacrifice of the Jews of Germany in 1096, yet at the same time they “extolled the special quality of their self-sacrificing martyrdom.”¹⁷

There has lately arisen a postmodernist school of thought concerning the massacres of 1096, close in spirit to the title of David Myers’s book, Re-inventing the Jewish Past.¹⁸ Many studies have been published demonstrating the closeness of the symbols, myths, and traditions of the Jews and Christians at that period. For example, there are the studies of Israel Yuval, which link martyrdom to the appearance of the blood libel in twelfth- century Christian Europe.¹⁹ Ivan (Israel) Marcus claims that the Christian devotion to the concept of bearing the cross and the Jewish devotion to the idea of death for the sanctification of God are two aspects of the same phenomenon.²⁰ He sees a resemblance between three historical manifestations: the crusaders’ belief that they knew the will of God, which required them to kill Jews on the way to the Holy Land; the Jews’ belief in self-immolation based on the conviction that they knew the divine will, which required them to kill themselves and each other like the priests of the Temple; and the belief of hassidei Ashkenaz that they could uncover the secrets of the Creator. From all this he draws the conclusion that the disturbances of 1096 were a turning point in Christian Europe, and the collective memory concerning them was chiefly preserved through the historical consciousness of the Jews of the Rhineland.

Against the background of the disturbances of 1929, Shemuel Ussishkin, a publicist and the son of Menahem Ussishkin, wrote the first book in Hebrew on the crusades, titled The West in the East: The History of the Crusades in Palestine (1931). The author, who was not a historian, explained his motivation in writing it as a desire to draw lessons from “those days” that would be relevant for “the present time.” What did the Christian knights of eight hundred years before have to do with the pioneers in Palestine? He answered: “If I nevertheless sat down and carried out my intention of surveying the history of the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem, I did so because I did not see the events of those days only as an ancient historical episode unconnected with the questions we face in our lives.”²¹ The Kingdom of Jerusalem, in his opinion, was not only one of the most fascinating episodes in the history of Christian Europe and in Jewish history, but it also had an additional, special point of interest: It had previously been usual to examine the crusader kingdom from the point of view of the disturbances of 1096, but Ussishkin turned his searchlight for the first time on the Zionist-crusader analogy. The book was not a rebuke or an apology, but a lesson concerning a test case in which the past could serve the needs of the present by providing an interesting example of a western culture dwelling at the heart of the East:

The analogy made by the Muslims between the Christian past and the Jewish present was generally understood by them to signify that the Arabs had to learn from their heroic past to unite their ranks behind a historic leader who would expel the infidels. Ussishkin, however, does not see this as the main point. His interest in the analogy is different: He seeks to discover how to prevent the collapse of a western civilization that has planted itself in the East. Where race and origins are concerned – he points out – the Jews are not part of the western world, as their roots are in the East and they are culturally and religiously close to the Muslims. However, it cannot be denied that the majority of Zionists and immigrants are westerners and not orientals, and the matter of their integration into the East raises questions similar to those that arose in the time of the crusaders in Palestine.

Ussishkin perceived the weak point of western Zionism to be the imposition on the East of an “alien culture” and a “foreign centre.” When we study the history of the crusaders in the East, he said, “we are confronted with questions and dangers relevant to our situation today, and it sometimes seems to us that we are reading contemporary history with fictional names and characters in fancy-dress.”²³ These lines recall and reiterate Karl Marx’s famous diagnosis of the failed French revolutions of 1848, which were stillborn because they borrowed the costumes of their parent revolutionaries of 1789 “in order to present their new world-historical vision in this fancy-dress, this time- honoured disguise, and in this borrowed language.”²⁴ Ussishkin came to the conclusion that “the crusades failed and nothing at all remains of the crusader kingdoms. But this fact only increases the necessity of studying their history in order to examine the reasons for the failure and in order to learn how to avoid the mistakes which had so many fateful consequences.”²⁵

One of the consequences of the crusades was the massacres of 1096. The Holocaust of European Jewry in the twentieth century took their place as the most horrible example of a systematic and murderous persecution of the Jews since that time. Berl Katznelson, the intellectual leader of the Labor movement in Palestine, more than any other leader in the Yishuv, immediately understood the depth of the tragedy. He already knew in 1940 that the starting point of any Zionist discussion had to be the destruction of European Jewry.²⁶ In that same year, under the title “With Our Backs to the Wall,” he drew an analogy between the crusades and the actions of the Nazis:

The Nazi-crusader analogy was not just a once-only occurrence on the part of Katznelson. About twelve years later, in 1952, the Israeli essayist Moshe Fogel sought a revision of the Jewish attitude to the crusades, because in his opinion they were not the reason for the slaughter of the Jews, but merely the pretext. “The German murderers in the eleventh century like their Nazi descendants in the twentieth merely used the crusades as the Nazis used the Bolshevik menace as a convenient excuse to exterminate the Jews whom they hated.”²⁸ In his opinion, there was no intrinsic connection between the crusades and the slaughter of the Jews, and the crusades could have happened without the slaughter of the Jews, just as the slaughter of the Jews could have happened without the crusades. The Jews were victims in the ideological war between Christianity and Islam in the eleventh century, just as they were victims of the ideological war between fascism and Communism in the twentieth century. The state of Israel was founded precisely in order to avoid this fate, to which a national minority is prone.

The crusades, according to Fogel, were a major link in a chain – the long historical duel between the East and West.²⁹ The expressions “East” and “West,” he maintained, should not be understood only in terms of geography and religion, but of material and spiritual culture, ideals of civilization. The Jews played an important part in this confrontation, and swung like a pendulum between East and West. In the Graeco-Persian War ,the Jews were in the eastern camp, but the West won and it seemed that Hellenism would conquer the world. The revolt of the Maccabees against Hellenism was a continuation of the battle of Marathon, but this time the East was victorious. Still, there was a reaction in the West when the kingdom of Byzantium became so “orientalized” that during the crusades there was very little cultural difference between Christian Constantinople and Muslim Damascus and Baghdad. Western Europe freed itself from any eastern influence, and in the crusader period there was a cultural abyss between Rome and Paris on the one hand and Constantinople on the other. The crusades were the reaction of the West and a continuation of the battle of Marathon in the guise of a Christian-Catholic offensive against the Muslim East. One phase in this duel between civilizations is the confrontation between the West under the leadership of the United States and the East under the leadership of Russia. Fogel concluded:

Europe Overseas

In 1949, a year after the founding of the state of Israel, the biblical scholar Menahem Haran enumerated three factors that worked to the disadvantage of the crusader state and that were also relevant in the case of Israel. The crusader state was thrust outward toward the sea by a unified and powerful Muslim Arab East. The crusaders were excessively concentrated in towns, abandoned most areas of the state to the local Muslims, and were overlords and conquerors. There was little emigration from Europe and crusader settlement in the country was sparse. What was the relevance of all this for the state of Israel? With regard to the rise of Arab power, this is not in the hands of the Israelis. They can only make sure they have a sufficiently large territorial rear. With regard to the ethnic character of settlement, in the three generations preceding the founding of the state the Israelis succeeded in this undertaking. With regard to the amount of immigration and the number of settlers in the country, Haran concluded: “All the evidence is in our favour. Our development will inevitably give us a different fate.”³¹ Haran, in effect, fired the opening shot of the crusader discourse soon after the War of Independence. For the first time, a man of academic stature took a stand and initiated an open debate without any fear of the historical parallel.

One year later, in 1950, the writer and poet Aharon Amir, writing from an entirely different ideological viewpoint, warned the young Jewish state against pursuing a “Crusader” policy. In his article “The Crusader Kingdom of Israel,” which appeared under the pseudonym “Yehoshua Bentov” in the journal Aleph, the organ of the “Young Hebrews” (known to their adversaries as “Canaanites”), Amir cautioned against a policy aiming at the total separateness of Israel, which would mean a Jewish theocracy preoccupied with building up its strength against its neighbors, and which would be perpetually dependent on external factors like world Jewry and foreign powers:

Amir considered that although the idea of comparing the fate of the crusaders with that of the Israelis was not a popular one, this comparison represented the most serious element in the ideological thinking of the Arabs. Thus, he believed that “a ‘Crusader’ State of Israel, a Zionist State of Israel, would not retain its strength for any length of time. Any unexpected gust of wind, any sudden change in the balance of world forces would portend disaster. The seal of perdition would be on its brow.”

It should be remembered that the “Crusader syndrome,” representing an importation of western culture to the East, stood in contradiction to the Canaanite ideology to which Amir subscribed, and this opposition of West to East was discordant with its nativistic ideal of Hebrew nationhood in the Mesopotamian region. It is ironic that this did not prevent the Canaanites from fostering the Phoenician myth and seeking to prove by means of it that the Jews were an eastern export to the West. In the words of Dan Laor, “The Canaanites expected the new nation of Israeli natives (whom they preferred to call “Hebrews”) to become the vanguard, the melting-pot of all the ethnic groups in the west Semitic world, creating a massive, homogenous Middle-Eastern nation similar to that of the ancient Hebrews who had been the dominant national, cultural and political force in the region in biblical times.” Whatever the case, Amir’s outlook reflected a “Hebraic” policy, severed from the Jewish umbilical cord and liberated from alien ideologies, which gave the Jewish immigrant no preference to the non-Jewish resident of the land, and which opened the gates of Hebrew society to anyone who desired it. It will not be difficult for the reader to detect here the first sprouting of the idea of a “state of all its citizens,” a state based on geography rather than history – an idea that is basically Canaanite. More than fifty years later, Aharon Amir’s call to his compatriots to choose the Canaanite option of Israeli identity had still not ceased to be heard; it was coupled with the threat that, unless they did so, the Israelis were doomed to end like the crusaders. The poet Amir Or concluded his article, “A Single Identity for All the Inhabitants of the Land,” with the following words: “As the years pass, the religious basis of our identity increasingly brings to mind the Crusader Kingdom and also its end.”³³

In 1953, in a critical review of the monumental History of the Crusades by the Scottish historian Steven Runciman, the editor of the Haaretz newspaper, Gershom Schocken, claimed that the Israelis were demonstrating an increasing interest in the history of the Land of Israel as distinct from an interest in the history of the Jewish people such as was found in exile, for example, in Graetz’s history. The very fact of exile, he said, meant that the history of the Jewish people was something different from the history of the Land of Israel. For nearly two thousand years, various powers had ruled over the land and had been influenced by the geographical circumstances and political situation. When the Israelis began to function once more as an independent political factor within the objective conditions of the country, it was natural that they wanted to know how other political elements in different periods had attempted to deal with the problems the land presents to all those who wish to rule it. Schocken came to the conclusion that “those who wish to draw a parallel between the fate of the Kingdom of Jerusalem and the situation in the State of Israel in our time must take into account that the episode of the rise of Saladin … does not give one the impression that an inevitable historical development took place here.” ³⁴

A year before the Sinai Campaign of 1956, the Israeli journalist Uri Avneri interviewed the English historian Arnold Toynbee. The interview appeared under the title “Don’t Repeat the Mistakes of the Philistines and the Crusaders.”³⁵ Toynbee, who in the tenth volume of his Study of History had diagnosed Zionism as a modern colonialism, in 1955 turned to the Israelis and addressed them as follows: “Reliance on the rifle and the bayonet will never give you the assurance that your country belongs to you. Only a deep soul-identification with the country, its past and future, will bring you this certainty. You have to understand that everything connected with your country, even if it does not relate to the Jews, is connected with you directly. You have to learn the history of the country and even that of the crusaders, for example, for it belongs to you.”

Steven Runciman repeated this advice in his answer to Avneri when he asked him whether he had ever thought about a similarity between the crusaders and the Zionists. “Not only have I thought about it,” he said, “but I wanted to add a subtitle: ‘A Practical Guide for Zionists on How Not to Do It.’ But my Jewish friends advised me against it.” When Runciman and Avneri met, they constantly found Zionist parallels to crusader figures and events. Avneri wrote:

The Israelis’ curiosity about the crusaders resulted from their growing interest in the history of the land as distinct from that of the people.³⁷ The Zionist educational network, which emphasized the periods of national existence in the days of the First and Second Temples, had neglected whole periods in which there was no marked Jewish presence in the Land of Israel. A people without a land implied a land without a people, and a land that was not settled was obviously a land without a history. For a long time, the whole period from Bar Kochba until the beginning of Zionist settlement was neglected. The history of the country, as opposed to the history of the Jews within it, was of interest to few. In the second decade after the founding of the state, a new attitude developed toward the Christian and Muslim periods in the history of the country. The question of sovereignty had now been settled, and so the inhibitions concerning the non-Jewish past of the country diminished.

The archaeological profession, which was very popular, also bestowed legitimacy on the investigation of non-Jewish periods. This was the background against which Michael Avi Yona’s studies of Palestine in the Roman and Byzantine periods, Yitzhak ben Zvi’s studies of Ottoman Palestine, and Joshua Prawer’s studies of crusader Palestine were written.

Joshua Prawer, an outstanding Israeli historian of the crusader kingdom in Palestine, scrutinized in his work a fascinating two-hundred-year-long chapter in the history of the Christian West and the Muslim East, a period in which the Europeans set up a “Europe overseas” in Palestine. Some people have seen this as a link in the chain of the ancient traditional hostility between the East and West, between Persia and Greece, between Hannibal and Rome – a chapter eventually known as the “Orient problem” in European history. Prawer focused on “a description of the vivid life of the crusaders, whose ideal was not one of harmony or integration but of continual confrontation on the battlefield, as in the spheres of religion and culture.”³⁸ The European victory implanted a western society, alien in its culture, religion, and customs, in a world whose material and cultural achievements were greater than those of the European conquerors. A confrontation between East and West was inevitable.

Only rarely did Prawer relate specifically to the Zionist-crusader analogy, and even on these rare occasions he only did so when he had to answer questions in interviews. An exception was his article “The Fall of the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem,” which appeared in the political journal La-Merhav in 1954. In this article, the reasons were given for the decline and fall of the Crusader Kingdom, but no historical parallel was made between the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and the twentieth century. However, in his summarizing introduction, Prawer expressed his feelings as a historian about historical analogies:

Prawer spoke of the great interest in the history of the crusader kingdom shown in the Middle East after the state of Israel arose. The Arab newspapers suddenly loved to talk about Saladin, Beybars, and King Al-Sharif, and the Hebrew and European-language press also displayed much curiosity about the subject. He concluded: On the one hand, it was the sign of a search for historical consolation after a defeat, and on the other it was an expression of fear and a warning after the intoxication engendered by the founding of the state. He continued:

Shortly before the Six-Day War, the weekly French-language Tunisian journal Jeune Afrique published Prawer’s views on the character of the Crusader Kingdom in Palestine, although these views were by no means identical with the Arab point of view. The reason given for their publication was that Prawer’s book was about to appear in a French edition. The journal allowed the view to be expressed that the crusader kingdom was totally different in character from the state of Israel in our time, a view that was in contradiction to the prevailing opinion among the Arab intelligentsia that the factors that led to the fall of the crusader kingdom would eventually destroy the state of Israel, to which it was supposed to be parallel. In its account of Prawer’s opinions, Jeune Afrique refrained drawing the parallel between the crusaders and the Israelis, but this question is implicit in the text of the book. To take one example: “The crusaders never created a people: they remained French (for the most part), English, Swabian, etc. Their kingdom merely expressed the religious unity of Christian Europe.”⁴¹ That is to say, the “fusion of exiles” characteristic of the state of Israel did not take place and there was no social unity on a national basis. To give another example:

From this point of view there was also a marked difference between the crusader kingdom and Israel.

Like most Israelis in the period before the Six-Day War, Prawer was worried by the security problems of Israel within its narrow borders. At various academic conferences at which he lectured, he hinted at present-day security matters while speaking about the history of the crusader kingdom. In March 1963 he gave a lecture on “Crusader Policies Concerning the Dead Sea and Sinai” for the Society for the Study of the Land of Israel and Its Antiquities and the Absalom Institute. Prawer claimed that there were three stages in the “security policies” of the crusader state. In the first stage, the kingdom sought to preserve its security by extending its control as far as the natural borders of the country – that is to say, as far as the deserts. In the second stage, when the crusaders became aware that a large Egyptian army could be brought across the desert, they tried to control the deserts themselves. In the third stage, the kingdom sought to conquer Egypt on the assumption that without crusader rule in Egypt there would be no security in crusader Palestine either. At a gathering that took place in October 1966 Prawer lectured on “Galilee and Its Defence in the Crusader Period,” and his conclusion was that one of the crusaders’ weaknesses was that they failed to accept the idea of spatial defense.

This was the reason for the failure of the Crusader Principality of the Galilee: It was not possible to control the country from stone fortresses without the support of a well-disposed peasantry.

About two months after the 1967 War, Prawer touched on the central point in the Jews’ attachment to their land: “Throughout the period of exile of the people of Israel, no other people succeeded in striking roots in the land and making it its country.” Prawer repeatedly emphasized the special connection of the people of Israel to its land, in contrast to the crusaders: “In the thirteenth century the country lay desolate, and the crusaders, despite their immense effort for two hundred years to hold onto it, failed, as the Muslims and Mongols also failed.”⁴³

In March 1973, about half a year before the Yom Kippur War, in the symposium “Conquerors and Conquered – the Crusader State as a Colonialist State,” held in honor of the appearance of the English edition of his book The Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, Prawer said that the crusader state was a society based on a legitimate claim to ownership of the land. At this gathering, the historian Meron Benvenisti pointed out that the analogy between the crusader state and the state of Israel was an invention of the Arab historians, and only the Israeli historians, who knew the land and Israeli society, could set the record straight. The historian Shlomo Avineri claimed that the true parallel to the crusader society was not to be found in the Middle East but in South Africa, whose apartheid regime was also based on ideological-biblical principles, drawing an analogy between the blacks and the Canaanites in the Bible. The only parallel one could make between the Israelis and the crusaders concerns the image of the Israelis in the eyes of the Arabs. The Arabs relate to the Israelis with a feeling of military inferiority that was characteristic of the relationship of the Muslim armies to the crusaders, but with a hint of cultural superiority as the representatives of the great and ancient Muslim civilization. The sociologist Moshe Lissac asserted that unlike modern colonialist movements, the crusaders did not have a metropolis. The right-wing intellectual Israel Eldad observed that although the crusaders could claim a hereditary title to the country, they had no sense of returning to a homeland. In the two hundred years they existed in the country, the word “homeland” appeared in their writings only once.

In a television program in July 1987 to mark the eighth-hundredth anniversary of the battle of Hattin, at which the fall of the crusader kingdom of Jerusalem began, an Arab child from a school in Nablus appeared who said that he had no doubt whatsoever that the Israelis would end like the crusaders; he declared that “the Jews are the new imperialists.” In this program, Aharon Amir expressed the opinion that “if the ghetto-principle will rule our lives” in the state of Israel, a crusader-like end is not only a possibility but a virtual certainty. Yet because Israel is part of the modern world and its way of life is predominantly secular, it will necessarily influence the populations not of Jewish extraction and will draw them into its sphere. Emmanuel Sivan, for his part, denied the validity of historical theories, saw little truth in the analogies, and warned that one should not be led astray by the myth of the battle of Hattin, which the Arab peoples had taken hold of in their struggle against the western powers. At the request of the interviewer Yaakov Ahimeir, Prawer commented on the different attachment of the crusaders and the Israelis to the land:

Although in his books and articles Prawer deliberately refrained from making any comparison between the crusader phenomenon and the Zionist enterprise, Benjamin Zeev Kedar, who was his pupil, ascribed to him an approach that hinted at such an analogy. In a book in memory of Prawer, he wrote: “I imagine that a hidden confrontation with this analogy to no small degree dictated the kind of interests he had: in the demographic structure of the kingdom, in the distribution of the Frankish settlements, in the scope of their agricultural settlement, in the degree to which European support was indispensable. In his books and articles he did not specifically state the conclusions to be drawn from this confrontation, but the reader disturbed by the analogy cannot miss them.”⁴⁵ As an example he cited Prawer’s approach to the subject of European Christian immigration:

In his article “Lessons the Crusaders Can Teach Us,” which appeared on the occasion of the publication of Prawer’s book in English, Kedar recalled some words of criticism in the journal History, expressing agreement with them: “The points of similarity and, even more, the points of difference between the crusader kingdom of the Middle Ages and the modern State of Israel are always implicit in the background although the writer hardly ever refers to them specifically.”⁴⁷ The reader accustomed to the publicistic exploitation of the crusaders in the Israeli-Arab dispute will be surprised to hear that in Prawer’s view the crusaders saw themselves as legitimate heirs to the land, that they came to expel the Muslims living there by conquest. Kedar also found a hint of actuality in Prawer’s words on the Muslim fellahin who, under crusader rule, had a feeling of humiliation at being conquered by unbelievers: “The exploiter was a foreigner, the enemy of their religion, the slayer of the believers. Thus, a chasm was created which could not be bridged, which could never have been eliminated by a more friendly attitude on the part of the crusaders.” For the Israeli reader, the most interesting feature in Prawer’s work is the reasons he gave for the fall of the crusader kingdom. The failure of the crusaders runs like a thread through Prawer’s work and disturbed him throughout his historiographical activity. In his youth he laid emphasis on the crusaders’ lack of agricultural settlement in Palestine and their demographic problem, whereas later on he stressed the links of the crusaders in Palestine to their lands of origin in Europe.

In the absence of direct European overlordship, financial and democratic assistance to the colony overseas had to depend on the feeling of pan- Christian solidarity toward it in Catholic Europe. In Prawer’s opinion, the partial orientalization of the crusaders in the country did not bring them closer to the Muslims but merely distanced them from their kinsmen and coreligionists in Europe. The estrangement and withdrawal brought them “to a situation very common in the world of modern colonialism: they grew distant from the mother country but did not get through to the natives.” The crusaders failed because they were finally unable to build a stable colonialist civilization like the Boers in South Africa or the French in Quebec.

The historical geographer Ronnie Ellenbaum, who was a student of Prawer’s pupil Kedar, does not feel any of that commitment to Zionism like some of his teachers at the Hebrew University. He does not seek to demonstrate how different the Zionists were from the crusaders. Therefore he does not have to claim that the crusaders did not settle on the land in Palestine, which is often posited to suggest the distinct reason for the crusaders’ downfall – he doesn’t look to them for help with estimating the Zionist state’s chances of survival. Here we have two different basic historiographical approaches to the crusader enterprise with consequences for the Zionist undertaking: the segregative approach of the Prawer school of thought and the integrative approach of Ellenbaum.

Unlike Meron Benvenisti – who like most of those involved with the subject thinks that the aim of the masses of pilgrims in the first crusade was not to acquire property or to set up a state, but was rather to liberate the Church of the Holy Sepulchre from the unbelievers – Ellenbaum claims that religious ideals were not the primary concern of the European settlers in Palestine. The Frankish emigration to the Levant was motivated by the same reasons people of the eleventh and twelfth centuries sought a place to live in Europe: People chose to settle in the East as others chose to settle in Spain. The normality of this settlement was expressed in their desire to acquire a property for their family, to build a house, and to live – and not only to die – on behalf of religious ideals. The war with Islam was not always their primary concern, both because there were relatively quiet periods and because of the difficulties of daily life. The historical failure of the stage of Frankish settlement is what gave rise to the historical image of the entire period, and that is what has left us with the mythical “crusader” image of the Frankish settlement.⁴⁸

A revision of the crusader myth is evident in the distinction that has recently been made between the concept Frankish settlement, which stresses the settling aspect of the crusades, and the more familiar “crusader settlement,” which stresses their warlike aspect. The Frankish settlement in the East was connected with the crusades in a historical and causal way, inasmuch as the crusaders conquered the land and created the territorial space in which the new settlements were established. However, the fact that the conquest and the settlement were parallel and influenced one another does not necessarily make them identical. The differences between the stage of the conquest of the land and the stage of settlement are similar to those between the stages in the creation of border settlements. In the first (“crusader”) stage, the “pioneers” determine the frontier and conquer the area, wresting it from those considered to be enemies of their culture. The enemy is not always human; it can also be physical, and the conquest does not necessarily have a violent character. In the second stage (the “Frankish” settlement), the region gradually fills up with “settlers” and “immigrants” whose motivation is personal, utilitarian, or economic.

The differences between the crusader stage and the Frankish stage of settlement, between the pioneer-conquerors who fix the borders of the region and the later settlers, are blurred in the common memory in a way that turns the first group (the crusaders) into a myth. The formation of the myth is expressed in a series of symbols: The conquerors of the frontier are often given collective titles reflecting its character: “pioneers,” “drainers of the swamps,” “crusaders,” “conquistadores,” “conquerors of the West,” and so on; and from among these are chosen the figures who together constitute the mythical pantheon. The myth develops principles in accordance with its needs and consequently stresses certain qualities in the character of these figures. The differences between the initial conquerors of the region and the later settlers are not necessarily real differences, but can be merely differences of image and appearance. The Franks had major achievements in the sphere of agriculture and settlement. The immigrants who settled in the Kingdom of Jerusalem set up a developed network of settlements similar to those in Europe. It included fortresses, monasteries, small castles, farms, unfortified villages, and so on. The Franks brought to the country a developed system of village administration, which they further developed. They built new roads and improved the existing ones, marked out fields and distributed them, created an advanced system of tithe-collection, developed agriculture, set up mills and built bridges, and grew crops previously unknown in the country, which they brought from Europe.

The picture presented by previous scholars, who claimed that the Franks were cut off from labor in the fields and from the inhabitants of the land, emerges as ill founded according to the written and archaeological evidence. Ellenblum counted more than two hundred Frankish sites in the list of settlements he examined in the course of his researches. In the short period of time the Frankish settlers lived in the East, they succeeded in setting up a functioning, developed system of agriculture and network of villages. Samaria and western Galilee were studied in particular, but the picture was similar throughout the kingdom. The main findings were as follows: The network of settlements in the area north of Jerusalem was more intensive and was also founded earlier than that in the Acre region. The difference was due to the greater density of the distribution of the Christian villages that already existed in the Jerusalem area, and to the fact that Jerusalem was the capital of the kingdom. The number and the distribution of the villages was similar to that of the Christian settlements in the Byzantine period. The Franks settled in all areas where there was a Christian community. Their settlement strategy throughout the Levant was the conquest of countries and geographical regions where there was a large Christian population.

Earlier scholars claimed that in the crusader East there had developed a mixed society, which they called the “Franco-Syrian society.” According to them, the Franks were influenced by the oriental way of life and the local customs, and gave the local inhabitants law, order, and physical protection. These scholars’ idealization of the relationships between the Franks and the local inhabitants played into the hands of later scholars like Raymond C. Smail and Prawer, who questioned their reliability. They had no reason to believe that there were amicable relations between the Franks and Muslims, and they developed an opposing model that offered another extreme picture: one of social, political, and geographical segregation.

Ellenblum’s great achievement lies in putting forward a view that synthesizes the earlier thesis of historians like Gaston Dodu, Emmanuel Rey, Louis Madelin, Reneé Grousset, and Dmitri Hayek with the opposing thesis developed by Smail, Prawer, and others.⁴⁹ Contrary to the veiled Zionist position of the monumental work of Prawer, which contrasted the segregation of the crusaders in Palestine with the rootedness of the Israelis in their land, Ellenblum’s “post-Zionist” approach is a post-ideological stand that examines the crusaders’ relationship to the soil, the area, and agriculture in a way unconnected with the threatening implications of the Zionist-crusader analogy that hovers over academic study.

The Crusaders Between Left and Right

The Zionist-crusader analogy made by Arab scholars and writers and internalized by Israeli politicians has gripped many people. It has given rise to an Arab academic literature concerning the mediaeval historical precedent and has made Israeli public figures eager to draw the opposite conclusions. The intention of the Arab side was to expose Zionism as a colonialist movement that would end like most colonialist movements, whereas the Jewish side was drawn into historiosophical debate ostensibly concerned with historical legitimacy. The Zionist-crusader analogy has uncovered a contemporary political discourse that has been shifted to the Middle Ages.

Three months after the founding of the State, Ben-Gurion related indirectly to the analogy when he wrote in his diary, “[Yitzhak] Grinbaum explained the principles of Zionism and argued with Gamal [El-Husseini, the deputy of the Mufti] who said that the Arabs will fight against the Zionists as they fought against the crusaders.”⁵⁰ In 1950 Ben-Gurion attempted to refute the crusader myth propagated by the Arabs that the defeat of the modern infidels was sure to come, even if delayed:

After the Sinai Campaign (1956), Ben-Gurion wrote that he had visited “Jezirat Paro” – that is, the Coral Island – “where there are the well-known remains of the crusader fortress.”⁵¹ On the appearance of the first volume of The History of the Crusader Kingdom in Palestine, Ben-Gurion was quick to read it; he invited Prawer to his home, who gave him the second volume.⁵² In May 1965, Ben-Gurion gave a lecture to the members of Bnei Brit in which he expressed the view that the state of Israel was unique because of the way its revival had come about. The state of Israel did not, in his opinion, arise because of the withdrawal of a foreign power – as the Roman Empire or the crusader kingdom had withdrawn – but sprang up as a result of the return to Zion, a unique phenomenon in world history.⁵³ About three months later, Ben-Gurion was visited by Professor Ben-Ami, a sociologist from New York City College, who was an expert on the crusader period and who found, according to the Israeli leader, “a similarity between the crusaders and Israel, and also differences. The crusaders were at one and the same time monks and soldiers and founded border settlements.”⁵⁴ In Ben-Gurion’s opinion, the best work on the period was that of Steven Runciman, “who is now writing a book on the crusaders from the sociological-historical point of view, and it also has a chapter on Israel.”

About two years before the Six-Day War, a symposium was held on the initiative of the student journal of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Pi Ha-Aton, on the subject “Is the State of Israel the Modern Crusader-State?”⁵⁵ The moderator of the symposium opened the debate by saying that, like the crusaders, the state of Israel depends on a strong army; just like them, the Jews are unable to integrate among the peoples of the region; just as then, the existence of the state encourages a process of unification in the Arab world; just as then, its economy depends on money sent by the Jews of the world from abroad. Then the moderator issued an apology: “It is not us that raised this question: we have merely done our best to answer it.” Most of those present at the symposium rejected the analogy completely and attempted to explain why.

The liberal Member of Knesset Yizhar Harari shrank from the comparison of the Israelis to the crusaders and even saw the comparative historical investigation of the matter as a sign of sickness. It is dangerous to draw conclusions from events in the past, he said, although of course they cannot be disregarded. The crusaders believed that their enterprise would purify them in the eyes of God; there was no conception of nationhood in the movement or of return to a homeland; rather, it was a temporary campaign to liberate the Holy Places. They were members of an army of conquest who held onto their conquests by force of arms, without any settlements in the rear or air-links such as one has today. The crusader warriors had somewhere to return to: They never regarded Palestine as their country. By contrast, the Zionists were and are a combination of family, settlement, and ownership. The Jewish people had no place else under the sun in which to live in freedom.

According to the Labor Party member Eliezer Livne, both Zionism and the crusades tried to set up a very different civilization here from the one that existed in the country before they came; neither movement was a national movement, for Zionism was also an attempt to perpetuate the Jewish civilization by returning to its source; both movements took control of a limited area and created a majority there; both of them relied on the support of world forces – Christianity on the one hand and Judaism on the other; both of them led to a strengthening of the movement for Muslim unity. However, the differences are in Israelis’ favor: The crusader kingdom of Jerusalem did not succeed in uniting the local eastern Christians and the immigrating western Christians; it did not succeed in creating a majority in the villages, and agriculture remained Muslim; it did not succeed in uniting the feudal landowners, the knights, the great chivalric orders in the country, and the European merchants; Israel, on the other hand, is a democratic state united by a common interest. The crusader state did not succeed in bringing about a continuation of immigration from the West (in Israel a great deal also depends on whether Jews from the western world will come). The Israelis have the advantage over the crusaders of living in the technological era, and thus the importance of land borders is less than in the days of the crusader conquest. Israel can become a financial, cultural, and economic center for the Jewish people regardless of its borders. About two years later Livne changed his views and became a member of the Movement for a Greater Israel.

In this symposium, the crusader-Zionist analogy was scrutinized from both the leftist and the religious points of view. The Communist Moshe Sneh enumerated five characteristic features of the crusader phenomenon. Christian ideals, in whose name the crusades were conducted, were, he believed, an ideological cover for colonialist conquests. In theory the crusades were directed toward the Holy Land, but in practice they represented a general expansion toward the East. The division of the Muslim East permitted the victory of the crusaders, whereas the union of Egypt and Syria brought about their fall. The crusader kingdom is considered a passing historical episode because it failed to integrate among the peoples of the area and was an alien extension of Western Europe on the eastern shores of the Middle East; the Jews were united with the Muslims in a common front against the conquering crusaders. The dominant approach of Israeli policy, according to Sneh, stressed the points of similarity with the crusader state rather than cultivating the differences. Israel’s connection with the western powers and its integration into the common market were an outcome of Ben-Gurion’s basic premise that “Israel is a European State.” The Sinai Campaign, the refusal to negotiate the right of return of the refugees, the military administration, and so on caused the Arabs to see Israel as an alien conqueror and not as a neighboring people, which gave rise to the harmful comparison with the crusaders. Cutting ties with the imperialist West and integration among the peoples of the area would prove, however, that the Israelis are different from the crusaders.

The main problem of the crusader state, according to the then Member of Knesset Moshe Una of the National Religious Party, was that it never created a “people.” The European rulers were always only a thin stratum of the population as a whole, and as masters of the country they remained dependent on a native population who were alien to them. They did not stand on their own feet economically, demographically, or politically. Is there any room for a comparison? The answer is in the affirmative: What is called for is internal national consolidation and a nondependence on unassimilable internal elements. The conclusion to be drawn is that one has to have internal unity and prevent mixed marriages, “which infect the body of the nation with diseases of disintegration.”

The revisionist lawyer Shemuel Tamir added that the analogy between the crusaders and the Zionists has a surprising extra dimension: the neighboring Philistine kingdom in the Land of Israel along the shores of the Mediterranean. Tamir indicated a number of points in common between the Philistines and crusaders of the past and Israel of today: having a European population as against one that is native born; fortifying oneself in the coastal regions as against the indigenous inhabitants who were in the mountains; enjoying the advantages of modern civilization as against numerical superiority and local roots; having a disconnection with the continental rear and a dependence on a financial rear overseas as against linkage to the natural subsistence areas of the region; having an economically oppressive military superiority as against the capacity to withstand a protracted continental siege; and trusting that things will work out in the course of time. Tamir concluded that the decision of whether or not Israel will be a new Philistia or a Jewish crusader state depends on “the soul-quality of the nation,” on its capacity to free itself from a closed-in atmosphere of provincialism and Levantinism.

Aaron Yadlin, the deputy minister of education at that time, approached the subject from an original angle. The question, in his opinion, is by what miracle the crusader state managed to exist at all, and not why it fell. It was built on shaky foundations from the beginning, and it was only extricated from its frequent wars by new crusades launched by the European leaders, whereas Israel, which since its inception has only known armed struggle, is able to hold its ground without the help of external crusades. The crusader kingdom was founded as a colony of Christian Europe, and throughout its existence remained as such on foreign soil. Apart from the remains of fortresses, it did not leave any cultural imprint, but was merely an episode in the history of Palestine. The idea of the crusades, which originated on foreign soil outside Palestine, was nurtured by a Christian intellectual climate that did not require a national-territorial consolidation. The state of Israel, on the other hand, is far from being a passing episode in the history of the country: It draws on the historical past of the people of Israel in its land. Because the state of Israel is not the colony of an external national-ethnic entity, there is an identity between the people and its land. The state of Israel is the inheritance of a historical people returning to its homeland, whereas the crusader state was the product of the search for feudal domains of a nobility that, though cut off from its native soil in Europe, nevertheless remained European. In Yadlin’s view, the crusader state did not create a people with a connection to the country; it did not create a homeland, but was in fact the outpost of conquerors who constituted a privileged class; and although it defended itself along lengthy borders, it did not develop a historical consciousness or a national existence. He compared the crusader state to a tree that did not strike roots in the soil and was then uprooted and taken away. Even the sense of the holiness of the land did not become the basis of a nation with a special crusader character. Its dependence on outside forces – the Pope, the Italian communities, and the chivalric orders – was detrimental to it and harmed its vitality. The crusaders were a permanent minority; their conquests had a colonialist character and were not a settlement enterprise like the Jewish settlement in Israel. They remained a class of warriors and not of workers, and the relationship between the conquerors and the conquered was quite bad. Israel does not depend on Arab agriculture as the crusaders did, an essential difference that assures the Israelis a different fate from theirs.

Some relevant political conclusions came from an unexpected direction. The leftist Member of Knesset Ya’akov Riftin could not find any real basis for the crusader-Zionist analogy, for despite the crusader slogan calling for “the liberation of the Holy Sepulchre,” he believed that the true purpose of the enterprise was the conquest of the entire Middle East, Constantinople, Syria, and North Africa. As against this, the Jewish people had no historical propensity to expansion except within the context of the Land of Israel. The crusaders came as masters to subdue the land and had no thought of its cultivation. As against this, the Jewish national revival sought to create a working people in the country. The crusader period can be seen as one of the many historical meeting points of the Jews and Arabs. They were united in their hostility to a common enemy, for the crusaders harmed both the Arabs and the Jewish communities in Palestine. The conclusion to be drawn today is that both people are engaged in a struggle against the modern crusaders: the forces of imperialism.

The symposium at Pi Ha-Aton exemplified the Israeli political consensus with regard to the crusader episode and its implications for the Israeli-Arab dispute. About two years after it appeared in print, the Six-Day War broke out. For some of the participants in the debate, the war shuffled the political cards and forced them to change their ideas; for others it confirmed their original points of view.

In his book David’s Sling (1970), in the chapter “The Similar Is Also Dissimilar,” Shimon Peres maintained that the Arabs look for historical precedents to justify their positions and that their propaganda therefore relies a great deal on the precedent of the crusades. “If the debate was purely historiographical,” he wrote, “perhaps the best thing would be to leave it to the historians, but the need to advance these claims is a political need.”⁵⁶ These historical analogies, thinks Peres, raise two questions. First, is there really no possibility of a small state having an existence not limited in time in face of the opposition of a power physically stronger and greater in numbers? Second, can a small country faced with a constant military threat from a larger country avoid becoming a military state? The basic assumption underlying his analysis is that every situation is unique and every people different from their neighbor, and despite the occasional similarity between one situation and another, the difference is greater than the similarity.

According to Peres, the crusades and the Zionist movement both originated in Europe, were ideologically motivated, and moved across the sea from the West to the Holy Land while contending with superior forces. But the differences were of course greater than the similarities, and the twelfth century is not the twentieth. The crusades were more religious than political, and the crusaders did not seek a permanent sovereignty but came for a limited purpose – to protect the Holy Places. They did not come to settle the land, nor did they seek a homeland for a homeless people. The Zionist movement, on the other hand, was political, although it drew from religious cultural sources. The movement was intended to rescue an entire people by gathering it together and resettling it on the soil of its ancestral homeland. The return to Israel was not a purely religious act, but a living experience and a national necessity. The crusaders started out as an army that came to conquer a relatively populated country; the Zionists did not begin as a movement of military conquest, but as a movement of settlers who came to a relatively desolate country. It was the settlers who needed protection and not the other way around; the ploughshare preceded the sword both in theory and practice. The settler movement sought to create a new form of life, and in this respect Zionism was not only a movement of national liberation, but also a movement of social redemption. The crusaders apparently did not number more than fifty thousand men, whereas the Jews in the Land of Israel had long ago passed the number of two and a half million, from which there was no returning. The crusades were directed from European centers, whereas the immigrants to Israel struck roots in the country; they were not sent by Europe, but abandoned it. Zionism is not a crusade but the return of a people to its source, to its homeland, to its destiny. Another difference is that today technology and up-to-date weapons play a decisive role, permitting a new balance of forces. Hinting at nuclear war, Peres warns of “destructive consequences for everyone … for the world is coming ever closer to the point where every war is total insanity for all sides.”⁵⁷ Peres ends with the conclusion that all comparisons with other periods are attempts to escape reality.

Lova Eliav, former secretary of the Labor Party, in the chapter “The Crusader Complex” in his book Glory in the Land of the Living (1970), offers the reader a “crusader theory” popular among the Arabs. According to this, the Christians sought to conquer the Holy Land, to destroy the Islamic holy places in the country, and to expel its Arab inhabitants.⁵⁸ They recruited fighters and raised money in Europe and exploited the weakness of the Arab world and the political upheavals of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. They had a decisive superiority in weaponry and modern equipment. They surprised the Arabs in their arrival from the north and from the sea and made their base in the coastal area. Once victorious, they set up the crusader kingdom of Jerusalem, built fortresses, spread out, and conquered. They did the bidding of the imperial powers of that time – Genoa, Venice, and others – which sought footholds, markets, and natural resources in the East. The Arabs tried several times to attack them, but without success. After some two hundred years, however, the crusaders grew decadent. They quarreled among themselves, became soft and decadent, and the Arabs did all the hard work. The crusaders remained an alien implantation in the country. The Arabs had a great commander who fused them into a fighting force and a single people. The leader learned the weaknesses of the crusaders, used methods of warfare more modern than theirs, defeated them, and put an end to the crusader episode. In the script of this Arab crusader theory, the Zionists figured in the same way. They sought to conquer the Holy Land, to destroy the Islamic holy places in the country, and expel its Arab inhabitants. They recruited fighters and raised money in Europe and throughout the Jewish world, and exploited the weakness of the Arabs in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They surprised the Arabs, set up their base in the coastal area, conquered Jerusalem, humiliated the Arabs, established the Zionist state, built fortifications, and spread north, south, and east. They did the bidding of the imperial powers, and the wealthy Jewish world assisted them with money, arms, and volunteers. After some years, the Zionists too will grow decadent. They will quarrel among themselves. The Arabs among them will do all the hard work in agriculture and construction, and the Jews will become soft and spoiled. They were and will remain an alien implantation in the country. The Arabs will have a leader and commander who can unite them, use more modern methods of warfare than the enemy, and put an end to the Zionist episode.

Eliav sees the crusader theory as a psychological refuge that the Arabs escape to because of the harsh and painful reality of the past, the present, and also the future. In his opinion, this theory corresponds to a fatalistic outlook, reflects helplessness, and derives from irrational feelings. If there is anything to be learned from history, it is that it does not repeat itself. The comparison between the Jews returning to their ancient homeland and the Christian knights of feudal Europe is superficial and displays a lack of understanding of the motives for the return to Zion. The Jews of Israel have nowhere to go back to: They will fight for their state. Here they will live and here they will die. The parallel between the religious wars of the crusades and the struggle of the two modern national movements is invalid by its very nature. The time factor also invalidates the comparison: In place of the weapons used in the decisive battle of the Horns of Hattin, laser beams and radioactive rays will be used in the future. If the Arabs ever succeed, with the help of a technological power or powers, in bringing Israel to the point of destruction, they too will be destroyed. After a modern Horns of Hattin, there would be no victors or vanquished.

Peres’s and Eliav’s hints of a nuclear battle of Hattin in the future – a battle different in its scale, nature, and significance from the historical battle of Hattin – raise the question of whether the image of the defeat of the crusaders in Galilee is etched in the Jewish consciousness as an apocalyptic confrontation comparable with the siege of Massada or the trauma of the Holocaust. If this is the case, what has been its contribution to the molding of Israeli nuclear strategic thinking? It would seem that the place of the legend of the battle of Hattin in the Israeli collective consciousness is completely marginal. If there is a crucial event that has molded the outlook of those with the power of decision concerning the Israeli nuclear option, there is no doubt that that event is the Holocaust of the European Jews and not the defeat of the crusaders.⁵⁹

Immediately after the end of the Six-Day War, Yigael Allon presented the government with the proposal known as the Allon Plan. In its initial form, it included the establishment of a small Palestinian state linked to Israel by a security agreement. For that reason, he was opposed to ceding to the Kingdom of Jordan the area intended for the future Palestinian state. At a meeting of the Kibbutz Hame’uhad central committee, he expressed himself as follows: “In my opinion, the return of parts of the West Bank to Jordan … is dangerous…. Who amongst us can guarantee that there will not be a militant regime in Amman with strong international support which in an international situation inconvenient for Israel would annul the demilitarization of the West Bank and make it into a forward position of the next Saladin facing the Mediterranean shore?”⁶⁰

In 1968, professors J. L. Talmon, Yehushua Arieli, Ben-Zion Dinur, and others met at the home of Joshua Prawer. Allon lectured on his plan, and this was followed by a discussion. Arieli warned that every Jewish settlement established in the conquered territories would be paid for in blood. Dinur declared that the plan gave him disturbing thoughts concerning the crusader state. Until now he had not dared to connect the Zionist enterprise and the achievements of the Jewish State with the fate of the crusader kingdom in Palestine, but now he was convinced that plans of this kind and a decision to take the path of settlement would be a critical danger for the existence of the state as had happened with its Christian precedent.⁶¹

Rabbi Yoel Bin-Nun, a leading moderate spokesman for Jewish settlement in the territories, rejects the idea that settlers in Judea, Samaria, and the Gaza Strip see themselves as “sacred emissaries” who have gone out to realize a national-religious ideal from a strong and solid political base that serves them as a supportive rear, as well as the idea that they are modern crusader colonialists. “Yesha (Judea and Samaria),” he said, is not “Israel overseas.’ … The crusaders were imitators of the people of Israel, which explains their success and also the partial nature of that success.” Rabbi Menahem Froman, also a settler, also thinks that the Zionists do not need to fear any resemblance to the crusader model, although he believes there is some truth to the comparison when it comes to a feeling of foreignness. To the Israelis’ sense of foreignness in the area, he proposes an original solution: “Returning to the land of Israel means returning to the forefathers. Returning to the land is returning to the fellah, to the Arab.” ⁶²

About three months after the Six-Day War, on the seventieth anniversary of the First Zionist Congress, the victorious chief of staff, Yitzhak Rabin, was invited to give a speech at the assembly at Basle, in the hall where the historic congress had taken place. Toward the end of his speech Rabin compared the State of Israel to the crusader kingdom:

Rabin thought that between world Jewry and the state of Israel there must be a relationship of mutual enrichment and inspiration. As long as the connection was renewed and adjusted to changing circumstances, Israel would flourish. A reduction of immigration would thus be the greatest danger for Israel, a danger not heeded by the crusader state, which degenerated for lack of new blood.

A year after the war, in his book The War of the Seventh Day, Uri Avneri expressed fascination with the crusader-Zionist analogy, because in his opinion “it is very interesting to compare Israel with the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem, both because of points of similarity and because of features which are not similar at all.”⁶⁴ The crusaders, he thought, had their own Herzl in the figure of Pope Urban, and their First Zionist Congress was the Council of Clermont, 802 years before the historic gathering at Basle. An echo of the call at Clermont, “This is God’s will,” may be heard in the call “Sons of Jacob, let us go forth,”⁶⁵ the slogan of the First Aliyah. Yet there was a significant difference in the aims of the two movements. The crusaders came to Palestine to liberate the Holy Land, and their settlement was only a consequence of that, whereas Zionism was essentially a movement of settlement. The Zionists thought at first that Palestine was empty, whereas the crusaders went there because it was not empty. The differences, however, did not give different results. Both movements had to fight, to settle, and to retain their conquests. Avneri, for his part, also claimed that both the crusaders and Zionists came from the West. Although the Zionists imagined that they were following in the footsteps of the conquerors of Canaan or those returning from Babylon, they actually, in his opinion, resembled the Philistines and the crusaders who did not speak the language of the country; they differed from the inhabitants in their culture and appearance, and first gained a foothold in the coastal plain before penetrating the mountain region that is the heart of the Land of Israel. Just as the Zionists saw themselves as the vanguard of the Jewish people, so the crusaders regarded themselves as the envoys of Christianity. In both states there was a problem of ethnic hierarchy in which the ruling class came from Europe; in both states there was a dependence on wealth from overseas. The kibbutzim were a unique Zionist creation resembling the great military orders of the crusades. The Knights Templar or the Knights Hospitaller would set up fortresses deep within Arab areas in the same way as the kibbutzim, some of which were built on the ruins of crusader fortresses. Did not King Baldwin I resemble Ben-Gurion? Was not the series of crusader outposts opposite the Ashkelon Corridor almost identical with the series of Israeli outposts facing the Gaza Strip?

More than thirty years later, in 1995, when he returned to the analogy, Avneri issued a manifesto calling for the united Jerusalem to be made into the capital of two states, Israel and Palestine. In it, he described Jerusalem as a mosaic of the cultures of all the peoples who had been in the country, including the crusaders. He said: “On that day I met Emil Habibi by chance and I suggested that he should be the first to sign. He said, ‘I will sign if you cross out the crusaders. I am not prepared to say a good word for those murderers of the people.’ I crossed out the crusaders. Eight hundred and fifty Israeli intellectuals and peace activists signed the corrected version. Habibi asked that on his tombstone should appear the words ‘I remained in Haifa.’ Haifa fell to the murderous crusaders after a desperate defence in which the Arabs and Jews stood together.”⁶⁶ The post-Zionist analyses of Uri Avneri paved the way for the post-Zionist ideologists of the 1990s.

The crusader-Zionist analogy comes back to us today from another, surprising direction. The former claims of the enlisted Arab historiography have returned and appear as bon ton in the post-Zionist historiography, and this is the point at which the new historians link up with the post-Zionist ideology. The beginnings of Zionism and Jewish settlement in Palestine in the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth are seen by them as a modern national colonialism. The idea of Zionism as an extension of world colonialism is summarized in a motto coined by Professor Baruch Kimmerling to describe the post-Zionist avant-garde: “We are a nation of immigrant settlers who came together … to dispossess another people.”⁶⁷ An answer to this claim was given by Ran Aaronsohn, who made a distinction between “colonization” and “colonialism.” According to him, colonization is primarily a geographical phenomenon, signifying emigration to a new country and the setting up of a network of immigrant settlements, whereas colonialism is the political and economic phenomenon of a state taking control of an area and its inhabitants beyond its borders and exploiting them for the benefit of the conquerors. Aaronsohn came to the conclusion that “the Jewish settlement in Palestine in its inception cannot be described as a colonialist enterprise. From some points of view one may see in it a similarity with enterprises of colonization in the world, and it is to be placed in that category.”⁶⁸

The historian Ilan Pappe, in comparing the Europeans’ attempts at settlement in Palestine in the Ottoman period with Zionism, uses an approach known as “realistic symbolism,” whereby one does not attempt to give an objective explanation of phenomena but deciphers them by means of the symbolism they contain. The same strategy has been followed by some of the “new historians,” who liken Zionism to a modern crusade, thus revealing their post-Zionist or anti-Zionist ideological orientation. Pappe himself made a remarkable contribution to this climate of thought with his article “Zionism As Colonialism,” which contained the expression “quiet crusade,” borrowed from the settler Hermann Hutte, in order to describe the beginnings of Zionist settlement in Palestine. It is truly ironic that Pappe concludes his article with a plea to scholars to be careful to use a neutral “terminology.” ⁶⁹

A hint of the connection between the cross (original sin) and the crusades (“the crusader-Zionist colonialism”) can be found in the claim of the post-Zionist ideologists that the Zionist original sin was not a concrete sin that could be atoned for or corrected. One of their best-known theories is that the end of the Zionist enterprise was already implicit in its beginnings. The Zionist state embodies a metaphysical sin, and its fate is sealed like that of the crucified one. Liberation from this metaphysical sin can only be obtained through an act of self-immolation: the negation of the sinning Zionist entity and its transformation in accordance with the post-Zionist vision into a secular democratic state (a “state of all its citizens”).

Forests in Flame

Of all the Israelis in a state of existential fear of the Iranian bomb, Aharon Applefeld best perceived the heart of the problem: “Our fate in Europe pursues us here. I come from a world where war had been declared on the Jews, and everyone had accepted it. And now the president of Iran comes and proclaims the extermination of the Jewish people. What is this if not the Jewish destiny?” The next day, an Israeli journalist also tied the Iranian threat to the precedent of the Holocaust in his article “The State is in Danger of Extermination,” and gave as one of the reasons for the lack of condemnation of this threat by the western peoples “the image of Israel as a foreign Jewish implant.” The general of reserves, Yossi Peled, who himself was a refugee from the Holocaust, stated, “Since the beginning of the ‘Return to Zion’ about a hundred years ago, the Iranian nuclear threat is the greatest, most real, most existential threat there has been, raising the possibility that the State of Israel is a passing episode. It is a frightening, frightening threat to our existence.” About a week later, a supplement in the Haaretz newspaper put a question on these lines to the formers of public opinion: “What will you do if in two months’ time Ahmadinejad drops a nuclear bomb here?”

The origin of the fear of the crusaders is to be found on the soil of Europe. The historian Shimon Dubnow revealed that the persecutions of 1091 were a major source of the fear that the Jews felt in exile. The tragic end of the story is that Dubnow himself was murdered by the Nazis in 1941. At the height of the Holocaust, Saul Tchernikovsky published his Vermisa Ballads – “The Rabbi’s Daughter and Mother,” “The Rabbi’s Beautiful Daughter,” and “The Rabbi’s Daughter and the Wolf” – in which the crusaders were depicted as cruelly massacring the Jews like the Nazis of their time. In these ballads, the poet continued to deal with the subjects he treated in “The Slaughtered of Taormina,” which was a reaction to the rise of the Nazis. The literary scholar Haya Shaham pointed out that Y. L. Baruch’s ballad “Birkat Hamazon” (Grace after Meals), written in memory of Dubnow, equated the crusader persecutors with the Nazi murderers. In Rehovot Ha-nahar (Paths of the River) (1951), and especially in the poem “Lament for the Whole House of Israel,” Uri Zvi Greenberg also saw a direct affinity between the persecutions of 1091, the expulsion from Spain, and the Holocaust. In the collective memory, Tchernikovsky’s poem “Baruch of Magenza” (1902) is undoubtedly the most impressive poetic expression of the crusader pogrom. The ballad is the confession of a Jewish father who in his madness killed his two daughters, set fire to a monastery, and looked happily at the burning town, the scene of his revenge.

Works of fiction, in the original and in translation, have also shown the crusaders in the light of the Christian persecutions of the Jews in the Middle Ages. The popular book by the German-Jewish educator Eugen Rispet, The Jews in the Crusades in England under Richard the Lionheart (1861), which was translated into Hebrew as Gibborei Metzudat York (The Heroes of York Castle), described the heroism and martyrdom of the Jews of York, England, when besieged by the crusaders. Zichronot Le-beit David (Memoirs of the House of David) (1897) by Avraham Shalom Friedberg, an adaptation of the historical story “The Golden Crescent” in Herrman Rekkendorf’s Geheimnisse der Juden (Mysteries of the Jews) (1857), depicted Jewish-Muslim brotherhood in the face of the Christian conquest of Jerusalem. In both these works, the murderous hatred of the Jews in exile takes the form of the Christians who set out to liberate the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem.

However, in Palestine at the beginning of the twentieth century, the traditional Jewish view of the victim changed. An example of this is Be-ein shoresh (Without Roots) (1914), a book by a member of the Second Aliyah, Jacob Rabinowitz, which depicted a complex relationship by means of a Jewish crusader, Johannes Mezilgo, who was brought up as a Christian in Europe, joined the crusaders, and discovered his “true” identity only in Jerusalem. The writer’s changed perspective and sometimes sympathetic attitude to the crusaders enabled him to portray the Jews in Palestine at the time of the crusades from a critical, secular point of view as analogous to the Jewish “Old Yishuv” of his own time. For the first time in the history of the Jewish literature on the crusades, someone turned his attention from the persecutions of 1091 to the pioneers in Palestine.

Prominent molders of Israeli culture, and especially the writers of the “generation of the founding of the state” – such as A. B. Yehoshua, Amos Oz, and Dalia Rabikovitz⁷⁰ – wrote major and significant works dealing directly or in a veiled manner with the Zionist-crusader analogy. The poet Yitzhak Shalev in Parashat Gavriel Tirosh (The Gavriel Tirosh Affair), the novelist Dan Zalka in Be-Derech le Haleb (On the Way to Aleppo), and the novelist Yuval Shimoni in Ma’of Ha-Yonah (The Flight of the Dove) all dealt with the subject of the crusaders. A. B. Yehoshua’s story “Facing the Forests” first appeared in 1963 in the journal Keshet.⁷¹ The text, in its plain sense, concerns a tired student close to the age of thirty, “rootless and without a regular income,” who is in the first stages of writing a doctoral dissertation on the crusades. He works for his living as a forest guard, warning of approaching fires. The other major character is an Arab whose tongue was cut out in war, who watches over the forests of the Jewish National Fund that were planted on the ruins of his village and prepares to set fire to them. The hidden meaning of the text is of course that it is a radical allegory of the Israeli-Arab dispute, to which the crusader episode forms a background.

Is the subject of the student’s dissertation – the crusaders – an incidental choice on Yehoshua’s part? The novelist Ehud ben Ezer thinks that in the story “the moral-ideological position adopted reaches the point of an existential nightmare fraught with disintegration and suicidal tendencies … viewing us as a ‘foreign’ European element, an alien growth.” The crusader metaphor hints of course at this foreign quality: the Israeli who watches over the forests of the Jewish people, who surveys the house of Israel. A close look at the student’s approach to the subject of the crusaders he is researching reveals a shallow avoidance, a sort of flight from the matter he is supposed to be occupied with at this stage of his life: “The texts are in English, the quotations all in Latin. Strange phrases from alien worlds. He worries a little. His subject – ‘The Crusades.’ From the human, that is to say, the ecclesiastical aspect. He has not gone into particulars yet. ‘Crusades,’ he whispers softly to himself and feels joy rising in him at the word, the sound. He feels certain that there was some dark issue buried within the subject and that it will startle him, startle other issues in him.”⁷²

The following day is spent on pictures. The next morning he reads the prefaces that come his way. “At noon his mind is distracted from the books by an imaginary flame flashing among the trees.” And take good note of this: He is distracted from the subject of the crusaders by his fear of a forest fire. The past and the present interpenetrate one another. It was the first hint of a connection between the crusades, which represent that which is dark and alien, and the fire that the Arab was to create in the forest like a desperate complaint and battle cry against the alien Israelis who had taken control of his land. The next day the father of the student comes for a week’s visit. The relationship between the father and son was superficial, evidence of a break between the generations. “He fails to understand why the son won’t deal with the Jews, the Jewish aspect of the crusades. For isn’t mass-suicide a wonderful and terrible thing? The son gives him a kindly grin, a noncommittal reply, and falls silent.” After parting from his father, the student muses, “He himself wouldn’t have a son.” Meanwhile, the crusader text is difficult, the words distant. He does not succeed in getting through to them. A band of young Israelis who had made a bonfire the day before makes its way through the forest. “Joys of youth. There is something of abandon about them from afar, like a procession of crusaders.” At the end of the summer, his aging girlfriend comes to visit him and teases him: “Well, what has he come up with? A fresh crusade perhaps?” Instead of a text, he pores over a map of the region. The words become symbols, pictures, signs; they are no longer words – the avoidance of an unmediated look at the text, the subtext, the context, which is clear and visible to the eye.

A relationship that was a nonrelationship developes between the student-watchman and the mute Arab. The student “tells him about the fervour, about the cruelty, about Jews committing suicide, about the children’s crusade…. The Arab listens with mounting tension and is filled with hate…. He wishes to say that this was his house, and there used to be a village here as well, and that they have simply hidden it all, buried it in the big forest.” The story ends with a great forest fire. The encroaching end hints at what finally happens. “The Arab is setting the forest on fire at its four corners, then takes a firebrand and rushes through the trees like an evil spirit, setting fire to the rest…. The Arab speaks to him out of the fire, wishes to say everything, everything at once. Will he understand?”⁷³ The student abandons his cases of research material and saves the Arab’s home. The forest goes up in flames and as does the watchtower. “Utter destruction…. The commemorative plaques alone have survived … Louis Schwartz of Chicago. The King of Burundi and his people.” The fire also spreads to his room: The books are burned to cinders. The old official responsible for the forests asks angrily to hear the whole story. “But there is no story, is there? There just isn’t anything to tell. All there is, is: suddenly the fire sprang up.” After a long investigation, suspicion falls on the Arab. The investigators were only waiting for this: They had suspected him for a long time.

On the face of it, Yitzhak Shalev’s book, Parshat Gavriel Tirosh (The Gabriel Tirosh Affair), is a clearly Zionist narrative that need not fear any resemblance to the crusaders.⁷⁴ The history teacher Gabriel Tirosh, who has fought against the British and Arabs and who is certain of the justice of his cause, brings the crusaders to the notice of his pupils as a negative proof that the fate of the Israelis will not be that of the Christian invaders. The literary critic David Sohnstein,⁷⁵ however, suggests a different and surprising reading of the novel, particularly with regard to “the figure of Gabriel, especially as the circumstances of his disappearance are not known.” Is the vanished hero now to be regarded as a personification of the state of Israel? In the words of Shalev himself in the novel, “I have gone ahead of reality and my friend with the vague feeling that the man Gabriel Tirosh is a portent of disaster.” Sohnstein concludes that perhaps the author’s way of writing “causes us, the readers, to make an imaginary attempt to prevent the inevitable foreseen disaster.” The disharmony between our love for the esteemed teacher and our knowledge of his death reflects “a personal disharmony which is an echo of the historical disharmony between the Jewish character of the State of Israel and the Zionist reality in its present form.” This interpretation is of course in opposition to Shalev’s nationalistic outlook expressed in his poem “Crusaders” (1975)⁷⁶:

There is an intrinsic connection between Ad Mavet (Unto Death), perhaps Amos Oz’s best story, which appeared three years after the Six-Day War, and “Facing the Forests.”⁷⁷ A historical novella, it concerns the journey of some Christian crusaders to Palestine led by the nobleman Gerôme de Touron and his faithful servant Claude the crooked-shouldered. On the first, Jewish level, the novella reveals the roots of the extermination of the Jews in the twentieth century in the persecution of the Jews in the crusades, which perhaps is an allegory of the Holocaust. Oz lays bare underground, mythical currents of Jewish-Christian relations and skillfully depicts the “crucifixion” of the Jews by the Gentiles. The cruelty of the crusaders toward the “other” in Europe, the Jews, turns inward and becomes self-hatred.

Unlike Oz, who deals with crusader fear in the religious-Christian and political-Arab dimension, Dan Zalka moves the discourse in his book, Ba-derech Le-haleb (On the Road to Aleppo), to a cultural meeting of East and West through the tale of a Frankish crusader and a Persian poet by the Dead Sea in the time of the crusades.⁷⁸ The poet, who is a prisoner, is ordered to write a poem as a condition for his release. The failure of the first poem he offers brings him to a regime of hard labor and exile in Libya, but his successful second poem is inscribed on the wall of a church. Unlike the poet Yehuda Amichai in “The Travels of Benjamin the Last of Tudela,” where the crusader heroes are treated as clowns, Zalka may have anticipated Samuel Huntingdon’s clash of civilizations.

On the second, Israeli level, Oz, like Yehoshua before him, perhaps wonders if the Israelis after the Six-Day War, as modern crusaders, underwent a self-conversion and now displayed cruelty, self-destructiveness, and decadence. Were the Israelis now the sacrificers as opposed to the mediaeval Jews who were the sacrificed? The expressionistic novella excels in bold contrasts and switches of roles. These literary features create a conflict between the narrator, who identifies with the murderous heroes and their travails, and the Israeli reader to whom the story is addressed, who naturally identifies with the Jewish victims.

In her poem, The Horns of Hattin, Dalia Rabikovitz poetically reconstructed the crusaders’ voyage to the Holy Land over the sea. Here is the first verse:

After Saladin’s victory at the battle of Hattin (1187), the third crusade set out in two directions: one over the sea, under the leadership of the kings of France and England, and the other overland, under the leadership of the Holy Roman Emperor. Rabikovitz’s poem describes the sea voyage, and thus the crusade is associated with the voyage of Jason and the Argonauts to capture the golden fleece, which is compared to the Kingdom of Jerusalem. In the myth of the Odyssey, there were special ships similar to the ships of the Vikings, who were venturesome like the crusaders. The crusader sea robbers are depicted as the bearers of apollonian wisdom. Christian compassion, however, in whose name they came to preach, turned into violence and gave way to madness and simpleminded cruelty. The Christians soon surrendered to the Muslims under Saladin, “who passed sentence on them at the Horns of Hattin.” He restored the world to the scales of righteousness: Finally righteousness triumphed, as is suggested by the name (Salah ed-Din – Saladin – resembles the Hebrew for “imposing justice”). In the poem, Rabikovitz effects a switching of roles: contrary to Jewish tradition, which warns that mercy to the cruel is liable to lead to cruelty to the merciful, the poetess shows sympathy for the crusaders far from their homes, exposed to dangers and bereft of glory. Despite the interpretations that have seen “The Horns of Hittin” as an aestheticisation of heroism, the poem ends with the defeat of the crusaders, who left behind “villagers … blue-eyed descendants.” In Shalev’s poem as well, they leave behind “blue-eyed babes in an Arab village,” but the Israeli poet is a lone voice among the many writers of the “State generation,” who even before the conquest of the territories in 1967 hinted at the Zionists’ original sin.

After the 1973 War, when the Sabras’ self-image was impaired, crusader-based works for children began to be published. We have seen that reversed roles between Jews and crusaders, double identities, and hybrid heroes had made an appearance in the works of Friedberg and Rabinowitz before the writers of the “State generation.” Empathy with the crusader persecutors of the Jews and analogies between these and Israeli soldiers are nothing unusual. In Ha-masa Ha-mufla Be-minheret Ha-zman (Wonderful Journey in the Time-Tunnel) by Oded Betzer, four Israeli children find themselves in the time of the crusades, fight with the Christians against their Arab enemies, and after that return to the Israeli present.⁸⁰ Arthur Wechsler, in his book Yedidei Melech Yerushala’im (Friends of the King of Jerusalem) (1976), takes an Israeli youth through the time-tunnel to the Middle Ages and makes him a friend of Baldwin, the first crusader king of Jerusalem.⁸¹ Here emphasis is laid on the closeness of upstanding Israelis to their crusader counterparts and their estrangement from religious Jews. The common denominator between Seligman, Betzer, and Wechsler is their changed view of the Zionist-crusader analogy. The crusaders are no longer depicted as rampageous persecutors of the Jews but embody bravery, self-confidence, and determination, qualities that the Israelis – Sabras who experienced the trauma of the Yom Kippur War – had difficulty internalizing.

In the last two decades, the crusades have not been subject to any special literary treatment. In the book Shnei Na’arim Be-memlechet Ha-tzalvanim(Two Youths in the Crusader Kingdom) (1985), Dorit Orgad described the adventures and friendship of Jewish and crusader boys.⁸² Gad Shimron, in his book Ha-satan Be-eretz Ha-kodesh (Satan in the Holy Land) (1988), follows the doings of Rino Mastion in the Holy Land during the second crusade.⁸³ In these literary representations, one does not find any special purpose or general statement concerning the Israeli ethos, and perhaps their different conclusions show more than anything else that in this period of the fragmentation of Israeliness there is no single Israeli narrative of the history of the crusades in the Land of Israel.

Past Continuous

In the discourse on Israelis dealing with the Zionist-crusader analogy, Zionist conclusions with regard to settlement are prominent. Ami Livne of Ein Harod and the dovish “Ein Vered” circle, in his article “Zionism, the Crusades, Settlement,” finds a negative moral in the crusades: “The abandonment of settlement and agriculture with their Zionist implications and importance for security and the change to a crusader lifestyle is a phenomenon with whose end we are familiar.”⁸⁴ In his call to the Israelis to avoid the fate of the crusaders who did not become rooted in the soil and did not adapt to the region, he declared: “We have to stop this process of crusaderization!” Brigadier-in-Reserves Uri Saguy expresses a similar opinion: “To the Arabs, we are temporary settlers on the hilltops and in the towns of the coastal plain like the crusaders, while they are the eternal owners of the land.”⁸⁵ His conclusion is that one has to have a real foothold in the soil, not so much as a metaphor for Zionist settlement, but rather in the sense of making a profound connection, as in planting an olive-tree, the very symbol of rootedness. A newspaper piece by Yehuda Ariel, titled “The Lesson of the Crusaders: The Souring of Settlement,” reaches the following conclusion: “One cannot protect a state with battlements of stone but only with human battlements and human hearts.”⁸⁶ At the same time, popular naturalist Azariah Allon, in his article “The Long Shadow of Saladin,” expresses the belief that “the Jews did not take hold of the land as a conquering and ruling class but as settlers, in all areas and in all spheres of occupation…. [I]f however, as some believe, we would become an ‘elect people’ in this country, with the Arabs there only to serve as hewers of our wood and drawers of our water, in that case we can expect the same fate as the crusaders, and no IDF in the world can ever help us.”⁸⁷

Quite often, people do not refer explicitly to the comparison with the crusaders, and it can only be discerned if one reads between the lines. In the three examples we are about to give, there is a particular approach to the subject, or even an avoidance of it, although they involve figures with a known political identity. In their book, Jerusalem – A Challenge, Israel Eldad and his son Arye relate the story of the crusaders in Jerusalem. It is surprising that it should be Israel Eldad, the strongly right-wing intellectual, who is in the habit of drawing many comparisons from the history of Israel and the chronicles of the nations, in this case does not refer to the analogy and refrains from embellishing the historical narrative with relevant conclusions, significant interpretations, or political messages.⁸⁸Heroes of Israel, a book by Haim Herzog, formerly the president of Israel, has much praise for the Jews slaughtered in 1096. It is no accident that Herzog chose to present the Jewish martyrdom in the Middle Ages in a chapter bearing the title “Heroes of the Spirit.”⁸⁹ Israel Bar, Ben-Gurion’s adviser in the Ministry of Defense, sees Western Europe as a separate political and strategic unit, and chooses to call the chapter dealing with this subject “The Crusader Kingdom of Gaullist Europe.”⁹⁰ The chapter makes no mention of the analogy between the crusaders and the Zionists.

The comparison with the crusaders has often been used to support political positions in public controversies. The crusades have served the purposes of both hawks seeking defense lines with strategic depth and of doves demanding territorial compromise and peace treaties. Yossi Raanan, in his article “The IDF and the Crusaders,” reported that during his reserve duty in the Gaza Strip he could not help thinking of the similarity between the convoys of settlers with their military escorts and the convoys of the crusaders: “It was very difficult for me to shake off the rather depressing feeling that the IDF in the Strip at the present day resembles the crusader army which once ruled in the land of Israel. This phenomenon is one of the most striking illustrations of the crusader-like character of the government in the Strip.”⁹¹ The Oslo Accords (1993) attempted to end the Israeli occupation of the territories in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza. Following those events, Mordechai Nisan, in an article called “Saladin and the War against the Crusaders: History, Myth and Symbols,” surveyed the religious, strategic, and Jewish aspects of the episode and concluded: “If the Arabs of today will follow in the footsteps of Saladin, Israel will find itself in a very real existential danger. But if Israel avoids the mistakes of the crusader kingdom, the return to Zion and its political manifestation will prove to be a correct historical move and will last forever.”⁹²Speaking of the sixth crusade, Arieh Winshal related that the Egyptian ruler at the time delivered up Jerusalem and most of western Palestine to the crusaders in a peace treaty.

The relations of religion and state in Israel today also get involved with the crusaders. “Religion, Army, State: The Lesson of the Crusaders,” a newspaper piece by the archaeologist Meir Ben-Dov tries, nine hundred years after the crusades, to draw a moral concerning dual loyalty to religion and the state. He says that at the end of the eleventh century the crusaders enlisted monks as soldiers for their conquests in the Middle East and gave them a special status among the knights of the orders.⁹³ They were both warriors and men of religion, and their dual loyalty finally proved to be dangerous. At the moment of testing, the crusaders discovered that the soldiers were first of all obedient to the commands of the church. In his short essay “The Modern Crusaders,” the poet Erez Biton also expresses fear of the power of religion, but in this case it is the Christian religion. In the building of the campus of the Mormon University in Jerusalem he sees an invasion “of Christian identity … a crusader invasion under a mask of cultural progress.”⁹⁴

The “crusader discourse” is not so esoteric a matter that academic works on the crusader period can refrain from drawing analogies. In his criticism of Prawer’s book, which emphasized crusader colonialism, Kedar observed that traditional apologists of Zionism would not derive any comfort from it.⁹⁵ Those who claim that the Zionist enterprise is a colonialist one always receive the answer that there is no metropolitan state behind the Zionist enterprise, and therefore colonialism does not apply to Zionism. Yet Prawer describes as colonialist a society that was similarly not dependent on a metropolitan state and that preserved full political independence throughout its existence. Zvi Ilan, also reviewing this book, confesses that “after gaining release from inhibitions and fears, I find points of similarity between the history of the crusaders in this country and what is happening to the Jewish society in it. One can and must learn from the history of the crusaders, and especially how not to do things and what not to do.”⁹⁶ The historian Benjamin Arbel, in his appraisal of Prawer’s World of the Crusaders, points out that the “real or imagined similarity between the crusader experience and the Zionist movement of settlement in Eretz-Israel” is one of the reasons why the history of the crusaders is a historical chapter that arouses special interest in the cultural life of Israel.⁹⁷ Reviewing Sivan’s book, Arab Political Myths, Joseph Drori describes the Arab belief that “the defeat of Europe in the Middle Ages on the soil of Islam portends the failure of Europe and its satellites (Israel) at the present day, even if it is delayed.”⁹⁸ Even when it is a matter of an important critical article like that of Shlomo Neeman’s, which does not deal with analogies at all, the editor uses the heading “Wondering about the Meaning of the Crusader Period.”⁹⁹

It is hard not to notice the continued presence of the crusaders in Israel. Their fortresses are visually prominent, and they attract tourists and are the object of excursions. In the many articles on the subject that Meir Ben-Dov wrote for the daily newspapers, there are recommendations for trips and reports on archaeological discoveries together with political and social comments.¹⁰⁰ In 1990, recommending a trip to “a crusader fortress and the Syrian outposts,” Ben-Dov described the Christian-Muslim agreement in the thirteenth century, the result of compromise and concessions by both sides, who understood that a bad peace was better than decades of successful war. The history of Jerusalem shows in his opinion that anyone who tried to drive another party out of the city lost it. Two years later he wrote about Sultan Beybars’ thirteenth-century bridges used by traffic in Israel until the beginning of the twentieth century. A year later, Ben-Dov reported on wonderful relics of crusader culture crumbling on private lands at the heart of many Arab villages in the north of the country, and advocated cooperating with the owners and making them into archaeological assets that could be of economic benefit to them. In 1994 he gave further evidence of the dual loyalties of the members of the military orders, the Muslims, and the Christians in Palestine, which proved to be such a calamity for the kingdom. About a year later he reported on a fascinating attempt in the crusader period at joint Muslim-Christian rule on the Golan Heights.

One of the most popular sites among Israeli excursionists in Galilee is the fortress of Yehiam. In the Israeli consciousness, this place is connected with both the crusaders and the War of Independence. The founders of Kibbutz Yehiam first settled in the cellars of the crusader Jiddin fortress, which formed part of the string of fortifications that guarded the approach to Acre, the crusader capital after the fall of Jerusalem. Before and During the War of Independence, the fortress served as a place of refuge for the settlement, which was under siege from the surrounding Arab villages. Today the crusader castle is also popular among tourists because of the “crusader” brunch restaurant there, which, we learn, is famous for its Kabbalot Shabbat (Receptions of the Sabbath), which take place every Friday evening at half past five in all weathers.

The crusader tourist sites have frequently served as a pretext for political attacks and as a symbolic platform for nationalist confrontation. During the struggle over Kibbutz Merhavia, Shukri el-Asli published in the newspapers an open letter to the supposed commander of the Ottoman army in Syria in which he described the essence of Zionism; he signed it “Saladin.” The meaning was that the founding of Merhavia harmed the monument to Saladin.¹⁰¹ The journalist Yoram Mizrahi described the site – comparatively neglected from the touristic point of view – of the Horns of Hattin, as if people wanted to forget it!¹⁰² Christian tourists, he said, come to the place because of Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount and not because of Saladin’s historic victory. A path descends through the site of Nabi Shueib to the village of Hattin, which was abandoned in the War of Independence. In the 1970s, the sculptor Yigal Tumarkin asked the Vatican for permission to put up a sculpture at the Horns of Hattin in commemoration of the battle, but received no reply. The Germans also rebuffed him. Already in 1968, Tumarkin had produced his “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Astronaut” and his “Portrait of the Artist as a Crusader,” in which the artist wore a mantle with a cross as the symbol of the Teutonic Order. He got the crusader “bug” when he was in the navy and was close to the crusader castle of Atlit. His interest in the complex figure of Frederick II brought him to Sicily and resulted in his print “Homage to Frederick the Second of the House of Hohenstaufen” (1979). In the chapter “Crusaders and Zionists” in his book The Land of Israel – Tumarkin, the artist related that he aroused controversy “because of what I said about the crusaders and the comparison with the State of Israel…. In certain Israeli circles, to mention this matter is like talking about a rope in the house of a hanged man.” Among his works, the crusader series stands out. It includes sculptures, paintings, reliefs, prints, and drawings: “The Horns of Hattin,” “Unto Death – to Amos Oz,” “The Kingdom of Jerusalem,” “Ma’iliya – Cross of the Land,” and so on. Tumarkin has said, “There are fears on the part of Jews and Christians alike – a fear of analogies. Some wanted to make films. I wanted to make a documentary film, but that didn’t go.” Instead of the sculpture at the Horns of Hattin and the film, Tumarkin made his “crusader sculptures” at Ramle, Acre, and Belvoir Fortress.

At the inauguration ceremony for Tumarkin’s sculptures in the National Park at Kokhav Ha-Yarden in 1994, a year after the Oslo Accords, Yossi Sarid, at that time Minister for the Environment, contrasted crusader imperialism with the rootedness of the Jews:

On the evening of the Muslim Feast of the Sacrifice, many cassettes of songs of the first intifada made in Jerusalem were sold in the Israeli-Palestinian village Beni Shoueib. “O infidels, your hour has come!” one heard on one of the cassettes, which praised “the spirit of Islam, the cry Allah Akhbar! The victorious one on his horse, the sword of Saladin.” In the intifada, some of the Arab and Palestinian writers and artists once again sought refuge in myths of a glorious Muslim past. For more than a generation the Arabs and Palestinians have turned toward myths of the distant path as symbols to express their political desires in the present. An example of this is the Israeli-Arab poet Mahmoud Dasuki’s poem “Flights of Birds,” representing the crusaders and Byzantines as a passing phenomenon: “The Byzantines return to al-Sham (Damascus) and they all sleep/ and the people lives in false imaginings/ and continues to hum unceasingly … / peace on Jerusalem … / and Jerusalem calls … the walls of Jerusalem call … / Do you hear? Alas, hero of Islam, / the Arabs sleep … / the Arabs sleep … ”¹⁰⁴

In August 1997 a delegation of Arab Members of Knesset arrived in Al-Sham (Damascus) from Israel. As guests of the Syrian president, they visited the cemetery of Muslim holy men at the Mosque of Umawi outside Damascus as well as the grave of Saladin. What was the meaning of the visit? It may be that the answer to this question may be found in the words spoken by the poet Samieh el-Kassem in the cemetery: “This people which produced so great a number of saints will prevail over all its enemies.”¹⁰⁵

The Arab physician Ziad Asali surveyed the works of the Israeli historians dealing with the crusader phenomenon. In his essay “Zionist Studies of the Crusader Movement” (1992), he points out their relatively impressive representation in the international academic community: About 10 percent of the Organization for Crusader Studies are Israeli scholars, and among eighty-two studies of the crusaders published in 1980, fourteen were written by Israelis.¹⁰⁶ Asali placed the studies of the Israelis (“Zionists”) in four categories: works dealing with the situation of the Jews in the crusades, works dealing with the situation of the Arabs and Muslims in the crusades, works dealing with the structure of the crusader state and society, and works dealing with the crusader ideology and its relationship with Europe and the church. In each category, the historical findings and their relevance to the Zionist-crusader parallel are mentioned. For instance, when quoting Prawer’s observation that “there was no lack of soil, but there was a lack of people,”¹⁰⁷ Asali concluded that the Israelis had internalized this lesson and made every effort to encourage Jewish immigration to Palestine, exploiting the repression experienced by the Jews in Europe, their religious obligations, and national aspirations, and encouraging violence against the Jews in Arab countries in the hope of spurring their emigration to Israel. On most points he found much similarity between the crusaders and the Zionists, but he acknowledged one difference: the Israelis’ intellectual and scientific achievements. Their fostering of academic and educational institutions is intended, in his opinion, to fulfill two purposes: to build up a national identity based on Zionism, and to contribute to the development of industry, agriculture, commerce, health, and other sectors based on a modern technology. Thus, the Israelis were able to build an arms industry and create a military establishment, in marked contrast to the crusaders’ limited military capabilities: “Israel’s capacity to produce sophisticated weapons, including atomic bombs, is an obvious reality when we remember the fall of Acre in 1291.”¹⁰⁸

Asali concludes that “Zionism is the heir – albeit illegitimate – of the crusader movement.”¹⁰⁹ According to Asali, it was born out of the depths of the crusader residue in western societies, as it combined dreams of reconquest of the Holy Land with a traditional antipathy toward orientals along with a solution of the Jewish problem in the West. The Jews effected a transposition, having been victims in the first crusade and aggressors in the modern one. Asali’s article, which is primarily a matter-of-fact survey of Israeli work in the field, ends as follows: “The Israelis have studied the crusader state in order to learn from its experience, avoid its mistakes and escape its fate.”¹¹⁰ Another Arab intellectual, the Franco-Lebanese writer Amin Maaluf, in his book The Crusades through Arab Eyes, avoided drawing a parallel between the crusader past and the Arab-Zionist dispute. Maaluf saw the crusader invasion as mainly an episode in the confrontation between East and West, and stressed the sensitivity that has to be shown toward the Arabs in depicting the past in view of their sense of persecution and present-day threats from the West.¹¹¹

Crusader-era expert and Israeli essayist Meron Benvenisti, in a Zionist-slanted memo to the Israeli Foreign Ministry called “Crusaders and Zionists,” wrote: “Despite the academic weakness and bias of Arab historiographical scholarship with regard to the crusaders, the analogy has also found support outside the Arab world…. In wide circles, people have begun to relate seriously to the crusader-Zionist comparison, and the analogy has taken root to such a degree that Israeli and Jewish scholars have also been gripped by it.”¹¹²Years later, Benvenisti expressed a further opinion on the matter. In his article “Longings for the Crusaders,” he suggested that the emphasis on the short crusader period rather than the long period of Arab rule in Israel was intended to strengthen the Zionist claim that the history of the country was a long period of alien rule in which foreign rulers stole it from the Jews until the latter returned to the land and established Jewish sovereignty there.¹¹³ Stressing the crusader period was a convenient way of blurring the fact that for 1,400 years an Arab-Muslim community lived there. The crusader epoch, which divides the Arab period into two, does not contradict the Zionist narrative. It is neutral in the Zionist-Palestinian dispute, for there is no fear that the Christians will exploit their contribution to the landscape to organize a new crusade for the liberation of the Holy Land. On the other hand, the Arab identity of important sites does interfere with the Zionist narrative. The reconstruction of Kockhav Ha-Yarden and Caesarea are in Benvenisti’s opinion examples of the expunging of a whole Arab civilization from the landscape, leaving crusader remains that do not disturb a convenient historical narrative. On both these sites, the Arab structures were cleared away, and it was the crusader structures that were restored and became tourist sites. Likewise, in Beit Atab near Ness Harim, Kfar Lamm near the moshav Habonim, in Kfar Kakon, in Tsuba, and in Kala’at Jiddin (the fortress of Yehiam), there was a historical revision of monumental sites with the intention of obliterating the connection with the Arabs.

The archaeologist Adrian Boas replied to Benvenisti’s charges. In his opinion, there has not been any international conspiracy of scholars to overlook the Muslim past.¹¹⁴ The preservation of mediaeval structures does not depend on their crusader or Arab identity. For example, the fortress of Belvoir is preserved as opposed to the Arab village of Kaukab el-Haw, but the crusader past is not specially cultivated in the museums or in the archaeological circles of the universities in this country. In the Tower of David Museum there is a small permanent crusader display set up on Prawer’s initiative, and there was a crusader exhibition in 1977 in the Rockefeller Museum. It seems that the words of the archaeologist Adrian Boaz are like a voice crying in the wilderness: “A more realistic approach to the Crusader period might free us from the temptation to see it as a parallel to the Zionist settlement of the land of Israel, as Jews and Arabs have both done for their own reasons. Such comparisons do not help us to understand either the crusades or the Zionist movement.”

In 1999 an exhibition was staged in the Israel Museum called “Knights of the Holy Land: The Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem,”¹¹⁵ commemorating the nine-hundredth anniversary of the founding of that kingdom. The task of holding the exhibition presented the organizers with some obvious difficulties. How in Israel can one perpetuate the memory of those who massacred the Jews both overseas and in this country, and at the same time not hurt the feelings of the Christian pilgrims who came here to celebrate the millennium? Finally, the arrangers of the exhibition avoided a critical discussion of the crusader phenomenon and, in cooperation with the Youth Wing, left the museum space to the visiting children, who dressed up as knights and enjoyed the crusader chess-sets, decorated shields, banners, and maps.

Even the criticism of an academic work dealing with the Frankish settlement in the country can lead to a lively debate on the significance of the analogy today.¹¹⁶ It would seem that when discussing the crusader phenomenon the academicians repeatedly forget the rules of scholarly discipline. Professor Haim Gerber, for example, declares that the “new historians” who find “points of resemblance between the Zionist enterprise and the acts of the crusaders” seek “to uproot the foundations on which the State of Israel rests, to question its legitimacy and in effect to contribute to its overthrow.” He points to the common view that both Zionism and the people from the West regarded the inhabitants of the land as barbarians without nationality or culture.¹¹⁷ Uri Avneri, answering Gerber, relates that, as early as the 1950s, “I was stunned by the similarity between the crusades and the Zionist enterprise.”¹¹⁸ Professor Ya’akov Amir expressed amazement at what Avneri had written:

The peace talks between the Israelis and the Palestinians and the possibility of evacuating the settlements in Judea and Samaria made Israel Harel, one of the settler leaders, write in his article “Unlike the Crusaders”: “Baath secular circles and other Islamic groups have foretold for some time that our fate will be similar to that of the crusaders. Judging by the strength and fortitude we have demonstrated in recent years, our spirit and behaviour, the comparison is unfair to the crusaders. They at least succeeded in persevering in the intolerably difficult conditions of deprivation, isolation and insecurity of the Middle Ages for some two hundred years.”¹²⁰ Is this what philosopher Yeshayahu Leibowitz meant when he foretold that the first “descenders” from the country (the Hebrew term “Yordim” usually means “emigrants,” but here it is employed in a slightly derogatory, metaphorical sense) would be the settlers in the territories? Is Harel suggesting that the descent from the settlers’ Messianic vision of redemption to the nadir of defeatism is something so disastrous that the Israelis may be compared to the crusaders?

Close to the time of the outbreak of the Al-Aqsa intifada in the autumn of 2000, and even more so while it was taking place, the Israeli and Palestinian relationship to the crusaders once more became a topic for discussion. Following the events, law professor and former Member of Knesset Amnon Rubinstein wrote: “Anyone who has seen or heard the statements of the exposed ‘masked men’ which have come out of the mouths of some of the Israeli Arabs, including Members of Knesset, about ‘effacing the green line’ … has also heard the statements between the lines and between the sentences: i.e., the revival of the old-new hope that it will be possible to obliterate Israel as the crusader kingdom was obliterated, since no national body can exist which is not Muslim-Arab.”¹²¹ In an article entitled “Neither Saladin nor Samson,” the journalist Dan Margalit used a Jewish martyrological image in order to lambaste “Arafat, who in recent days has proposed the sacrifice of Ishmael. He makes a burnt-offering of Palestinian children … but even if the Palestinians now decide to refrain from making peace with Israel, assuming that its fate will be like that of the crusaders, and that even in situations of despair it will not be headed by a kind of new Samson who will choose to ‘die with the Philistines,’ Arafat will still have to ask himself if all this will be worthwhile simply in order that the granddaughter of his great-granddaughter will see a new Saladin on the political stage.”¹²² On two occasions in the autumn and winter of 2001, the analogy was the main subject of the Israeli television program “Globus” on the government channel.

Binyamin Netanyahu’s vision of a “cold peace” raised the specter of the crusader myth, this time from an unexpected quarter. Commenting under the heading “In the Crusader State,” the journalist Guy Behor wrote:

At the beginning of the disturbances, Amos Oz wrote for the New York Times, putting his finger on the salient point: The choice was between myths on the one hand and historical reconciliation on the other. Oz describes Arafat’s return from the failed Camp David summit as follows:

On the same subject, Oz later turned to the Palestinians in the name of the Israeli peace camp:

At a meeting of Israeli intellectuals and Palestinians in July 2001, Oz once again located the point of inception of the Al-Aqsa intifada: the welcome that Arafat received on his return from America where he had demanded the right of return. He was received with the greeting, “Welcome home, Saladin!”¹²⁶

The colonialist discourse is not a new one. The analogy, however, has been disproved by the facts. The Zionist settlement of Palestine took place without military or political assistance from foreign states and so does not resemble any colonialist movement. Zionism was not a religious movement, but a national movement that saw the return to Zion as the modern expression of a people that wished to forge its collective destiny through a return to its historical sources. The Israelis created a rejuvenated homeland and established an identity between a large part of the people and their soil; they developed settlement, science, and technology, achieved a clear national identity with a culture, language, and creativity of its own, and succeeded in maintaining a democratic existence (within the “Green Line”) under the most trying condition there can be for a democracy – a protracted military conflict. Most important of all, the Israelis never felt strangers in their country. They did not apologize for their national existence, but saw it as the historical realization of a universal right supported by international recognition – not as an original sin.

At the dawn of the twenty-first century, the Zionist-crusader analogy is still part of the new world picture. The destruction of the Twin Towers in New York is a historic landmark in the struggle between globalization and fundamentalism, and has conjured up the specter of a crusade as symbolizing the demonization of the “other,” which in the name of a holy God provides the authorization for his annihilation. The former president of the United States George W. Bush declared that one had to wage a crusade against the fundamentalists, and Osama Bin Laden called for a jihad against the “crusader-Jewish alliance,” in this way binding up the motivations for world terror with the crusader guilt of the state of Israel.

Three days after the terrorist action in New York, on September 14, 2001, the northern branch of the Islamic Organization in Israel had its yearly conference in the Arab-Israeli city Umm el-Fahm. The organizers of the “Al-Aqsa Is in Danger” assembly held on that occasion placed behind the speakers’ platform a placard twenty by thirty meters in size on which one saw Saladin approaching Al-Aqsa with his troops, and over the mosque was written, “We are coming back, Al-Aqsa!” The tens of thousands of people attending the meeting were given copies of the sermon delivered by the preacher at Al-Aqsa, Manhe E-Din Ibn Sachi, on October 9, 1187, the first Friday on which Saladin prayed in the mosque after its liberation from the crusaders. At the end of the sermon it was written: “Ibn Sachi gave this sermon of liberation. Who will give the next sermon of liberation?”

Does the Al-Aqsa intifada represent a turning point in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that changes it from a national conflict to a national-religious conflict? The climax of the new radical religious symbolism is reached in the Zionist-crusader analogy, which is rapidly becoming a myth and a counter-myth among the Israelis and Palestinians. The ways in which the crusader narrative is presented embody the opposing intentions of the rival sides. The Arab side has nurtured a myth in which a historical analogy has been bound up with political attitudes and religious sermonizing, whereas most of the spokespeople for the Israeli side have sought to divest this politico-religious myth of its content by using a dry secular terminology, although many of them have nurtured a counter-myth that gave rise to an enlisted political narrative. This was well expressed by the philosopher Emil Fackenheim, who at the height of the Al-Aqsa intifada voiced the opinion of most Israelis; that is: “The crusaders came to Jerusalem but we returned to it. They abandoned it, but we came in order to stay. And while they left behind them ruins in the sand, we came in order to build it anew.”¹²⁷

The crusader dynamic appears to Israelis variously. They see it traced from the terrorist attacks on buses to the Iranian atom bomb scare; from the territories conquered in the Six-Day War to Israel’s alien presence in the region; from 1967 to 1948; from the “small conquest” to the “great expulsion.” Some maintain that in order to deactivate Iran’s nuclear threat, it is necessary to neutralize the nucleus of the conflict, the Palestinian problem. The crusader perspective is evidence of the changing viewpoint on the whole conflict and of the range of fears it engenders. It is perceived as a local quarrel with the first “colonialists”; a dispute between a small, newly founded state and an alliance of neighbors that have risen against it; an Israeli Goliath opposed to the occupied Palestinians – a Goliath who in turn is a potential victim because of the threat to his existence. Has the metaphor not rebelled against its maker? Has it not been transformed in the cauldron of time to a mythic golem, dominating its maker and controlling his fears, his thoughts, and his actions?