Israel’s conflicts and ‘Crusader anxiety’ are examined through historical comparisons, emphasizing moral grounds, global reactions, and the impact of violence on its legitimacy and international perception.
Explore the parallels between Israel’s historical conflicts and the Crusades, examining the moral, political, and societal impacts of ‘Crusader anxiety‘ and ongoing violence.
Crusader Anxiety
Israelis in general indignantly reject the charge, standard throughout the Arab and Muslim world, that they are the Crusaders of our times. But they do so essentially on moral grounds only: their cause, the return of an exiled and persecuted people to their historic homeland, simply brooks no comparison with the imperial conquests of the medieval church militants.
For one, throughout their 192-year presence in the Holy Land, the support came mainly from a seemingly inexhaustible supply of new Crusaders led by the kings, princes, and great barons of feudal Europe. For the other, it has come mainly from the bounty—armaments galore, annual aid amounting to about one-third of what Washington hands out to the entire world, and extravagantly party diplomacy—heaped on it by the American superpower.
But ironically, and quite unlike the Crusaders, it is precisely the former—their violence—which, much as anything else, will bring that decline about. Whenever, for example, the Israeli army “cuts the grass” in Gaza, it breeds revulsion around the world at what this grass mostly consists of—namely, not Palestinian “terrorists, but non-combatant men, women, and, above all, children buried beneath homes reduced to smithereens.
And that is only the most periodically shocking of things; a host of others increasingly call into question the integrity and the very legitimacy of the Jewish state.
Original Sin
Consider Israel’s first, most formative, fateful, and egregiously Crusader-like act—its “original sin,” to which it owes its very existence.
In 1099, the Christian Kingdom of Jerusalem arose upon the debris of one of “the greatest crimes of history, the massacre of the entire Muslim and Jewish population of the holy city. Eight and a half centuries later, in 1947-48, Israel was born of a similarly massive “crime against humanity”; or, at least, had the article of international law about that offense been operational at the time, and had anyone had the will to invoke it, that is surely what the Palestinian Nakba, or catastrophe—ethnic cleansing and expulsion, through force, terror, and many an atrocity, of those “non-Jewish communities”—would” have judged to be.
There was no such will, not on the part of Western publics, still less of their governments. And least of all Washington’s. It was in the US that pro-Jewish/Israeli sentiment ran highest, amid widespread celebration of the “noble dream” (as Abraham Lincoln once called it) come true.
There, too, politicians—and journalists and academics—risked the punitive, sometimes career-threatening wrath of an already redoubtable institution, the Israel lobby, if they strayed too far from this celebratory orthodoxy.
And so, Crusader-like, it was to prove. The chivalry of medieval Christendom spent 192 years doing more or less continuous battle with this or that kingdom or sultanate of an Arab-Muslim Middle East—much as internally fractious and fragmented as it is today—until, owing to Western support, they ended up being thrown into the sea.
The Israelis have been at it, in a very like fashion, for a good 75 years now, in what their official military doctrine defines as “wars” and “campaigns between wars.”.
Conquest and Expansion
To begin with—both the Crusaders and the Israelis—wars were largely wars of further conquest and territorial expansion.
No sooner had Baldwin de Bouillon been crowned first king of Jerusalem, on Christmas Day 1100, than he set about enlarging his diminutive kingdom—and he eventually encompassed the whole of what is now Palestine and bits of Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon, as well. It surrounded itself with formidable frontier fortifications and agri-military settlements, adumbrations of Israel’s great border “walls” and its farm-and-fighting kibbutzim.
David Ben Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, was bent on expansion, too—though accomplished, he once said, not by “moralizing” or “sermons on the mount,” but by the “machine guns which we will need.”.
But unlike his medieval predecessors, innocent of any such niceties as the rules and ethics of war, he couldn’t just invade and conquer a neighboring country at will. His, after all, was a “peace-loving” nation, which had only just secured its very controversial admission to the United Nations on the strength of a solemn pledge to that effect.
Nor would such an action have been becoming of the supremely moral and democratic state, and “light unto the nations,” which he told the world he was building, and which much of that world, notably its liberals and its left, had already taken to its heart, on account, among other things, of its “inspiring” socialist ideals and the kibbutzim at the core of them.
Ben Gurion and his successors yearned for others to attack them. Meanwhile, all they could do was await—more to manufacture—opportunities to attack those others first; opportunities that, crucially, would enable them to do so in the guise of legitimate “self-defense.”.
Living by the Sword
The Israelis lumped all this under the heading of “delegitimization.”. And, for them, delegitimization ultimately amounted to an existential threat—less serious, according to Netanyahu, than a nuclear-armed Iran or the missiles of Hamas and Hezbollah.
Because if Israel was a state forever condemned to live by the sword, as Netanyahu said it was, then it could not fashion, maintain, and effectively wield that sword without the support and goodwill of Washington and the West, any more than the Crusaders could have done without that of the papacy and medieval Christendom.
Thus, the US was legally obliged to supply itself with every possible “superior military continual means” to “defeat any … military threat from any individual state or possible coalition of states.”
The arms themselves were only one thing; another was the uses to which Israel put them, and which, however unlawful in intent or criminal in execution, the US could always be relied upon to support or condone.
For every time the “most moral army in the world” buried women and children—along, sometimes, with an actual “terrorist” or two—beneath homes in Gaza; every time a leading politician or rabbi delivered some breathtakingly racist or bloodcurdling remark about Arabs or Palestinians; every time religious settlers embarked on a “pogrom, an olive tree-uprooting campaign, or an attempt to burn down an entire Arab town, praying as they went about it, the pressure increased.
Indeed, every time some religious or ultra-nationalist firebrand ascended al-Haram al-Sharif, the Noble Sanctuary, site of Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock, and dropped an incendiary hint or two about resurrecting an ancient Jewish temple in their place—every time such things happened, the “Jewish and democratic state” delegitimized itself a little fraction more.
Western Disenchantment
Sabra and Shatila, and the whole military misadventure in Lebanon—Israel’s Vietnam, of which it was the gruesome climax—was the first big signpost pointing towards what was to become the long, slow process of Western disenchantment with its “beautiful Israel” of yesteryear.
This was eventually to imperil Israel in the same way that a similar process across medieval Christendom had once imperiled—finally undone—the Christian Kingdom of Jerusalem.
Lionheart’s mass execution of some 2,700 Muslim prisoners of war. It was simply turning its attention to new and more pressing preoccupations closer to home
The 20th-century world, with its 20th-century “values,” could hardly, honestly, not have been troubled by the similar—perhaps not quite so nasty—things that the Crusaders’ 20th-century successors have done and continue to do in pursuit of their very similar dream.
Respect, devotion, and solicitude—these, genuine or assumed, Israel still commanded in many quarters, particularly governmental and official ones. But in many others, and society at large, such sentiments were steadily yielding to their opposites: to criticism, censure, or outright condemnation, and calls for punitive action, like the sanctions, arms embargo, and economic boycott that brought down the apartheid regime in South Africa.
Warriors of God
It was gradually taking on the attributes of a theocracy, with rabbis, often of the most bigoted and reactionary kind, gaining such influence in the nation’s affairs that, in the eyes of anxious secularists, who now habitually refer to this process as the “Iranization” of Israel, it was beginning to look like a Jewish version of the ayatollahs’ realm.
It was a state and a society held hostage by a golem of its creation, its religious settlers—wild and weird embodiments of a fusion between the 19th-century “blood-and-soil” nationalism in which their secular predecessors were steeped and the newfangled, militant Judaic messianism of their own, whom it would probably require a civil war to rein in.
For those antique “warriors of God”, the supreme, most sacrosanct of tasks had been to save the Holy Sepulchre—the site, Christians believe, of Jesus’s crucifixion, burial, and resurrection—from the “pollution” and derelictions of Islam.
Similarly, for an unknown but growing number of their Israeli successors—and not just religious ones—the return to
