British writer David Hirst published a long article in which he mentioned the similarities between Israel and the Crusaders throughout history in terms of methods and ambitions.
In his article, Hirst did not rule out that Israeli behavior would ultimately lead to the same end that the Crusaders endured in the East.
Although the article or the introduction to the new edition of the book was written before the seventh of last October, the writer did not change its content when publishing it except one sentence, stressing that it “still expresses reality, indicating that Israel’s criminal behavior will lead to more This will further delegitimize it, and will make the chance of it achieving the same fate as the Crusaders in the East greater.”
"Crusader anxiety"
The writer says, “The Israelis reject with indignation the “prevalent accusation” directed against them in various parts of the world, which says that they are the Crusaders of this time, but they reject the accusation based on moral considerations only, considering that their cause “is the return of the exiled and oppressed people to their historical homeland.” “It will not be compared to an invasion by militant medieval church followers.”
However, for obvious reasons, they pay special attention to the history of the Crusaders and their experience, and the evidence for this is that they established in Israel an important center specializing in the study of the Crusaders. There is no doubt that what the specialist scholar David Ohana calls “Crusader anxiety,” or The “hidden pathological fear” that the “Zionist project” may “end in comprehensive destruction,” just as what happened with the Crusader ancestors, has become an integral part of the Israeli psychological state, or at least the psychological state of those who have full awareness of this. Serious historical correspondences.
Among these similarities, in terms of initial importance to the Crusaders and Zionists alike, is achieving high military skill and ensuring support from foreign powers.
The writer responds: “In the case of the Crusaders, throughout the 192 years they spent in the Holy Land, support came to them mainly in the form of inexhaustible resources from the new Crusaders led by kings, princes, and senior nobles in feudal Europe.”
In the case of the Israelis, “support comes in the form of annual military aid amounting to approximately one-third of what Washington provides to the entire world, and in the form of extremely extravagant, partisan diplomacy lavished on them by the American superpower.”
He said: "It was the decline in external support, not the loss of military skill, that ultimately led to the fall of the Crusaders, and the same thing could happen with the Israelis as well."
original sin
The writer adds: “Consider Israel’s first actions in its most important formative stage, which are similar in extent to their destructiveness and heinousness to the actions of the Crusaders, or what could be described as its ‘original sin’, to which the credit for its existence today is due. In the year 1099, The Christian Kingdom of Jerusalem was established on the ruins of what resulted from one of the “greatest crimes in history,” the massacre committed against the entire population of the Holy City, both Muslims and Jews, after eight and a half centuries in the period between 1947 and 1948, and Israel was born. Through a “crime against humanity” that resembles this in terms of its gravity and atrocity, or at least let us say that if the article of international law pertaining to that crime had been in effect at that time, and if anyone had had the will to demand its implementation, it would have been certain that the Palestinian Nakba, ethnic cleansing and expulsion, “The use of force, terrorism, and many atrocities committed against those ‘non-Jewish communities’ would have been considered a crime against humanity.”
He continued: “The Israelis also proved that they are exactly like the Crusaders. The medieval Christian knights spent 192 years constantly fighting one battle after another with this or that kingdom or sultanate in the Muslim Arab Middle East, which was then, as it is today, suffering from Internal division and discord, until the Crusaders lost Western support and ended up being literally thrown into the sea. This was also the case with the Israelis, who for 75 years now have been waging, or waging, what their official military doctrine calls “wars.” "Campaigns between wars."
Conquest and expansion.
First of all - for the Crusaders and the Israelis alike - such wars were wars aimed at conquest or expansion.
As soon as Baldwin de Bouillon was crowned the first king of Jerusalem, on Christmas Day in the year 1100 AD, he embarked on a campaign to expand the area of his small kingdom, which eventually included all of Palestine as we know it today and parts of Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon, as well. It surrounded itself with impregnable front fortifications and agricultural military settlements, similar to today's huge border walls that Israel is building and the agricultural and combat villages (kibbutzim) it has been establishing.
David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first prime minister, was also intent on expansion, an expansion that must be accomplished, as he once said, not through "beautification of morals" or through "speeches delivered from the Temple Mount," but rather through " "The autocannon we're going to need."
But unlike what was practiced by his ancestors, who did not know any of those niceties such as the rules and ethics of war, he could not practice conquest and expansion in neighboring countries as he wanted, as he belongs to a nation that “loves peace” and which had just achieved it, despite what happened. At that time, there was controversy and disagreement about that, regarding membership in the United Nations, pledging to abide by its charter.
This was not expected from a democratic state with a high degree of moral superiority, which considers itself “a light that shines upon nations,” and which Ben-Gurion said, addressing the world, that he was working to build, and which most of the world, especially its liberals and leftists, received with great enthusiasm. And sympathy, considering that it is an example of “inspiring” socialist ideals, of which the kibbutz is at the heart.
Ben-Gurion and those who came after him were eager for others to attack them. In the meantime, all they could do was wait and wait for opportunities or seek to create them in order to surprise these others with an attack. These opportunities were extremely important in that they enabled them to launch the attack. Covered with a legitimate cover of “self-defense.”
The opportunity finally came in June 1967, when the Arab armies began marching towards Israel in response to harassment and provocations by it, in the midst of a foolish and frightening clamor of war rhetoric. At first glance, the world trembled in fear for Israel, wondering: Will we witness a second Holocaust after only twenty-five years have passed since the first Holocaust?
This is of course impossible. As was foreseen and as had been prepared for a long time, Moshe Dayan, the iconic one-eyed general, and other of the Master’s disciples, set out to deal with this directly. In the Six-Day War in June 1967, they achieved, in one fell swoop, completely similar goals from a strategic standpoint. And expansionism, which took twenty years to accomplish at the hands of King Baldwin eight centuries before that, in addition to the occupation of the entire Sinai, and they also carried out a mini-nakba with the large wave of Palestinian refugees they achieved.
Even here, the world did not pass its judgment on Israel. On the contrary, the “pampered darling of the West” rose to unprecedented high levels of status and popularity.
Judging the Zionist project
Returning to the similarities with the Crusaders, the Israelis found themselves ruling the country's indigenous population, which consisted of those who neither killed nor expelled them, and then rewarded them in numbers.
Historians of the Crusader era rarely fail to quote the 12th-century Muslim traveler Ibn Jubayr, and in particular his description of a Muslim community that “laments over the injustice of a landowner of the same religion as them, while they praise the behavior of his rival and enemy, the Frankish landowner, from whom they were accustomed to treating them.” “Justly.”
Perhaps this is the strong evidence remaining from the testimony of those who saw it with their own eyes, that no matter how barbaric and savage the Crusaders were in battle, they may not have been bad in governance, or at least in terms of their deviation from enforcing the customs of that time.
Can the same or better be said about the Israelis regarding their invasion and occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in the present time? Objectively speaking, this is not possible, but such was the general impression, because the Israelis, for their part, kept insisting that their occupation was “the most merciful occupation in history,” a claim that the careless world never thought to verify.
When was the first time that the world put the Zionist project to the test and judged it after embracing it and accepting it without criticism or questioning for a long time? As Weizmann predicted, the moment came when the world judged the project, even if it came decades after he referred to that.
Living by the sword
The Israelis collected all these measures and put them under one heading, which is “delegitimization.” For them, delegitimization ultimately amounts to an existential threat, and it is no less dangerous, according to what Netanyahu stated, than Iran’s nuclear arming or the missiles of Hamas and Hezbollah. .
Why? Because if Israel as a state was doomed to live by the sword, as Netanyahu talked about, then it would not be able to design that sword, maintain it, or display it effectively without the support and satisfaction of Washington and the West, just as the Crusaders were not able to do that without support and satisfaction. The papacy and the Christian world in the Middle Ages.
Hence, the United States is obligated by law to continue providing Israel with “all possible means of military superiority” so that it can “defeat any military threat coming to it from any specific country or potential coalition between a group of countries.”
The weapons themselves are only one thing, and there is another matter, which is the way in which Israel uses those weapons, and ensuring that no matter how forbidden this use is in terms of purpose or criminal in terms of implementation, it can continue to rely on the United States for support or approval.
Hence, Washington automatically and automatically wields the sword of veto against any draft resolution, something that has been repeated dozens of times over the years, even against resolutions that included mild criticism of Israel in the United Nations, which is the same entity to which it owes credit, in the event of It is almost unique among nations, despite having created it in the first place, and with it, of course, the “legitimacy” that the world is now seeking to strip it from, as it fears.
There is no doubt that it will continue to do so at an ever-increasing pace. Every time “the most moral army in the world buries women and children, sometimes along with a “terrorist” or two, under homes in Gaza, and every time a high-ranking politician declares Or a rabbi with astonishing racist expressions or expressions that make the blood freeze in the veins around Arabs or Palestinians, and every time the religious settlers set out to commit “murder,” or launch a campaign to uproot olive trees, or attempt to set fire to an entire Arab town, while they perform prayer. As they do so, the pressure increases
Indeed, every time a religious or nationalist extremist goes up to Al-Haram Al-Sharif, the place where the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock are located, and delivers a fiery sermon about rebuilding the ancient Jewish Temple in their place. Every time something like this happens, and the world hears about it, the The "Jewish and democratic state" loses an additional measure of its legitimacy.
It is clear that her closest friends are taking the initiative to warn her, as this entity “beloved and pampered by the West” risks becoming a “pariah” entity in the ranks of countries such as its arch enemy, the Islamic Republic of Iran.
And yes, through its rampant religiosity, the state has in fact come to seem closer to the Crusaders themselves, following in their footsteps, not only in terms of the method of continuous warfare, but also in terms of aspirations, and among these aspirations, one stands out more than others as the model of the closest resemblance at all. .
For these ancient “warriors for God,” the highest and most sacred task from their point of view was to save the Church of the Holy Sepulchre—the site where Christians believe Christ was crucified, buried, and resurrected—from “corruption.” And neglect of Muslims.
In the same way, for an unknown, but growing, number of Israelis who succeeded them, and this is not limited to the religious among them, the return to Zion will not be complete except with the establishment of the Third Temple, next to Al-Aqsa and the Dome of the Rock, or replacing them instead, here. In the third holiest spot for Muslims.
Will the world finally realize, when it wakes up from its slumber, what these people have brought to the ground and to the people in the region, three-quarters of a century after that moment in which Weizmann predicted that the world would judge Israel, and will it distance itself from the state or disavow it, abandoning it? To the fate to which she has become exposed?
He concluded by saying: “In light of modern “values,” the United States and the West will have stronger justifications than the papacy and the Christian world had in the Middle Ages when they abandoned the Crusaders in light of the values they had at the time. It is unlikely. Undoubtedly, but the more Israel continues to “delegitimize” itself in the eyes of the world - and it is doing so in Gaza now - the less that exclusion becomes, and the more likely it becomes that the nightmare that the professor of the Crusades, Ohana, spoke of, and which he predicted would be its fate, will come true. Similar to the fate of the Crusaders themselves. Of course, it will not be thrown into the sea, but, one way or another, the fate will be decided strategically, militarily, or diplomatically.
A very detailed and informative content.
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