Similarities between Crusaders and Zionists
By Uri Anvery
11 October 2014
Lately, the words
“Crusaders” and “Zionists” have been appearing more and more often as twins. In
a documentary about the ISIS I just saw, they appeared together in almost every
sentence uttered by the Islamist fighters, including teenagers.
Some sixty years ago I
wrote an article whose title was just that: “Crusaders and Zionists.” Perhaps it
was the first on that subject. It raised a lot of opposition. At the time, it
was a Zionist article of faith that no such similarity existed, tut-tut-tut.
Unlike the Crusaders, the Jews are a nation. Unlike the Crusaders, who were
barbarians compared to the civilized Muslims of their time, Zionists are
technically superior. Unlike the Crusaders, the Zionists relied on their own
manual labor. (That was before the Six-Day War, of course.) I have already told
the story several times of my attachment to the Crusaders’ history, but I can’t
resist the temptation to tell it again.
During the 1948 war my
commando unit was fighting in the South. When the war ended, a narrow strip of
land along the Mediterranean Sea remained in Egyptian hands. We called it the
“Gaza Strip” and built outposts around it.
A few years later, I
read Steven Runciman’s monumental “A History of the Crusades.” My attention was
immediately drawn to a curious coincidence: After the First Crusade, a strip of
territory along the sea was left in the hands of the Egyptians, extending a few
kilometers beyond Gaza. The Crusaders built a string of fortifications to
contain it. They were in almost the same places as our own outposts.
When I finished
reading the three volumes, I did something I never did before or since: I wrote
a letter to the author. After praising the work, I asked: Did you ever think
about the similarity between them and us?
The answer arrived
within days. Not only did he think about it, Runciman wrote, but he thought
about it all the time. Indeed, he wanted to subtitle the book “A guide for the
Zionists on how not to do it.” However, he added, “my Jewish friends advised
against it.” If I ever chanced to pass through London, he added, he would be
glad if I called on him.
I happened to be in
London a few months later and called him. He asked me to come over immediately.
Steven Runciman
answered the bell himself, a tall British gentleman of about fifty. Being an
incurable anglophile, I was enchanted by his courteous aristocratic manner.
We sank into a
discussion of the Crusader-Zionist parallel, and lost all sense of time. For
hours we compared events and names. Who was the Crusader Herzl (Pope Urban),
who the Crusader Ben-Gurion? (Godfrey? Baldwin?), who the Zionist Reynald of
Chatillon (Moshe Dayan), who the Israeli Raymond of Tripoli, who advocated
peace with the Muslims? (Runciman graciously pointed to me).
Years later, Runciman
invited my wife and me to Scotland, where he had moved to live in an old
watchtower near Lockerbie, built as a defense against England. Over dinner
served by a lone manservant he spoke about the ghosts haunting the place.
Rachel and I were astonished when we realized that he really believed in them.
The two historical movements were separated by at least six centuries, and
their political, social, cultural and military backgrounds are, of course,
totally different. But some similarities are evident. Both the Crusaders and
the Zionists (as well as the Philistines before them) invaded Palestine from
the West. They lived with their backs to the sea and Europe, facing the
Muslim-Arab world. They lived in permanent war. At the time, Jews identified
with the Arabs. The horrible massacres of the Jewish communities along the
Rhine committed by some Crusaders on their way to the Holy Land are deeply
imprinted in Jewish consciousness. Upon conquering Jerusalem, the Crusaders
committed another heinous crime by slaughtering all Muslim and Jewish
inhabitants, men women and children, wading “to their knees in blood,” as a Christian
chronicler put it.
Haifa, one of the last
towns to fall to the Crusaders, was fiercely defended by its Jewish
inhabitants, fighting shoulder to shoulder with the Muslim garrison. I was
brought up hating the Crusaders, but I was not conscious of the abysmal hatred
Muslims felt for them until I asked the Arab-Israeli writer Emil Habibi to sign
a manifesto for an Israeli-Palestinian partnership over Jerusalem. In it, I had
listed all the cultures that had in the past enriched the city. When Habibi saw
that I had included the Crusaders, he refused to sign. “They were a bunch of
murderers!” he exclaimed. I had to omit them. When Arabs couple us with the
Crusaders, they clearly want to say that we, too, are foreign intruders,
strangers to this country and this region.
That’s why the
comparison is so dangerous. If the Arabs entertain such a deep hatred for the
Crusaders after six centuries, how are they ever to become reconciled with us?
Instead of wasting our
time on the debate about whether we are similar or not, we would be well
advised to learn from the Crusaders’ history. The first lesson concerns the
question of identity. Who are we? Are we Europeans facing a hostile region? Are
we “a wall against Asiatic barbarism,” as Theodor Herzl proclaimed? Are we “a
villa in the jungle,” according to the famous dictum of Ehud Barak?
In short, do we see
ourselves as belonging to this region or as Europeans who accidentally landed
on the wrong continent?
To my mind, this is
the basic question of Zionism, going back to its first day, and dictating
everything they have done to this very day. In my booklet “War or Peace in the
Semitic Region,” which I published on the eve of the 1948 war, I posed this
question in the very first sentence.
For the Crusaders,
this was not a question at all. They were the flower of European knighthood and
they came to fight the Saracens. They made Hudnas (truces) with Arab rulers,
mainly the emirs of Damascus, but fighting Islam was their very raison d’être.
The few advocates of peace and reconciliation, like the aforementioned Raymond
of Tripoli, were despised outsiders.
Israel is in a similar
situation. True, we never admit that we want war; it is always the Arabs who
refuse peace. But from its first day, the State of Israel has refused to fix
its borders, being ever ready for expansion by force — exactly like the
Crusaders. Today, 66 years after the founding of our state, more than half of
the daily news in our media concerns the war with the Arabs, inside and outside
Israel.
Israel suffers from a
deep-seated sense of existential insecurity, which finds its expression in
myriad forms. Since Israel is in many ways a conspicuous success story and a
world-class military power, this sense of insecurity often gives rise to
wonderment. I believe that its root is this feeling of not belonging to the
region in which we live, of being a villa in the jungle, which really means
being a fortified ghetto in the region. It could be said that this feeling is
natural, since most Israelis are of European descent. But that is not true. 20
percent of Israeli citizens are Arabs. At least half of the Jews have come here
(they or their parents) from Arab countries, where they spoke Arabic and
listened to Arab music. Were the Crusaders a small aristocratic minority in
their state, as Zionist historians always contends? Depends on how you count.
When the first
Crusaders arrived in Palestine, the majority of the population was still
Christian of various Eastern sects. However, the Catholic invaders did look
upon them as inferior strangers. The Poulains, as they were called, were
despised and discriminated against. They felt themselves closer to the Arabs
than to the hated “Franks,” and did not mourn when these were finally ejected.
Most of these Christians later converted to Islam, and were the forefathers of
many of today’s Muslim Palestinians.
Another lesson is to
treat immigration seriously. In Crusader society, there was a constant coming
and going. Just now, a flaming debate about immigration is going on in Israel. Young
people, mostly well educated, with their children, are leaving for Berlin and
other European and American cities. Every year, Israelis look anxiously at the
balance sheet: How many were driven to Israel by anti-Semitism, how many were
driven by war and right-wing extremism back to Europe? This was a tragedy for
the Crusaders. One main reason for the Zionist rejection of the Crusader
parallel is their sorry end. After almost 200 years in Palestine, with many ups
and downs, the last Crusaders were literally thrown into the sea from the jetty
of Acre. As the former underground chief and Prime Minister, Yitzhak Shamir,
the father of Ya’ir, was fond of saying: “The sea is the same sea and the Arabs
are the same Arabs.”
Of course, the
Crusaders had no nuclear bombs and no German submarines.
Source: http://www.arabnews.com/columns/news/642231