Uri Avnery
October
11, 2014
LATELY, THE words
"Crusaders" and "Zionists" have been appearing more and
more often as twins. In a documentary about 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.
(The name Runciman was
familiar to me: his father, Walter, a viscount, was sent by Neville Chamberlain
in 1938 to mediate between Nazi Germany and the Czechs, and scandalized the
world by greeting the Germans with "Heil Hitler".)
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.
After a glass of
sherry, 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'etre. 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.
(Last week, our Minister of Agriculture, Ya'ir Shamir, demanded that we take
urgent measures to limit the birthrate of the Bedouins in the Negev
- like Pharaoh in the biblical story.)
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% 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. The greatest Sephardi thinker, Moses Maimonides
(Rambam in Hebrew) spoke and wrote Arabic and was the personal physician of the
great Salah ad-Din (Saladin). He was as much an Arab Jew as Baruch Spinoza was
a Portuguese Jew and Moses Mendelssohn a German Jew.
WERE THE Crusaders a
small aristocratic minority in their state, as Zionist historians always
contend? 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.
WHEN ISIS and other
Arabs use the term Crusaders, they do not mean only the medieval invaders. They
mean all American and European Christians. When they speak about Zionists, they
mean all Jewish Israelis, and often all Jews.
I
believe that this
coupling of the two terms is extremely dangerous for us. I am not afraid
of ISIS' military capabilities, which are negligible, but of
the power of their ideas. No American bomber is going to eradicate
these.
It is getting late. We
must de-couple ourselves from the Crusaders, ancient and modern. 132 years
after the arrival of the first modern Zionists in Palestine, it is high time for us to define
ourselves as we really are: a new nation born in this country, belonging to
this region, natural allies of its struggle for freedom.
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