Zionism: The West’s Latest Crusade

Zionism goes beyond Judaism and even settler-colonialism. Here is the case for understanding the relentless violence in the Holy Land in the long durée of a European ideological obsession.

Photo by Levi Meir Clancy on Unsplash

I don’t often do recaps of my talks on the YouTube channel anymore, simply because it would be an overload (for readers and the author). But in the last weeks, I had a few exceptionally insightful discussions, of which I would like to share the following in writing. The analysis of Dr. Manuel João Ramos, an associate professor of anthropology at the University Institute of Lisbon, really helped me add a new and important socio-historical perspective to the horror we now call the Gaza Genocide.

In a nutshell, Ramos proposes that contemporary Zionism should not be viewed solely as a late form of European settler colonialism, but as a specific outgrowth of a much older European civilizational project, whose roots lie in medieval Christianity, crusading ideology, and millenarian expectations centered on Jerusalem. Zionism in its modern form, including Jewish political Zionism, appears in his account as the latest articulation of a thousand-year attempt by Christian Europe to sacralize world order around the Holy City.

In this view, the cognitive and symbolic framework for understanding the world—and Europe’s place in the world—was developed in the Middle Ages and flourished in the centuries that followed. A key element of this framework is the legend of Prester John: a supposedly Christian “king of kings” located somewhere in the East, who promises an alliance with Western Christendom to reconquer Jerusalem. Although the letter attributed to Prester John was almost certainly a forgery produced in the Hohenstaufen court, its political effect was profound. Circulating widely in Latin, vernacular European languages, Hebrew, Greek, and Slavic tongues, it helped justify the Third Crusade and then, crucially, nourished the imagination of later generations of European elites.

In Ramos’s reading, the 12th-century legend does more than express a desire to retake a lost city. It fuses an Alexandrian imperial idea—joining East and West under one sacred ruler—with Christian eschatology. The conquest of Jerusalem, in this imaginary, will inaugurate a final golden age and hasten the coming of the Lord. This combination of territorial ambition, salvific expectation, and a binary world of light and darkness underpins what he calls the “crusading spirit” of Europe. It also helps explain why European expansion from the 15th century onward was not only driven by material motives but deeply saturated with theological and mythic content.

It goes hand in hand with the medieval self-understanding of Europe and its position in the world, beautifully depicted in the early 13th-century Ebstorfer map. On it, one sees the known world drawn with the head of Jesus Christ on top, his two hands on the sides, and his feet at the bottom. At the heart of the map and of Jesus, one finds the city of Jerusalem. Most importantly, though, the head of Jesus is not in the north but in the east. North is to Jesus’ right-hand side, and south (Africa) is to his left. While today we often berate Eurocentrism, it is noteworthy that such medieval depictions did not at all understand Europe as the center of the world, but in a rather sorry place “down” from where salvation was to come from. It is from such a worldview that the European Crusades were born. The ambition to unite with the magical Christian king from “up” in the East, to “assent” in the world, and jointly struggle toward the center—Jerusalem

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Portuguese maritime expansion around Africa, in this view, was oriented by the search for Prester John, sometimes reimagined as an Ethiopian Christian monarch. Early European conquerors, such as Afonso de Albuquerque, embody this radical millenarianism: the project to divert the Nile, break the power of the Mamluks, seize Mecca, and eventually march overland to Jerusalem is a direct continuation of the crusading goal by new means.

Hence, one can cogently argue for a socio-political continuity from medieval crusading to the so-called Age of Discoveries. The Portuguese and Spanish voyages were not only a commercial or demographic venture (as they are often viewed today), but were papally mandated missions to “discover” or “uncover” the world—the descobrimento meaning literally “taking away the cover” of darkness by projecting the light of Christ.[1] This goes hand in hand with millenarianism—a deep-seated Christian belief in the coming of a 1000-year reign of Christ before the Last Judgement—to which the conquest of the Holy Lands was central.[2]

This long arc matters for Ramos’s interpretation of modern Zionism. It is Christian Zionism, not Jewish Zionism, that is the older and numerically larger phenomenon—something also Professor Yakov Rabkin from the University of Montreal explains in another recent talk.

From the 17th and 18th centuries in England, millenarian currents proposed the “restoration” of the Jews to Palestine as part of a broader expectation of the millennium.[3] By the 1830s, Christian Zionist ideas had consolidated in Britain and later migrated to the United States, where they now animate much of the evangelical support for the State of Israel. Ramos emphasizes that this Christian Zionism precedes Jewish political Zionism “by more than a century” and that it is structurally tied to apocalyptic scenarios such as Armageddon, not to concern for Jewish safety or national self-determination.

In this light, even Theodor Herzl’s project appears as a derivative moment in a longer Christian European tradition. Let’s not forget that Herzl’s first strategy to keep the Jewish community of Vienna safe was not to found a Jewish state but to pursue the mass conversion of Jews to Catholicism.[4] Zionism was, in Herzl’s own reflections, a kind of backup plan, albeit one that turned out more realistic than the conversion of Jews. This just underscores how deeply European, and specifically Christian, the conceptual field of Zionism is (again, something also Rabkin underscores constantly). Zionism as a political project emerges from within European debates about modernity, empire, and eschatology, before it was adopted and reworked by Jewish actors facing antisemitism and state violence.

What, then, is added by framing Zionism as the continuation of the Crusades rather than as colonialism alone? Ramos does not deny the colonial dimension. The establishment and expansion of the Israeli state in Palestine involves settlement, dispossession, asymmetrical power, and racialized hierarchies; in that sense, it clearly belongs to the history of European colonial practices. But he argues that the language of “settler colonialism” is insufficient, because it foregrounds economic and demographic drivers while leaving the deeper civilizational and theological structures partly invisible, especially the impact of European conceptions of universalism, today often expressed in a discourse on “values” like human rights, democracy, freedom, etc., that has repeatedly been applied over the centuries—albeit always in a strictly limited fashion, excluding those who are not seen as part of the in-group.

In this self-understanding of Europe—and later “the West”, including America—the enlightened part of humanity is the bearer of light, reason, and salvation, facing a surrounding “jungle” of darkness and threat. It’s the mindset portrayed by Josep Borell, then the High Representative of the EU for Foreign Affairs, a few years back in his now infamous Garden Speech:

“Yes, Europe is a garden. We have built a garden. Everything works. It is the best combination of political freedom, economic prosperity, and social cohesion that the humankind (sic.) has been able to build (…). The rest of the world (…) is not exactly a garden. Most of the rest of the world is a jungle, and the jungle could invade the garden. The gardeners should take care of it, but they will not protect the garden by building walls.”

And make no mistake, it’s not just Borell’s wacky way of putting things. The EU, in general, still views itself largely in missionary terms—today armed with agendas of development, human rights, gender, and sexual equality—who address Africans in the imperative, instructing them on what they “should” do (something worked out beautifully by Professor Peo Hansen of Linksöping University). This stance simply reproduces the crusading posture in secular form. It presupposes Europe as a normative core, entrusted with reforming a deviant periphery, even as Africans now have multiple external partners and often shrug off European prescriptions.

This long durée of the historical trajectory in which we need to embed Borell’s words helps explain both the depth of European and North American attachment to Israel and the constant recourse to the “Judaeo-Christian tradition” as a civilizational marker. It is the mental and historical meaning behind calling Israel “the only democracy in the Middle East”. Since democracy (in this almost mythical sense) is understood as the epitome of Western civilization, and Israel is a central part of it, it is the West’s obligation to support Israel not for Israel’s sake, but to cement once and for all its own domination over the Holy Lands.

When European elites today defend Israel’s actions in Palestine, often in the face of overwhelming evidence of mass violence, they are not merely defending a strategic ally or a settler project. They are defending, whether consciously or not, a thousand-year imaginary in which control of Jerusalem is the symbolic apex of Western identity and salvation history. For that reason, Ramos suggests, contemporary conflicts in the Middle East can be read as iterations of a “Seventh” or “Eighth” Crusade, rather than a wholly new departure.

Ramos’s central claim, then, is not that material explanations—capitalist expansion, migration pressures, resource extraction—are wrong, but that they are incomplete if they ignore the long transformation of ideas. Crusading, millenarianism, Christian Zionism, Enlightenment utopias, and “civilizing mission” discourse form a continuous if evolving field. Zionism, on this view, is one specific crystallization of that field: a way in which the European civilizational project has sought to install its sacred and political center in Jerusalem, through Christian and Jewish actors alike, over many centuries.

To describe Zionism only as colonialism is to miss this longue durée. It risks treating the present as a late episode in a 19th-century story, rather than as a moment in a millennium-old struggle to bind world order, salvation, and European identity to a single city. Taking that longer horizon seriously is indispensable if Europeans are to understand how their own history appears from the standpoint of those who live with the consequences—in Palestine, in Africa, and across the formerly colonized world.

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[1] For a useful discussion of the change in meaning of this word see Joaquim Barradas de Carvalho, A la Recherche de la Specificité de la Renaissance Portugaise (Fondation Calouste Gulbenkian, Centre Culturel Portugais: 1983).

[2] On millenarism and the Portuguese court, see Sanjay Subrahmanyam, The Career and Legend of Vasco da Gama (Cambridge University Press: 1997).

[3] See, for example, Samuel Collet, A treatise of the future restoration of the Jews and Israelites to their own land (J. Higmore: 1747).

[4] Herzl recalls in his diaries: “I can still recall two different conceptions of the Question and its solution which I had in the course of those years. About two years ago I wanted to solve the Jewish Question, at least in Austria, with the help of the Catholic Church. I wished to gain access to the Pope (not without first assuring myself of the support of the Austrian church dignitaries) and say to him: Help us against the anti-Semites and I will start a great movement for the free and honorable conversion of Jews to Christianity. As is my custom, I had thought out the entire plan down to all its minute details. I could see myself dealing with the Archbishop of Vienna; in imagination I stood before the Pope — both of them were very sorry that I wished to do no more than remain part of the last generation of Jews — and sent this slogan of mingling of the races flying across the world.” In Raphael Patai (Ed.), The Compete Diaries of Theodor Herzl, Volume 1, p. 7 (Herzl Press: 1960).