Palestine is the center of European history, according to an upcoming academic book ~ Elder Of Ziyon

Wednesday, September 16, 2026

Palestine is the center of European history, according to an upcoming academic book

A forthcoming book from De Gruyter Brill and University of California Press advances an amazingly ambitious thesis. Hanine Shehadeh’s The Thousand-Year Crusade for Palestine: Zionist Christianity and the Settler Jew argues that Europe’s conversion to Christianity created a civilizational fixation on Palestine that eventually shaped European sovereignty, nationalism, race, colonialism and modernity itself. The publisher summarizes her argument bluntly: this “Zionist Christian formation is the foundation of Western modernity.”

The book is not yet published, so I cannot judge its evidence. But the amount of evidence for such an extraordinary claim must be equally extraordinary. A Palestinian scholar has written a history in which the European Christian lust for conquering Palestine becomes the great hidden force shaping the entire modern world.

The chain is sweeping. Europe converts to Christianity; Christianity focuses Europe on Palestine; the Crusades follow; Protestantism inherits the fixation; French nationalism carries it forward; European ideas of race and sovereignty develop through it; Jewish Zionism then absorbs this supposedly colonial-racist structure. Israel finally emerges as, in the publisher’s phrase, “not a refuge from European history but its most durable export.”

Postcolonial scholarship has spent decades criticizing Europeans for writing history as though Europe were the center of the world. It is a fair critique. But shouldn't that apply to anyone who finds a grand unifying theory centered on a single geographic location? This appears to perform much the same maneuver with a different center. Palestine becomes so historically important that the Crusades, Reformation, nationalism, empire, race, Zionism and Western modernity itself can all be organized around it.

This is not de-centering history. It is re-centering it.

Of course Palestine mattered enormously to Christianity, and Jerusalem occupied a unique place in the Christian imagination. But there is a vast difference between saying that Palestine repeatedly mattered to European religious and imperial history and saying that a Palestine-centered “Zionist Christian formation” became “the foundation of Western modernity.” Western modernity also had something to do with the printing press, capitalism, the scientific revolution, the Enlightenment, industrialization, Atlantic slavery, the conquest of the Americas, bureaucratic states and centuries of European wars that had nothing to do with Jerusalem.

The framework becomes even more revealing when it reaches Jewish Zionism:

It is from within this history of Zionist Christian formation, not against it, that Jewish Zionism emerges at the close of the nineteenth century. Reading the French Revolution alongside Napoleon’s campaign to conquer Palestine, Shehadeh argues that Jewish Zionism absorbed the colonial-racist terms of European modernity—accepting the diasporic Jew’s alleged degeneracy and proposing redemption through empire in Palestine. The State of Israel emerges, in this light, not as a refuge from European history but as its most durable export.

Jewish Zionism, according to the description, does not primarily emerge from Jewish history, Jewish persecution or Jewish attachment to the Land of Israel. Forget thousands of years of prayers to restore Zion - we have a much better explanation of Jewish Zionism as being rooted in racism against indigenous Arabs (who themselves are invaders to the land after Christians held it for centuries, but let's not quibble over historic details - the book wants to start European history in Palestine with the Crusades, not the Romans or the Byzantines.)

If Jews remain in Europe, they are victims of European antisemitism. If they leave Europe and seek sovereignty, they have absorbed European colonialism/racism. If Zionists criticize Jewish powerlessness in exile, they have internalized European racism. If they seek support from imperial powers, they become agents of empire. Even an attempt to escape the European condition becomes another expression of European ideology.

And this requires leaving out a fairly important fact: Christianity did not invent Zion. It inherited Zion, Jerusalem, exile, return, covenant and redemption from Judaism. Jewish attachment to the Land of Israel did not require medieval Crusaders, Protestant restorationists or Napoleon to bring it into existence.

That does not mean modern Zionism developed outside European political history. Of course it didn't. But saying Zionism borrowed from nineteenth-century nationalism is very different from making it the end product of a thousand-year Christian-colonial fixation on Palestine.

Notice the subtitle of the book: "Zionist Christianity and the Settler Jew." All Jews who want to return to their ancestral home have been labeled as "settlers." Such an interesting term. It almost seems like an Arab is looking at European history through an Arab lens and cannot see anything outside her own point of view. Of course the Jew is a settler. The only virtuous Jews are the ones who prefer to stay in Europe to be slaughtered, or to stay in Arab countries where they must thank their hosts for their second class, dhimmi, "protected" status.

Can Shehadeh's model recognize a Jewish historical subject that is neither Europe's victim nor Europe's colonial proxy? It appears not.

A Palestinian-centered grand theory is not automatically less parochial than a European-centered one. But it requires a lot more logical leaps.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!