CHAPTER 5
In September, 1967, on the seventieth anniversary of the First Zionist Congress, General Yitzhak Rabin was invited to address a commemorative meeting. It was held in the hall of the original congress in Basel. Toward the end of his speech, the victor of the Six-Day War startled everyone. He compared Israel to the Crusaders' Kingdom of Jerusalem and drew the conclusion that the main danger to Israel is the dwindling of immigration, much as the Crusaders' state decayed because of a lack of new blood.
To an outsider, this may not sound particularly startling, but for an Israeli, and a Chief of Staff at that, to compare Israel to the Crusaders approaches heresy. One reason for this is that the average Israeli learns very little about the Crusaders' two hundred-year stay in Palestine, but very much about what the Crusaders did on the way there. The atrocities committed by the Crusaders, and those who pretended to be Crusaders, in Southern Germany and elsewhere left an indelible imprint on Jewish history.
But there is a second reason. The Crusaders came to a bad end. After ceaseless fighting for eight consecutive generations, they were finally, literally, thrown into the sea. Israelis fear that the very analogy may cast an evil spell on their own historical experiment. For precisely the same reasons, Arabs like to compare the Zionists to the Crusaders, an "automatic" comparison of course quite childish; history doesn't repeat itself in quite this mechanical a fashion. The analogy between Israel and the Crusaders'