kingdom of Jerusalem is interesting nevertheless, both for the similarities and the dissimilarities it reveals.
* * *
The Crusader bug bit me a few years after Israel's War of Liberation. I had rather casually started to read Steven Runciman's excellent History of the Crusades. Coming to the chapter about the fortifications the Crusaders built opposite the Gaza Strip to defend their kingdom against the Egyptians, I was suddenly struck by the idea that as a soldier in the Army of Israel I had occupied exactly the same positions.
As I continued my reading with a fresh eye, hundreds of large and small similarities sprang to mind. This can become an obsession. One begins to identify not only great events and institutions, but also personalities, kings, dukes and knights, wondering who is the Zionist prince of Gallilee and who the duke of Transjordan.
The similarities are indeed striking. The Crusaders' movement, like the Zionist one, was a revolution so profound, so far-reaching, that it defies rational explanation. Of the many reasons attributed to this phenomenon-political, social, cultural-none is completely satisfactory.
The Crusaders, much as the Zionists, make one wonder what induces people suddenly to leave their homes and comfortable lives, marching for thousands of miles among innumerable perils to a distant and uninviting country, to live there in unending struggle, fighting unknown diseases and an implacable foe. What combination of glorious visions, selfless idealism, craving for loot, sheer disgust with the old life, and the promise of a new Jerusalem only dimly imagined, was needed to raise such a human tidal wave?
The Crusaders had their "Herzl" in Pope Urban. Their "First Zionist Congress" was their Council of Clermont, in November, 1095, eight hundred and two years before the historical gathering in Basel. The cry of "God wills