it" echoes in the cry o£ "Let's go, Children of Jacob" which became the motto of the first Zionist aliyah.
Yet there was a significant difference in the conscious objectives of the two movements. The Crusaders went to Palestine to wrest the Holy Land from the hands of the Infidel. Settling in the land was only incidental to the necessity of guarding the holy places once regained. The ethos of the movement was anti-Moslem in its very essence. Zionism, on the contrary, was essentially a colonizing movement. The fight against the Arabs was only incidental, and, as we have seen, totally unexpected. The Zionists thought that Palestine was empty. The Crusaders went there because it was not empty. Yet these differences of motivation did not lead to vastly different results. Whether they wanted war or not, both movements had to fight, to settle the land, to guard its possessions.
Another difference is that the Crusaders came as conquerors, taking possession of the country in one big military campaign, settling on the land after their victory. The Zionists came as settlers, bought land piecemeal, set up their fortified villages and took over the country in a war they did not want after creating a base strong enough to sustain a sovereign state.
But both of these differences, important as they may be, are negligible compared with the striking similarity in the general direction of the two movements. Like the Philistines before them, they came from the west, partly by sea. Every seaborne invasion of Palestine has created the necessity of establishing a beachhead, fortifying it against the surrounding land, with supplies and reinforcements coming by ship. It creates, even unconsciously, a posture of facing the hostile hinterland with one's back to the sea as a secure base. Correspondingly, among the population of the surrounding area, it raises the spectre of foreign invasion by an alien body, to which the country has to react. In this the invasions from the west seem different, in the history of Palestine, from the traditional Semitic