Jerusalem, the Crusaders, and the Zionism

Taking of Jerusalem by the Crusaders, 1099, by Émile Signol (1847)

Jerusalem

In 70 CE Jerusalem was completely leveled by the Roman Emperor Titus following the seven-month siege of the city that crushed the Jewish revolt lead by the Zealots from Galilee and Golan. When the Romans entered the city, they desecrated the Temple, which had been previously rebuilt and re-dedicated by Herod the Great in 9 BCE, even though it was not completed during the time of Jesus. The Herodian expansion, including the Temple Mount, was completed only a few years before, in 63 CE, by Herod Agrippa II, only to be destroyed by the Romans in 70 CE.

As result of the Roman conquest of Jerusalem, both Judaic Jews and Christian Jews were severely persecuted, forcing them to flee the city.

At the time of Jesus, some forty years earlier, Jerusalem was already a cosmopolitan city with visitors from all over the Mediterranean regions and beyond, including Gaul, Rome, Greece, Cyprus, Asia Minor, Mesopotamia, Parthia, Syria, Arabia, Egypt, Cyrene, Ethiopia. See Jeremias, 1969: 58-72. No one ethnic or religious group claimed the city as exclusively their own.

Christians (both Jewish and gentiles) were largely persecuted in the Roman Empire until Pax Constantiniana (Peace of Constantine or Edict of Milan) declared in 312.

In 335 Emperor Constantine the Great dedicated the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem. In 339 the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, commissioned by Constantine the Great and his mother Helena, was also dedicated. Christian pilgrims began to flog to these holy sites ever since, even after the fall of Jerusalem to Caliph Umar in 637, who permitted the pilgrims to continue to venerate the holy Christian sites.

Theodosius I

Theodosius I, born in Gallaecia, Hispania (modern-day Coca, Spain), was proclaimed Emperor of the Eastern Roman Empire in Sirmium (modern-day Sremska Mitrovica, Serbia) in 379 and became the sole ruler of both the Eastern and Western Roman Empires in 392, to die three years later in 395 in Mediolanum (modern-day Milan, Italy)—around the time when Theodosius’s harbor (that he built) was completed in Constantinople’s southern harbor. Theodosius entered Constantinople and appointed Gregory of Naziansus as Patriarch in 380. Gregory of Nyssa orated the funeral of Theodosius’ first wife Aelia Flaccilla and the separate funeral of his daughter Pulcheria both in 386. In 388 Theodosius moved his court to Milan, where Bishop Ambrose (previously the governor thereof) worked out a face-saving agreement to deny him of the communion on account of the 390 Thessalonian massacre, for which he took credit despite his remote involvement. Theodosius died in Milan and was buried in Constantinople in 395. He is venerated as a saint by both Eastern (Orthodox) and Catholic Oriental Churches. Theodosius I seemed to have moved seamlessly between West and East Roman Empire, as the Church too seemed to have enjoyed the political unity that existed therein.

The Crusaders

The first Crusaders (the so called “armed pirgrams”) arrived in Constantinople in 1096, the second Crusaders in 1147, the third in 1189, and the fourth in 1203. They arrived in Constantinople on the way to Jerusalem through Antioch, which was the well established route. The first Crusaders were invited to Constantinople by the Byzantine Emperor Alexios I Komnenos. They were the first and the last Crusaders to capture and to install Christian rule in Jerusalem (starting with Godfrey of Bouillon (1099-1100) and his brother Baldwin (1100-1118)) that lasted only 88 years between 1099 and 1187. Maintaining a Christian territory in the midst of the Muslim rulers was indeed a difficult, if not impossible, task.

The fourth Crusaders (1202 to 1204), who were also invited by the Byzantine prince Alexios IV Angelos, never left Constantinople however (after entering and conquering the city) but burnt and ransacked her, when Alexios IV could not pay them the promised money. After all, the Venetians incurred expenses for building the naval fleet that carried the Frankish nobles and their retinues to Constantinople with the stated (but never realized) goal of re-taking Jerusalem, as invoked by Pope Innocent III. As Volker Leppin puts it:

The knights of the Fourth Crusade between 1201 and 1204 had turned from the goal of liberating Jerusalem and instead had conquered the Christian city of Constantinople with some feeble political rationalization, ransacking, raping, and robbing the city over three days of hideous violence.

Leppin, 2025: 142.

The Orthodox Christians never forgot the destruction of the holy city of Constantinople by the Latins (aka the Franks).

There were a total of nine Crusades all and all. Since the capture in 1099 and the subsequent control of Jerusalem that ended in 1187, the Crusaders could never re-take Jerusalem—except for a brief period of 15 years when the second Treaty of Jaffa was negotiated in 1229 (without a fight) by Frederick II with the weakened Ayyubid Saltan of Egypt, al-Kamil, who ceded temporary control of Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and Nazareth to Frederick II (the Sicilian ruler during the sixth Crusaders, who was excommunicated by Pope Gregory IX in 1227 but became the king of Jerusalem upon signing the Treaty) in exchange for preserving administration over Temple Mount and other Islamic holy sites.

In 637 Jerusalem surrendered to the Arab armies of Umar bin al-Khattab, the second Rashida Caliph, who nonetheless allowed Jews, Christians, and Palestinians to continue to live under his rule. He also allowed Christians from the west to continue to visit the holy sites in pilgrimage, such as the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem and the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, Palestine.   

By the “Covenant of Umar,” Caliph Umar bin al-Khattab guaranteed Christians safety and protection for their pilgrimage to the holy sites. During this time the family of Wajeeh Nuseibeh was entrusted with the key to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem. To this day, they hold the key to open and to close the Church. 

In contrast, in 1099 when the first Crusaders captured Jerusalem from the Fatimid governor of Jerusalem, Iftikhar ad-Daula, the people therein were massacred indiscriminatingly, whether Muslims or Jews or even Eastern Orthodox Christians. Many converted to Christianity to escape the sword. The control over the Church of the Holy Sepulcher and the Church of the Nativity were handed over to the Latins. One of the contemporary eye-witness account describes the Jerusalem massacre (similar to the Roman massacre in 70) as follows:

Our men followed and pursued them, killing and hacking, as far as the temple of Solomon, and there there was such a slaughter that our men were up to their ankles in the enemy’s blood.

From “The Crusaders Capture Jerusalem, 1099.” 

The first Crusaders (1096 to 1099) were comprised of two groups: the  commoners and the nobles, both from the modern-day France and Germany. The nobles were: Godfrey of Bouillon from the Holy Roman Empire, Raymond IV from Toulouse, the Normans (Behemond of Taranto and Robert Curthose), the brother of the French king, Philip I (Hugh of Vermandois), and Robert II the Flander.

The undisciplined gangs of commoners (farmers, blacksmith, bakers, cablers, carpenters, etc.) lead by Count Emicho of Flonheim (from the modern-day Germany) ransacked the Jewish villages and massacred the civilians along the Rhineland in the spring and summer of 1096 on their way to Constantinople along the down stream of the Danube. See Jewish Chronicle of the Crusades.

Pillaging, raping, and killing were the norms of wars then as they are now. The innocents suffer the most in wars.  

In 1187 Jerusalem was recaptured by Saladin (Salah ad-Din Yusuf bin Ayyub), a Sunni Muslim of Kurdish descent. Unlike the first Crusaders, however, Saladin tolerated the minority Jews living there and the majority Christians population therein. Upon the request from Byzantine Emperor Isaac II Angelos in Constantinople, Saladin restored the administration of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher back to the Orthodox Christians (the Greeks, the Armenians, and the Coptic, who still to this day hold their respective vigils and liturgies there).

St Francis in the 5th Crusade

After the first Crusaders captured Jerusalem in 1099 and thereafter lost the city to the indigenous Muslims in 1187, the subsequent Crusaders—a total of nine—were never able to re-capture the city. Before and since then, the city remain cosmopolitan with the majority of Muslim population living there.

St Francis of Assisi joined the 5th Crusade, was captured, and had an audience with the sultan. Volker Leppin describes the defeat of the crusaders and the saint’s capture as follows:

It was on August 29, 1219, that the crusaders near Damietta stormed the Egyptian Mediterranean coast to engage the Islamic army, but thereby fell prey to their sophisticated tactics: the Arabs appeared to retreat, when all of a sudden they turned around and attacked the invaders as they fled. According to received estimates, around five thousand Christians were slaughtered and a thousand were taken prisoner. Francis was regarded among the crusaders as a prophet of doom, though a true prophet at that. A peacemaker he was not.

Leppin, 2025: 143.

Nakba

Since Saladin’s recapture of Jerusalem in 1187 (except for a brief period from 1229 to 1244 when governorship was handed over to a Christian king by treaty) Jerusalem remained under the Arab control until 1948, when the UN gave Jordon the control of East Jerusalem and the newly created modern Israel the control of West Jerusalem. In 1967, not satisfied with the Palestinian lands given to them, the Zionist Israeli force took over the remaining East Jerusalem, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, the Golan Heights, and the Sinai Peninsula. The racist dream of the so called “the Greater Israel” had already begun to materialized to the detriment of the indigenous Palestinian people ever since.

On November 2, 1917, British Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour wrote to Lionel Walter Rothschild—the second Lord Rothschild, a wealthy banker, financier, and the President of the English Zionist Federation at the time—to express the British cabinet’s support of “Jewish Zionist aspirations” to establish “a national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine, provided that “nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-jewish communities in Palestine.”

Thus, Balfour sought the funding from the Zionist Federation lead by Rothschild for the Zionists project. Thus, the founding of the State of Israel in 1948 was grounded on this one piece of paper, while the “civil and religious rights” of Palestinians have been violated ever since and to this day. Download the 1917 Balfour letter. As President Kennedy said in his 1939 letter to his father, “Palestine was hardly Britain’s to give away.” But Britain did. On the other hand, however, Britain also gave the same land called the Levon to France as well at the same time in order to recoup money from her devastating loss from the WW I. When the Arabs resisted the British, the latter armed the other Arab fractions, assisted by Lawrence of Arabia, to rise up against the united group of Arabs. The West Asia has been in turmoil ever since, as the same playbook of colonial domination is played out time and again.

Until the 1948 Nakba, “Palestine [according to a UN report] was a multi-ethnic and multi-cultural society. However, the conflict between Arabs and Jews intensified in the 1930s with the increase of Jewish immigration, driven by persecution in Europe, and with the Zionist movement aiming to establish a Jewish state in Palestine” (The Question of Palestine).

The UN report continues:

In November 1947, the UN General Assembly passed a resolution partitioning Palestine into two states, one Jewish and one Arab, with Jerusalem under a UN administration. The Arab world rejected the plan, arguing that it was unfair and violated the UN Charter. Jewish militias [however] launched attacks against Palestinian villages, forcing thousands to flee. The situation escalated into a full-blown war in 1948, with the end of the British Mandate and the departure of British forces, the Declaration of Independence of the State of Israel and the entry of neighboring Arab armies. The newly established Israeli forces launched a major offensive. The result of the war was the permanent displacement of more than half of the Palestinian population.

The Question of Palestine.

Since October 17, 2023, Israel—funded and equipped by United States, Britain, Germany, France, and other EU nations—massacred Palestinians in Gaza, killing more than 72,938 (more than half, children) and wounding more than 172,919 as of May 2026.

By the Report of Judgments, Advisory Opinions and Orders” issued on January 26, 2024, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) found probable cause of genocide and ordered the following provisional measures, among 4 other measures: 

• The State of Israel shall…. take all measures within its power to prevent the commission of all acts within the scope of Article II of this Convention [on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide], in particular:
  (a) killing members of the [Palestinian] group;
  (b) causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
  (c) deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; and
  (d) imposing measures intended to prevent briths within the group.
  […]

• The State of Israel shall take immediate and effective measures to enable the provision of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance to address the adverse conditions of life faced by Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

On November 21, 2024 the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the former Defense Minister Yoav Gallent for war crimes and crimes against humanity. On September 16, 2025, the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory declared that Israel has committed genocide against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. On October 26, 2026, the same Commission found that Israel continued to commit genocide in Gaza after October 2025 US-brokered ceasefire in the enclave. On July 21, 2026, UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese issued a report to the UN General Assembly titled “Truth under the rubble: media in the time of genocide,” in which she accused influential Western media outlets and digital platforms of complicity in Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Albanese called the genocide “mediacide,” stating that genocide requires “destroying the conditions in which killing can be seen, documented, remembered and judged.” Nearly 300 Palestinian journalists and media workers have been targeted and killed by Israeli military. As of May 2026 ICC seeks warrants for Ben-Gvir, Smotrich, and other Israeli officials. Any UN-member countries can arrest and extradite them to ICC in The Hague.

To date, Israel has no constitution and no defined boarders. The so called “the Greater Israel project” seeks to turn West Asia into an European, white, Jewish empire by force with US money and weaponry. While the US cities are crumbling, the US funds are financing the western style houses in the illegal settlements dotting across West Bank and East Jerusalem.  

The Zionism is powaqqatsi—from the Hopi language (powaq, ‘sorcerer;’ qatsi, ‘life’), n., “an entity, a way of life, that consumes the life forces of other beings in order to further its own life.” It is a criminal enterprise seeking destruction of other peoples’ way of life in order to promote white Jewish supremacy. It is a state sponsored discrimination, apartheid, based on race, color, ethnicity, culture, and religion.

Prior to the 1948 Nakba Jerusalem was populated largely by Arabs and Christians. The minority group of Jews lived peacefully among the other indigenous peoples most of the time—ever since King David conquered the Jebusite city of Jebus in around 1,000 BCE and named it the City of David or Zion (2 Sam 5.6-10; I Chron 11.4-9). 

According to the British Mandate government estimate, there were 30,630 Muslims and 29,350 Christians living in Jerusalem at the end of 1944. As reported by the 1949 Israeli delegates to the UN, 50,000 Arabs lived in Jerusalem in 1949. See Population Data for Jerusalem (1944 & 1947).

Anti-Semitism

Many Israelis nowadays are Ashkenazi Jews, a major Jewish ethnic group who is defined by ancestry in Central and Eastern Europe. Another large Israeli group came relatively recent time from the United States for subsidized housing, education, and healthcare in the illegal settlements in East Jerusalem and West Bank.

Benjamin Netanyahu was born in Poland, grew up in Philadelphia, went to MIT before entering Israeli politics. Bezalel Smotrich was born in Smotrych, Ukraine. Itamar Ben-Gvir’s mother was born in a Mizrahi Jewish family in Kurdistan before she immigrated to Palestine under the British mandate of 1919. Yoav Gallant’s mother, Holocaust survivor Fruma Gallant, was born in Poland. All of them are non-semite, because “semite” is defined as “a member of any of the people descended from Shem, the eldest son of Noah.” Palestinians are semite; while modern Israeli are anti-semite; because most of Israelis hate Palestinians and want to ethnically cleanse them from the land of Palestine.

Fascism starts with distortion of language. “Anti-semitism” is now defined as criticism against Israel.

The Origin of Zionism

Zionism was preached by Spurgeon as early as 1864—32 years prior to publication of Theodor Herzl's Der Judenstadt (1896, The Jewish State), the first book to promote political Zionism. Zionism was/is a Christian doctrine that most Christians denominations declare to be heretical.

Herzel was not a religious Jew at all. He was an atheist and a journalist. Like Benjamin Netanyahu, he did not believe in God but believed in God’s promise of the land made to Abraham around 2,000 BCE.

Spurgeon said in his 1864 sermon delivered in London:

The meaning of our text, as opened up by the context, is most evidently, if words mean anything, first, that there shall be a political restoration of the Jews to their own land and to their own nationality.

Zionism has a long history in Britain. Expectations of a national return of the Jews to their homeland, often called Restorationism, were widely held amongst the Puritans. The early Methodists, Congregationalists like John Owen, Baptists like John Gill, John Rippon, and C. H. Spurgeon shared the same view. Presbyterians like Samuel Rutherford, Horatius, and Andrew Bonar, and Robert Murray M'Chyene, and many Anglicans including Bishop J C Ryle and Charles Simeon held similar views. Simeon wrote in 1820, “the Jews at large, and the generality of Christians also, believe that the dispersed of Israel will one day be restored to their own land.” See “Christian Zionism in the United Kingdom.”

In America, the Scofield Bible is largely responsible for Christian Zionism. Cyrus Ingerson Scofield (1843-1921) had a checkered early life (a soldier, lawyer, and politician who served time for forgery). After experiencing a dramatic conversion in 1879, he came under the wing of James H. Brookes, a prominent St. Louis pastor and leading American dispensationalist. For years, Scofield studied with Brookes. When he became pastor of the First Congregational Church in Dallas, Texas (1882-1895), he began to teach the dispensational system through detailed Bible lessons he gave. By the early 1900s, Scofield saw a need for a single volume that would allow an average reader to study the Bible through the dispensationalist lens without needing a library of commentaries. He wanted to create a Bible with cross-references, subject chain notes, and brief explanatory comments printed right on the same page as the scripture, all guiding the reader to the dispensationalist conclusions. Miss Henrietta E. C. Moon provided the financial support that freed Scofield from his pastoral duties for nearly a decade to focus solely on writing. Scofield moved among wealthy, conservative businessmen (like those at New York's Lotus Club) who supported evangelical causes. John T. Pirie (of the Carson Pirie Scott department store) was a key backer. Their support was theological and institutional, not political. Moreover, Scofield did not work in isolation. He relied on a committee of like-minded scholars and pastors for review and feedback, most notably Arno C. Gaebelein, a converted Jewish evangelist and editor who was a passionate Zionist. Gaebelein's influence is evident in Scofield’s notes that emphasize prophetic significance of the Jewish people. But the emphasis reflected a shared theological belief, not a covert political ideology. Scofield’s project gained legitimacy by being accepted by the prestigious Oxford University Press in 1908, which published the first edition in 1909.

In 1979 Jerry Falwell founded the Moral Majority, a conservative Christian political action group in reaction to the school and housing desegregation laws promulgated in the US in 1954 and 1968 respectively. By the advice of Paul Weyrich, a non-Christian political strategist, Falwell made abortion the central issue in the presidential campaign, which helped to enlarge the Republic base and ultimately gave Ronald Reagan the presidency in 1981. In less than 10 years thereafter, the Moral Majority dissolved.

In 1983 James Dobson created Family Research Council to fight against abortion. In 1989 Jerry Cox founded a similar conservative Christian action group called Family Council. These political organizations eventually became the backbone of the ideology of Christian Nationalism.

Shortly after Donald Trump’s 2016 Republican primary win, televangelist Paula White, Franklin Graham, and other conservative (fundamental) Evangelicals began to declare that Trump was God’s anointed or God’s chosen. They continued to do so even to this day.

In 2017 speech delivered at Christian United For Israel (founded in 2006 by Rev. John Hagee, and claiming to be the largest pro-Israel organization in the US), Benjamin Netanyahu declared the Evangelical Christians to be “one of Israel’s greatest allies.” In 2024 United Methodist Church bishops, however, declared Christian Nationalism as a heresy.

The Zionists are the modern-day Crusaders, largely rooted in racism, islamophobia, and ignorance to Arabic history and cultures, fueled by the evangelical, fundamentalistic Christian Nationalism, and supported and empowered by the military industrial techno feudal lords and corporations, who promote wars for profit. The whole West is united in this criminal and colonial enterprise that feeds on its own delusion, as thick and deep as the blood that the Crusaders shed in 1099 when they took Jerusalem from the Muslims and the minority population of Jews and Christians.

Beholding the visions of God, John concludes his Book of Revelation:

The Spirit and the bride say, “Come.”
And let everyone who hears say, “Come.”
And let everyone who is thirsty come.

[…]

Come, Lord Jesus.

Rev 22.17, 20.

The global forces of military-industrial-financial-AI techno complex must be destroyed, as if in fire and earthquakes, if the genuine zionism is to take hold of the earth in the Kingdom of God.

“Seek ye first the kingdom of God and His justice,” declares Matthew (6.33).