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The Thousand-Year Crusade for Palestine traces how Europe’s conversion to Christianity—a religion foreign to its geographical core—forged the continent’s identity around a single fixation: the reconquest of Palestine. From crusading violence through the Protestant Reformation to French Republican nationalism, Hanine Shehadeh shows how Christian Europe built its idea of sovereignty, honor, and belonging by casting Jews and Arabs as its constitutive opposites—a redemptive formation that gradually racialized Western Christianity itself. Shehadeh argues that this Zionist Christian formation is the foundation of Western modernity.
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.