The 1,000-Year Crusade for Palestine traces how Europe's conversion to Christianity - a religion alien to its geographic center - shaped the continent's identity around a single obsession:
reoccupation of Palestine. from the violence of the Crusades through the Protestant Reformation to French republican nationalism, Shehadeh shows how Christian Europe built its concept of sovereignty, honor, and belonging by portraying Jews and Arabs as its constituent opposites-a redemptive formation that gradually conferreda racist stamp on Western Christianity itself. Shehadeh argues that this Christian Zionist formation is the basis of Western modernity.
From within this history of Christian-Zionist formation, and not against it, Jewish Zionism emerged at the end of the nineteenth century.By reading the French Revolution in conjunction with Napoleon's campaign to conquer Palestine, he argues for testimony that Jewish Zionism internalized the racist colonial terminology of European modernity, accepting the alleged decadence of Jews in the diaspora, and proposing salvation through empire in Palestine. In this context, the State of Israel stands out not as a refuge from European history, but as its most enduring export.
