Hanine ShehadehBook author · Intellectual historian
University of California Press / Paperback
New Release · University of California Press
Zionist Christianity and the Settler Jew
About the Book
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 the conquest of Palestine. From crusading violence through the Protestant Reformation to French Republican nationalism, Hanine Shehadeh shows how Christian Europe built its ideas 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.
Why has Palestine occupied such a powerful place in the Western imagination for centuries? Shehadeh offers a brilliant and provocative historical reading of this question, tracing a thousand-year genealogy of Christian conquest, redemption, and civilizational identity… Timely, original, and compelling, this is a book that demands attention.
Chair in Global Law, Queen Mary University of London
Author of Militarization and Violence against Women
A provocative and fascinating reading of Zionism through the longue durée. It fundamentally challenges our understanding by linking the Crusades to the Reformation and the Enlightenment, showing how they were all predicated on a fundamental disavowal of the rich history of the Palestinians.
Professor of History and Chancellor’s Chair, UC Berkeley
Author of Age of Coexistence
Palestine emerges as the discursive and material terrain the Christian West used and uses to define itself and to displace its contradictions… Rather than one late example of settler colonial invasion, Christian Zionism emerges as its original archetype.
Professor of History and Politics, Swinburne University of Technology
Author of Settler Colonialism
How is it that Israel is often claimed to be an integral part of Western civilization? In this superbly researched study, Hanine Shehadeh traces the story back to the Crusades… Shehadeh has written a powerful and eloquent book that deserves to be read.
Professor Emeritus, Columbia University
Author of Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World
About the Author
Hanine Shehadeh teaches and writes about modern Arab histories and intellectual history. She completed her PhD in Intellectual History at Columbia University.
Meet Hanine Shehadeh