In November 1095, Pope Urban II called the European Christians to march east and ‘liberate’ Jerusalem from the hands of the Muslims. The campaign that followed, known as the First Crusade (1096–1099), ended with the capture of Jerusalem and the massacre of its inhabitants in July 1099. A millennium later, in October 2023, the Israeli occupation launched a genocide against the native population of that land, this time in Gaza, in response to the attacks by the resistance group Hamas on the 7th of the same month. Despite mounting findings from the United Nations (UN) and the International Court of Justice (ICJ) that the actions of Israeli forces constitute genocide, the European Union (EU) and its member states have largely maintained political, financial, and military support for the Israeli occupation.

This article argues that there are criminal continuities between the politics of the First Crusade and the EU’s support for the current Israeli genocide in Gaza. Both demonstrate how European powers frame violence against the native Arab population of Palestine as morally justified, suspend ethical constraints in wartime, and enable settler colonial projects of displacement and ethnic cleansing. Using Just War Theory as an analytical framework, the article shows how Europe’s crusading logic persists in contemporary European geopolitics. To sharpen this argument, I adopt the term ‘Neocrusader Union’ to describe today’s EU: not as a literal medieval alliance of Catholic knights, but as a modern elite reproducing the Crusader era’s ‘Holy War’ under new banners such as ‘security’, ‘counterterrorism’, and ‘self defence’.

From Holy War to Self Defence

Right before the First Crusade, at the Council of Clermont in November 1095, Pope Urban II justified war as a ‘sacred duty’, depicting Muslims as ‘desecrators of the Holy Places’ and ‘oppressors of pilgrims’. According to Robert the Monk’s account, he relays the Pope’s electrifying acclamation, ‘Deus vult! Deus vult!’, meaning God wills it,1 which is the same slogan many right wing groups in Europe and North America use today. Other eyewitness chroniclers framed the campaign as divinely sanctioned retribution. For example, Raymond of Aguilers, who witnessed the massacre of Jerusalem, wrote: ‘It was a just and splendid judgment of God that this place should be filled with the blood of the unbelievers’.2 Arabs (used in the European imagination interchangeably with Muslims or Saracens, the latter from the Arabic word sariqin, meaning thieves) as the population of Palestine were thereby labelled unbeliever inhabitants, whose removal constituted the ‘defence’ of Christendom.

As for the Gaza genocide, EU figures today similarly represent actions of the Israeli forces as necessary self defence. With the tables turned centuries later, and white Europeans having assumed the position of ‘the civilised’ over Arabs, there is no longer any need to work hard to justify their killability, beyond invoking self defence against the threat that ‘the uncivilised’ pose to their ‘civilised’ settler allies in occupied Palestine. On 13 October 2023, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen stated that ‘Israel has the right to defend itself – today and in the days to come’.3 One day earlier, Olaf Scholz, then Chancellor of Germany and previously a board member of the European Investment Bank, affirmed that Israel has ‘every right to defend itself […] within the framework of international law’,4 effectively replacing the 1095 Pope’s call ‘God wills it’. In both eras, Europe characterises the genocides against the native population of Palestine as morally necessary defence.

Dehumanisation of Arab 

During the First Crusade, European clerical chroniclers routinely dehumanised Arabs, Muslims, and Saracens, labels used interchangeably, which blurred even the presence of Arab Christians and Arab Jews, who were also killed during the massacres. Guibert of Nogent portrays these populations, naming them collectively as Muslims, as divinely opposed ‘enemies’ and uses markedly dehumanising language to vilify them.5 The infamous siege of Maarrat al Nu’man in December 1098, one of the Levantine cities captured on the road to Jerusalem, exposed how far such dehumanisation could go. As historian Jay Rubenstein notes, Albert of Aachen reported Crusaders cutting flesh from Muslim corpses during the siege, while Ralph of Caen went further, accusing them of roasting both adult captives and children,6 where the text implies they were captured alive, slaughtered, and cooked. Interestingly, medieval narratives acknowledged such barbarism and cannibalism while maintaining a strong sense of the ‘righteousness’ of the cause, which is a striking indicator of Arabs’ exclusion as humans in the eyes of European Christendom.

In contemporary European discourse, Palestinians are similarly stripped of individuality. EU officials and sympathetic media often adopt Israeli frames that depict Palestinians as ‘human shields’ for Hamas, justifying the deliberate blurring of distinctions between civilians and combatants. Early in the Gaza genocide, already by December 2023, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UN OCHA) reported tens of thousands of Palestinian killings, the majority women and children.7 Yet responsibility for these massacres is persistently displaced onto Palestinians themselves for ‘letting themselves’ be ‘human shields’, a discursive inversion that shifts blame onto victims, replicating early European war ‘ethics’ that rendered Arab suffering as divinely deserved.

Israel has subjected Gaza to a blockade since 2007, and since October 2023 it has combined siege with intensive bombardment of homes, hospitals, schools, and vital infrastructure. On 26 January 2024, the ICJ found that South Africa’s genocide case against Israel was plausible and ordered provisional measures.8 In March 2024, UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese concluded that Israel is committing genocide through killings, the imposition of conditions of life calculated to bring about physical destruction (including starvation), and mass displacement.9 Despite all this, the EU has sustained political and economic backing until today, an echo of medieval Europe’s justifications of sieges and massacres against Arab civilians.

The Neocrusader Union thus does not represent a sudden shift in war ethics, but a long continuum of criminality: from the subsequent crusading campaigns targeting native Arabs in and around Palestine, to mandate era sponsorship of settler colonialism, to the post 1948 normalisation of ethnic cleansing and occupation, culminating in today’s EU support for an ongoing live streamed genocidal campaign in Gaza.

Just War Theory: Then and Now

After all the above is put in context, a continuum of political criminality by European leaderships against the people of Palestine since the First Crusade until today, we can analyse this criminality from a theoretical and theological perspective in Europe’s own terms. Here I find the Just War Theory (bellum iustum in Latin) the most relevant in understanding Europe’s ethical benchmark for violence inflicted on others, and the moments when leaders deliberately ignore it. The Just War Theory was first systematised by St Augustine of Hippo in the 5th century, and later developed by St Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century. Its purpose was to establish ethical principles that could distinguish legitimate warfare from unlawful violence. The theory has three main criteria: jus ad bellum (right to war), jus in bello(conduct in war), and jus post bellum (justice after war). I find that when these principles are applied comparatively to the First Crusade and the European Union’s support for Israeli genocide in Gaza, we see obvious continuities in Europe’s consistent suspension of ethics when the people of Palestine are the targets of war.

Jus ad bellum – right to war: During the First Crusade, the papacy claimed jus ad bellum by declaring the campaign a holy mission for the defence of Christian pilgrims and sacred sites. Or in other words, as mentioned earlier, ‘Christ commands it!’ Yet, in reality, this was not a defensive war but a violent invasion framed as redemption. In the case of Gaza, EU leaders such as Ursula von der Leyen and Olaf Scholz have framed Israel’s genocide as legitimate self defence. However, the resort to jus ad bellum collapses when tested against proportionality and necessity, as the scale of mass killings and demographic destruction inflicted on Gaza far exceeds any defensible notion of self defence.

Jus in bello – conduct in war: The ethical principles governing conduct in war, such as discrimination between combatants and civilians, were also abandoned in both eras. During the First Crusade, chroniclers such as Gesta Francorum describe the massacre in Jerusalem: soldiers rode in blood up to their knees and to the bridles of their horses on their way to al Aqsa Mosque, which the chronicler calls Solomon’s Temple.10 Adding this to the reported acts of cannibalism by European soldiers11 illustrates a wholesale violation of jus in bello. In Gaza today, Israeli forces, as the European continuation of settler colonialists, carry out blanket bombardments of densely populated areas, destruction of homes, schools, and hospitals, and the deliberate use of starvation as a weapon of war.12 Together these demonstrate the same disregard for the civilian/combatant distinction when it comes to Arabs since the First Crusade.

Jus post bellum – justice after war: The principle of jus post bellum requires that postwar settlements restore justice and recognise the rights of those affected. After 1099, however, the establishment of the Latin Kingdom in Jerusalem entrenched the exclusion of Arabs from sovereignty in their own land. Fulcher of Chartres, a French priest and eyewitness of the First Crusade, even celebrated how Westerners became wealthy settlers in the East at the expense of the native population,13 an early form of the current settler colonialism in occupied Palestine. In today’s Gaza context, the EU’s political horizon remains similarly exclusionary. Even amid findings by the ICJ that Israeli actions plausibly amount to genocide, EU policies continue to prioritise the security of the occupation while deferring Palestinian sovereignty indefinitely. In both cases, the victors imposed settlements that perpetuated domination and denied justice to the indigenous population.

The Neocrusader Union: Europe’s Genocidal Pattern

At the Jerusalem genocide in July 1099, despite internal rivalries between leaders pursuing personal ambitions of carving out their own Latin kingdoms in the rich Orient, Godfrey of Bouillon emerged as the undisputed leader of the Crusaders and bore direct responsibility for the massacre that followed the city’s capture. Today, his prominent equestrian statue, inaugurated in 1848, stands proudly at the Royal Square in front of the Church of St James on Coudenberg in Brussels, the capital of the European Union. Honouring a Crusader warlord responsible for large scale mass killings directly in front of Belgium’s main royal ceremonial church embeds the continued glorification of Crusader criminality into the very heart of the EU’s political and cultural capital.

In the past, medieval European Christendom functioned as a de facto Crusader union under papal direction, mobilising transnational resources to colonise Palestine and replace its native population with Christian European settlers. Today’s EU, the Neocrusader Union, displays a continuous pattern: again replacing the native Palestinian population with European settler colonialists, this time by exporting Europe’s ‘Jewish Question’ into a Zionist settler project in Palestine, and unifying EU member states behind these new settler colonialists’ genocide in Gaza, despite ICJ orders and UN findings signalling genocide. What unites these eras, and the later crusades in the Levant and repeated European invasions, is not identical institutions but a continuity of political theology: a civilisational narrative that renders the Arab population of Palestine killable and removable in the name of higher purposes, once ‘holy war’, now ‘self defence’.

The remaining question is whether the EU can repudiate this criminal legacy and heed the voices of protests across Europe condemning their leaders’ support for the Gaza genocide, or whether it will resort to cosmetic statements while persisting as a Neocrusader Union. 

This article has been lightly proofread using AI assistance.

  1. Georg Strack, “The Sermon of Urban II in Clermont and the Tradition of Papal Oratory,” Medieval Sermon Studies 56 (2012): 30-45, https://doi.org/10.1179/1366069112Z.0000000002.
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  2. Eileen Dugan, “Jerusalem in the Crusades: Crescent and Cross, Kingdom of Heaven, and the Fall of the City in 1099 and 1187,” Journal of Religion & Society (2007): 4-13. ↩︎
  3. European Commission, “Statement by President von der Leyen on Israel,” 13 October 2023. ↩︎
  4. Bundestag, “Policy statement by Olaf Scholz, Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany and Member of the German Bundestag, on the situation in Israel,” 12 October 2023, accessed 20 September 2025, https://www.bundesregierung.de/breg-en/service/archive/policy-statement-by-olaf-scholz-2230254. ↩︎
  5. Steven F. Kruger, “Medieval Christian (Dis)Identifications: Muslims and Jews in Guibert of Nogent,” New Literary History 28, no. 2 (1997): 185-203, http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/nlh.1997.0024.
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  6.  Jay Rubenstein, “Cannibals and Crusaders,” French Historical Studies 31, no. 4 (2008): 525-549, https://doi.org/10.1215/00161071-2008-005.
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  7.  UN OCHA, “Hostilities in the Gaza Strip and Israel: Situation Report,” 30 December 2023, accessed 20 September 2025, https://www.unocha.org/publications/report/occupied-palestinian-territory/hostilities-gaza-strip-and-israel-reported-impact-30-december-2023-2359. ↩︎
  8. International Court of Justice, Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in the Gaza Strip (South Africa v. Israel). Order of 26 January 2024.
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  9.  Francesca Albanese, Anatomy of a Genocide: Report of the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967. UN Human Rights Council, A/HRC/55/73, March 2024. ↩︎
  10. Thomas F. Madden. “Rivers of Blood: An Analysis of One Aspect of the Crusader Conquest of Jerusalem in 1099.” Viator 43, no. 3 (2012): 33–45, https://doi.org/10.1484/J.VIATOR.1.103193. ↩︎
  11. Rubenstein, “Cannibals and Crusaders”. ↩︎
  12. Maher Hamoud, Gaza Genocide and the Necessity of Deconstructing the Term ‘Famine’ into ‘Starvation’, SouthPush, 27 August 2025, accessed 20 September 2025. ↩︎
  13. Strack, “The Sermon of Urban II”.
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