The Waving Of Palestinian Flags

Across Europe we often see the waving of Palestinian flags. Image from the Wikipedia article "Flag of Palestine".

What is actually happening is that we are going far back into history, to the time of the Crusades.

There is something that I have never seen pointed out about the Middle East of today, and it is about how history tends to repeat itself. That is why it is important to understand history, because we tend to repeat it often without realizing it. 

Have you ever wondered why there seems to be such a preponderance of militias in the Middle East? By militia I mean a paramilitary force that is not a national army. Some people refer to such militias as "non-state actors". 

The best-known militia in the Middle East is Hezbollah, which means "The Party of God". But there were many more in the present and recent past. There is the two Palestinian militias, Hamas in the Gaza Strip and Fatah in the West Bank. There has been the Amal Militia, which used to be a rival of Hezbollah in Lebanon. There has also been a Druze militia and older movements like the PLO, Palestine Liberation Organization, and the PFLP, Popular Front For The Liberation of Palestine. 

All of these militias are related to the founding of Israel in 1948. But why should this region have so many militias that are not national armies? There is a clear answer and it goes back nearly a thousand years. 

That answer is the Crusades. 

The militias of the Middle East today are the direct descendants of the medieval orders of knights at the time of the Crusades. Those knights were first tasked with protecting and assisting Christian pilgrims to the Holy Land and then to liberate the Holy Land from Moslem control. The militias of the Middle East today have a very similar role, and operate in the same area, but the role is reversed. They are tasked with regaining control of the Holy Land for the Moslems from the restored state of Israel. 

While only the First Crusade was a great success, the knights established several "Crusader States" in the Middle East. These orders of knights were Catholic but independent of any nation, which today would be referred to as militias or "non-state actors". The descendants of these temporary states today are Gaza, ruled by Hamas, and the West Bank, ruled by Fatah. 

Hezbollah, operating in Lebanon and the best-known of the militias of the Middle East, is sometimes referred to as a "state within a state". That is exactly what was being said about the Knights Templar eight hundred years ago. They were named for Solomon's Temple, which some Crusaders mistakenly believed the Al-Aqsa Mosque to be. The Knights Templar accumulated a tremendous amount of wealth and power until they fell out of favor with both the Pope and the King of France.

They were followed as the predominant order of knights by the Knights Hospitaller, or the Knights of St. John. When they were given control of Malta, as we saw in "Malta And Jerusalem", they became known as the Knights of Malta. So great was their influence that places where the sick and injured were cared for became known as hospitals. 

We see the long-lasting influence of orders of knights such as these most of all in how the militias of the Middle East seem to be their direct descendants, except that the militias are Moslem while the orders of knights were Catholic. 

The orders of knights had their banners. This is the banner of the Knights Hospitaller. Image from the Wikipedia article by that name.

The widespread waving of Palestinian flags today is a reenactment of the long-ago waving of the banners of the orders of knights.