The Last Crusader

Rahaf Al-Mawed
4 min readNov 6, 2024

--

The Crusaders Reach Jerusalem - Domenico Paradisi (1689–1693)

When he, who attests piety, masks his culpability, and introduces deity, speaks to me, I can only recount how my veins quiver before the sacrament scenery of vulnerability. Angelic imagery can be found playing the harp, like David’s exorcism of Saul’s dæmon, within my shelves.

I speak of God less when impuissance is in motion, a thread befuddled by the wresting of the needle before colonizing the fabric. Power has never riveted me, frailty does. In all of my diary soliloquys, I have spoken of the needle as a means to free the fabric. And in all of my valedictories, I devoted a psalm for the angelic aureate gyves.

But does the fabric remain scatheless after you untwine the threads?

To speak of God, I present his drudges. And to speak of land possession, I streamline the archenemy. This primeval understanding of mine has bred odium towards the western nations, western systems, whiteness, and Arab acquiescence.

I have been in contact with the eerie relationship of the world since I was a child, so this interpretation of mine has never been modern or a testimony of recent Israel, I have been artful even as an adolescent with these perceptions. This white Jewishness embodies the white society’s dream of recapturing Jerusalem after Salah Ad-Din. The American dream, apparently, travels beyond its stolen land’s borders.

This white Jewishness, too, is a chauvinist when it comes to non-white Jewishness. But Israel is a project that relies on numbers and the paranoia of its declination, so they feed the hand whose color they would rather blanch but still enslave and capitalize on.

If we look at mercenaries, the betraying fantasy oversees, full of battledresses with Arabs underneath. This colonial entity does not even concern itself with the number of blood spilled when it comes to these ‘foreign’ fighters, their names never registered to be erased, firstly. That is the system of a colonial project whose aim is to blackmail the embryonic lives of the need.

But again, what prompts an Arab to engage with the murder of a brother when their regal circumstances bring them to acclaim Israel? What kind of parasite do you have to be to fight against a cause that has changed the look of the region?

The Arab youth is far from radicalized or revolutionary, affirming themselves as the Eurocentric ‘Middle East’, or the derogatory French’s ‘Levant’ with please. The former devoid of objective geography, and the latter esthetically orientalist. When the last crusade is upon our swords, and the slain are decomposed, we will not reclaim what our hands had no finger traces in. When Palestine is freed, we shalt name ourselves the way we were always supposed to be.

Behold me a fanatic, I’d rather be. They have stolen our Ancient Hebrew and maimed it even though our ancestors had spoken it first. That I shalt reclaim, for no one can take the glory of our Semite names. And that is the cynicism of this alleged Jewish claim. They have erased the Aramaic, the Arabic, the Yiddish, the Ladino, the Amharic that their own kind used to converse in and replaced it with Modern Hebrew.

But Abraham and Sarah were infertile, their hands above the skyline with beseech, ‘Give me the seed to plant one tree.’ And so, God blessed them with twins, and then nations. Palestinian Jacob and his covenant with God brought forth his ‘Israel’ name, a binding, a servitude to God, also manifesting itself in his children.

Even though both these names are interchangeable, when in the Quran ‘Jacob’ is mentioned, the intent is to point out his story of succession with his Israelite children and their noble prophetic lineage, whilst when ‘Israel’ is used, the book refers to invoking his covenant with God.

Colonial Israel’s manipulation of this name is another theft to lacerate our Canaanite history. And to that, I shalt only reclaim what has always been mine.

How dare this white Jewishness, or the mass Jewish conversions from foreign nations, dictate that my blood is a stranger to this land? How dare they call me an anti-Semite when my sole index is more of a Semite than they will ever be?

But that is their foundation- renunciation. For the Holy Land is the cradle and treasure of the three Abrahamic religions, as well as civilization, they seek to seize that glory all way. What is white Jewishness if not a puppet to White Christianity? And what is White Christianity if not fraudulent attempts to take that religion away from its birthplace, claiming it as theirs, identifying us with an ‘opposite’ religious force, and heavily splitting our region and theirs upon that?

That is why I loathe those becoming an acolyte to western values. Why is it that whenever an Arab country is to be praised by their own people, the reasoning of this hail is always a symptom of whitewashing? Why is it that whenever Arabs speak of their calibre, they state that they are polyglots when they can barely discourse and write using their own mother tongue- Arabic?

They have parted ways with our struggle, and to that, my scimitar shalt not dither if the last crusader standing before me is a traitor.

--

--

Rahaf Al-Mawed
Rahaf Al-Mawed

Written by Rahaf Al-Mawed

A writer with a perennial and perseverant quill.

Responses (1)