#4 The Truth Behind Israel's Claims to Israel - Who Owns (or should have rights) to the Holy Land? Princesses from European fairy tales today live in Bethlehem

Although they call themselves Christian Arabs, their faces are Flemish and French and perhaps English. The dress of the Bethlehem woman, which is unique, is also a memory of the Crusades. The married women wear a high headdress covered with a flowing veil. It is the headdress worn by princesses in European fairy tales (p. 120).

SHOOT: The crusaders (holy warrirors) captured Jerusalem in 1099. The last of them were driven out of Acre in 1291. By far the majority of time (in history) Israel has been occupied by non-Christian and non-Jewish forces.

clipped from www.westarinstitute.org The crusaders found themselves as the meat in the sandwich between two opposing forces more powerful than themselves. The Turkish-speaking Mamluks had seized power in Egypt and the Mongols suddenly arrived from the East. To make matters worse, there were incessant quarrels among the crusaders themselves. In 1260 the Mamluks defeated the Mongols in a battle waged in Palestine and thereafter harassed the crusaders until the last of them were driven out of Acre in 1291. That brought another chapter in the history of Palestine to an end. Yet crusader influence remained. The blood of the crusaders still flows in the Christian communities round Bethlehem and Nazareth. H.V. Morton, the very popular travel writer between the two world wars, wrote a best-seller on Palestine in 1934, called In the Steps of the Master. When he visited Bethlehem he said, Here the Crusaders are still alive.