The Templers were one of those important but all too often overlooked historical footnotes that are wrongly glossed over.

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The pilgrimages and settlements of Russian but especially of German Christians into historical Palestine during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries remain very useful metrics to gauge the Zionists’ nonsensical claim that Palestine was a land without people they just happened upon a little over a century ago. Given Palestine had been an integral part of the Ottoman Empire from 1516 (to 1918), Israeli efforts to erase their presence notwithstanding, it is self-evident that Turks must have been present to administer that part of their domain, as well as the indigenous Christian and Muslim Palestinians, who had lived there from the dawn of time.

Though Rasputin and other Russians made pilgrimages to Ottoman Palestine in huge numbers, with over 10,000 Russian pilgrims visiting in Easter 1911 alone, Jerusalem’s Russian Compound, which includes the beautiful (Russian Orthodox) Holy Trinity Cathedral, is today the most obvious reminder of the over 13,000 pious Russians and legions of priests and nuns who lived, worked and prayed there prior to the Great War.

Though Kaiser Wilhelm II personally dedicated Jerusalem’s Lutheran Church of the Redeemer on 31 October 1898, his travelling companion, Colonel Joseph von Ellrichshausen, initiated Gesellschaft zur Förderung der deutschen Ansiedlungen in Palästina, a society for the advancement of the German settlements in Palestine. This group raised funds throughout the German Empire for the German Templer settlers to acquire land for new settlements in Palestine by offering them low interest loans on easy terms. Although these German Templer colonists had their own series of schisms and alliances with similarly motivated American Protestants, the Zionist settlers, who were beginning to arrive in much larger numbers, learned more than a trick or two from the Templers who had earlier been expelled from the German Lutheran Church because of their millenarian obsessions.

Before moving on to the Templers, we should first note that because Theodor Herzl timed his own visit to Zion to coincide with that of the Kaiser (whom he twice met there), cynics might easily regard various donations German Jews made to the construction of Jerusalem’s Lutheran Church as bribes to further the Zionist cause both in Palestine and throughout the German Empire. As this article explains, the long standing and often criminal collaboration between Germany and Zionists took many twists and turns, some of them complements of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, who was later hanged in Israel for his part in the Hungarian Holocaust, who spent the 1930s gun running to the Haganah.

The Templers were one of those important but all too often overlooked (but not by their Nazi compatriots) historical footnotes that are wrongly glossed over. The Templers began arriving in Nazareth and then Haifa in the late 1860s and, as their influence spread, the German Empire had to occasionally dispatch gunboats to protect them who, the imminence of the Rapture and the Apocalypse notwithstanding, had no real right, except that of the cheque book and the odd German gunboat, to be there.

This is not to say that the Templers were inanimate German chess pieces, nothing more than human flags in knickerbockers. They were hard and innovative workers, who made major contributions to Palestine’s transport industry, to the design of Palestinian houses and, most importantly perhaps, to the orange growing and distribution industries. Their Australian based descendents tell their story in full book form here.

Oranges became a three-way tussle between the indigenous Palestinians and the Templer and Zionist settlers, with the Zionists eventually winning out by superior firepower, superior ruthlessness and superior financing. That said, it was the Templers who first marketed the oranges under the now world famous Jaffa brand and it was they who pioneered selling Palestinian oranges throughout Germany and the rest of Europe, The Zionists just took a page out of Kaiser Herzl’s playbook and piggy backed along.

Although the Palestinian orange growers lacked the financial strength of the settlers, they see-sawed for many years with the Zionist orange growers for pole position as they pitted their inherited knowledge against the Zionists’ superior financing and overseas supply chains. The Zionists, of course, had other plans for those unfortunates we still see being played out in the mass execution and burial grounds of Gaza.

Though the Templers just chugged along as they waited for the rapture and the Apocalypse to put an end to orange growing, events overtook them. The British interned them and shipped most of them off to far away Australia and the Zionists did what they do best. They shot the Templers in their beds or in their orange groves or wherever they came across them, so much so that the British had to warn the remaining Templers it was time to get out of Dodge, that the emerging Israeli state had no time for those who were not a part of der volk. As the Israelis later paid reparations to the survivors, that stands as evidence of their culpability in the ethnic cleansing of the Templers.

Though the Templer story has been sympathetically told here, it is one that deserves a much wider airing for the considerable light it throws on the war crimes the Zionists continue to perpetrate in their former Palestinian stomping grounds. Though the Templers’ movement was, at heart, a naive colonial plan that Imperial and Nazi Germany both tried to leverage, just as their ideological descendents manipulate today’s Christian Zionist lot, it was also a precursor of the internal contradictions of today’s Zionist colonisation, where pork chomping, vodka swilling ex Soviet “Jews” are, along with other dubious groups, major political players in the blasphemous mass of contradictions that is modern Israel. And, though our secular inclinations would be to laugh Zionism off as the hypocritical nonsense that it is, their ongoing century of war crimes, including those against the Templers, warrant a more clinical and adversarial examination by historians, lawyers, journalists and anyone else who wants to maintain a granule of professional or human credibility.