The Invention of the Land of Israel - Shlomo Sand

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of the home-land’s different regions. Such reproductions and photographs feature valleys, mountains, and villages, but never urban settings.38 Nearly always, the visual representation of the homeland is accompanied by a touch of romantic longing for an ancient rootedness in the land.

      As part of the intensive nationalization of the masses, imbuing the population with a love for the homeland naturally depended on knowledge of its geography. And just as physical cartography enabled humans to conquer the earth and acquire its many treasures, political mapping helped states to capture the hearts of its citizens. As we have already seen, alongside the history lessons concerning the national entity’s past, geography lessons established and sculpted its territorial embodiment. By these means, the national entity was simultaneously being imagined and shaped in both time and space.

      Among the results of this was the complicated relationship between the laws of compulsory education and the laws of compulsory military conscription. Previously, in order to defend the territory under their control or to appropriate the territory of others, kingdoms had been forced to hire armies who had no knowledge of the territory and borders of the kingdoms that hired them—a problem gradually resolved for the modern nation-states by compulsory military conscription, based on the willing agreement of most citizens to serve in the armies of their respective states as long as a defined territory stood at their disposal. Thus, modern wars grew longer and increasingly “total” in nature, and, as a result, the number of lives thereby taken increased exponentially. In the new global world, willingness to die for the homeland, which in the ancient Mediterranean world had been the privilege of the few, now became the entitlement—and obligation—of all.

      However, we would be mistaken to conclude that so many people were transformed into sworn patriots solely as a result of indoctrination or the manipulations of modern ruling elites. Had it not been for the systematic mechanical reproduction achieved by newspapers, books, and, later, radio broadcasts and cinema newsreels, and for the intensive pedagogic formation of a general system of compulsory state education, citizens would have remained much less aware of the role of national space in their lives. In order to identify their home-land, people had to know how to read and write and had to consume healthy servings of the extensive buffet known as “national culture.” We can therefore conclude that as ideological mechanisms of the state, the new schools and the new communications media were directly responsible for the systematic creation of homelands and patriots.

      As we know, the emergence of the modern state, with its criminal code and its civil-legal system, was one of the first conditions for the establishment of bourgeois property. The legitimization of private property within the modern state was stabilized and reinforced by the democratization and sovereignty gaining ground within it. In other words, society’s abstract sense of collective ownership of the land within its state borders also served indirectly to reinforce recognition of the capital amassed by wealthy members of society, and the thriving of capital was not facilitated solely by the state’s monopoly over violence but also by its absolute control over all its territory.

      In this sense, territory is the common property of all shareholders in the nationalist enterprise. Even the completely destitute have something that belongs to them, and small property owners are still masters of the great national assets. This conception of collective ownership engenders a sense of satisfaction and security with which no political utopia or promise for the future can compete. This dynamic, which escaped most socialists and anarchists of the nineteenth century, proved itself during the twentieth century. Workers, clerks, artisans, and farmers marched together during the bloody nationalist conflicts, motivated by the political imagination that they were fighting for the homeland beneath their feet, which strengthened their steadfastness, as well as for a state whose leaders were their official representatives. These democratic representatives were charged with administering the property of the masses—that is, with defending the territory without which the state could not survive.

      This leads us to one source of the strong collective sentiments that would roil and inflame national modernity. When Samuel Johnson declared in the late eighteenth century that “patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel,” he accurately foresaw the sort of political rhetoric that would dominate for the next two centuries: whoever could present himself as the most loyal watchdog of national property would become the uncrowned king of modern democracy.

      Just as all property has its legal limits, every national space is bounded by borders now subject to international law. However, whereas it is possible to quantify the exact value of private property, including land, this is not true of collective national property; because the assets in question have no market, it is difficult to calculate their exact worth.

      At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Napoleon could still sell the great Louisiana Territory of North America without eliciting any protest on the part of those who had just started to become French. And in 1867, when Russia sold Alaska (for the paltry sum of $7.2 million), the Russians hardly complained, and some Americans even protested the acquisition as a pointless waste of their money. Such acts of financial quantification and transfer of state property subsequently lost all validity and would not be repeated in the twentieth century.

      In contrast, from the beginning of the twentieth century onward, new patriotic wars took the lives of massive numbers of victims. One example was the 1916 Battle of Verdun, one of the bloodiest and fiercest battles of the First World War. On a small patch of no-man’s-land just a few square kilometers in area, more than 300,000 French and German soldiers were killed over a period of months, and far more than half a million were left wounded and disabled. Certainly, not all the soldiers remained in the wet, putrid trenches of their own free will. Although by that stage in the so-called Great War they thirsted for it much less than they had at its outset, most were still devoted to the supreme imperative of defending the homeland and suff used with a patriotic desire to avoid giving up even one kilometer of its territory. During the twentieth century, the prospect of dying for the homeland imbued male fighters with the sense that no other death could achieve such timeless nobility.

      Fluid borders between large and small territories have existed throughout history, but they differed from the borders of the modern era. They were not geometrical lines but, rather, wide strips that lacked definition and permanence; in the case of natural objects—mountains, rivers, valleys, forests, deserts—that separated kingdoms from one another, the entire object served as the border. In the past, it was uncertain to which political authority many villages belonged, and, truth be told, many

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