SUSAN DUNN
599
which binds man to the soil and by which possession of the soil is ac–
quired; it is also the basic energy for the creation of a national culture.
This is what we do not have. Judging from the deliberations at the
Zionist Congress, culture is entirely a mastery of ideas or ideology... .
Farming, building and road-making is part of culture and is indeed the
foundation and the stuff of culture." Like Maurice Barres, Aaron David
Gordon affirmed that nationhood is created by a people "rooted in its
soil." But unlike Barres and other French intellectuals who loved the soil
in theory only, the Zionists built irrigation systems, tilled the earth, and
harvested its crops.
Political mythology is fluid. Political myths pass effortlessly from one
side of the political spectrum to the other. The international banker of the
House of Rothschild could be the foreign enemy of France until, in the
form of Georges Pompidou, he became the President of the Fifth
Republic. Similarly, the same anti-Semitic myths could belong to mid–
nineteenth-century socialists before they became the property, forty years
later, of their right-wing adversaries. Perhaps more surprising, the cult of
the soil, too, passed from right-wing anti-Semitic French nationalists eas–
ily into the hands of some of the early Zionists. One hundred years after
the arrest, "degradation," and deportation of Alfred Dreyfus in 1894, we
are still playing with the same deck of political cards, dealing, discarding,
and reshuffling the same myths, the same fears and hatreds, the same
hopes, the same ideals.
Have the Israelis added a new card to the deck? Some of them have
found that the most effective path to nationhood and peace in that part of
the world is through healthy and vital bonds with the land, for
all
the
people living on it. These Israelis have discovered that not only do ba–
nanas in the desert - that ancient cult of the soil - create a nation, they
may create something even better - two nations, interdependent and
sovereIgn.
