Home?

From Tel Aviv / Je...

What is home? This is a question that's been on my mind for several years. Whenever I'm feeling down and lonely while on the move, it's where I want to go. Then where is it? During my travels I've found the feeling of home whenever I return to a place more familiar than the last I was at. I may only have spent a few days there before leaving, but upon returning, whether I know a couple people or just a couple streets and restaurants, it's more comforting than a totally alien place. But surely you can only truly call one place home.

Is mine in Washington DC where I grew up? None of my family are there now, so if home is a place you can go back to, that doesn't work. Maybe it's in England, where my parents grew up, the land whose culture therefore infiltrated my upbringing and made me not wholly American. But I wasn't raised there, and my British friends wouldn't consider me a Brit. India? I've spent more time there than in either of my two "home" countries in the past 4 or 5 years. But to call myself Indian would be absurd on so many levels.

What makes up the idea of home? Is it pop culture, religion, where your friends are, where your family is from, the community you grew up in? The answer of course is no single one of these options but a combination. It's also something else, as I'm starting to find out here in Israel. It's where your ancestors lived 3,000 years ago. It's a culture you share not through common experience but through your heritage. It's being labeled as part of a group not because you choose to be part of it, but because others decide you are.

My grandfather was an atheist. That didn't stop Nazis in Germany barring him from university one semester before completing his degree to become a doctor. According to them, he was Jewish. I'm an atheist too, but should a similar situation arise in the future, I could do nothing to stop other people calling me Jewish due to the lineage passed down through my mother, and therefore I share something in common with Jews all over the world. Although this connection to something I did not previously feel a part of is a strange concept to me, I can understand it. However, I have as much trouble understanding other ideas as a fish does the Theory of Relativity.

I asked an Israeli friend why Israel had to be created where it is. Why not another, less tense part of the world? His was not religious reasoning, that God gave the land to the Jews; he is an atheist. His grandparents, originally from Czechoslovakia, had never felt at home in that country. He didn't feel at home anywhere but Israel. This was the land the Jews were exiled from almost 2,000 years ago. It is home to them. It's the only place that makes sense. This was his response. It's one I struggle to understand.

Where does this sense of home he was talking about come from? I tried searching for an equivalent example I could relate to. 3 of my 4 grandparents were from Germany. Do I feel a special draw to the country? Two years ago I visited the house one of my grandmothers grew up in in Berlin. It was a nice place which I surely wouldn't mind having as my own, but I felt no right to that piece of land she was forced to leave. With that kind of disconnect in the passage of just two generations, I cannot comprehend the connection some people draw between themselves and their ancestors thousands of years in the past.

The concept of a Jewish homeland is one that also perplexes me. When I visited Jerusalem last week, I went to the Yad Vashem, a museum about the Holocaust. It's a fantastic and devastating place. When confronted with the reality of what happened to Jews during World War II, it's easy to justify the creation of a place where Jewish people could be safe from persecution by others.

But in the end this is a racist solution, plain and simple. It brings up the question, is "good" racism possible? In an ideal world we wouldn't need it, but we live in a non-ideal world and maybe it's an appropriate non-ideal solution.

I found out I'm entitled to an Israeli passport because I'm Jewish, and went to a centre which provides help with immigration. The woman there told me what's involved in the process of becoming a citizen, or making Aliyah as it's called. The law requires people in my age bracket to serve 100 days in the military. The upshot is that the government is keen to attract Jews and provides benefits: 16,000 shekels (~US$3,800), lower income tax, free Hebrew lessons, free medical insurance for half a year.

The key to unlocking all this wealth and good fortune is proving that I'm Jewish. In explaining this, the woman at the centre explained the racist nature of the state itself.

"Israel is the only country in the world where the majority of the population is Jewish. Most people, including myself, want to keep it that way. So we have to do everything we can to encourage Jews to immigrate and discourage others. That's the game you play. If you don't like it, too bad."

I asked if it's possible to immigrate to Israel if you're not Jewish. She looked around and said in a low voice, "no," as if it were a dirty secret.

But what does this mean for me? I'm Jewish because someone somewhere at some moment in time might point in a rulebook and say so. This cannot be enough reason to call Israel my home. I share no more culture or religious beliefs with any given Israeli than I do with many other people on Earth. And I feel no loyalty to the Israeli state. Given this, the underlying question I find most bothersome is why am I entitled to be a part of Israel when others aren't?

On the level of an individual, the way this state is designed to perpetuate a Jewish majority seems no more fair to me than any other system which gives certain people rights and denies others the same ones based on meaningless groupings.¹

I am far from having a definite opinion on all this, but in the meantime, trying to understand other people's idea of what home means has brought me no closer to my own understanding. If anyone wants to clear it up for me, I'm all ears.

1. I realise I'm ignoring the question of other countries' automatic citizenship policies. Perhaps each could be considered as arbitrary as the next?↩