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Today, for the international day fo peace I want to share a personal selfish thought with you. If you’re not Israeli you can either sympathize with me or hate me for it (and if it really touches you, it should be able to feel a little bit of both).
Pumpkin spiced latte
It’s a Starbuck’s original. I’m having it almost every day for the past two weeks. It became part of my routine here and drinking it feels so foreign, exotic. It’s nice to get used to something that you won’t be able to have when you’re back home. In a globalized world where you get the same things everywhere; in the Internet era when you can be on facebook, twitter and skype with your friends and family, and experience the events back home – I hold on to those little differences that weave the sense of actually being in another place.
I’m in Hawaii, carrying out a routine of paradise on earth, and yet I miss home so much. I get to be in a fantasy setting and I find myself longing to just hang out with my dog again in that ugly square near my house in Tel Aviv. The Americans I meet feel lucky to be Americans. They always assume all of us Middle Eastern would rather be Americans too and be away from all of this war crap. I don’t blame them, they got long immigration queues that give them that idea, but I find it hard to explain to them why I can’t really make myself at home anywhere but in my home. Why I love visiting their country and all other countries, but no matter how many years I’ll drink it, that tasty pumpkin spiced latte will never “taste like home” for me.
Home is where ______ is
What’s that got to do with peace day? I’m getting there. You see, I happen to live in a place of dispute. My ancestors claim it was their promised land and wave their bibles, while some of my neighbors and web friends claim their ancestors were on that land too and hold keys to the old houses they fled from during our independence war. How would an American feel if a Native American will knock on his door one day and claim his ancestors actually owned this land before there were U.S property laws and he should just evacuate himself to Canada or something? (At least until the Canadian Eskimos will realize they can pull the same trick…)
The Native American (or in my case, Palestinian) may have a point there, but would you leave the house you were born in, the only place that you will ever call home, because the guy has a point? Furthermore, will that guy really feel like home in your house? I’ve talked to this Palestinian guy online and he told me his family is originally from the Israeli city of Safed and he dreams of coming back home.
Since he was born in Gaza and never saw safed, I was compelled to ask him: Are you sure it’ll feel like home to you? Safed is a myth to you as the vague Promised Land was to my biblical ancestors. I’ve been to Safed a month ago, it’s a very poor city living of its peculiar mystical tourism. Honestly, after you’ve seen the city I bet you wouldn’t wanna live there. A home is not just a construction or merely a location, it’s what was cultivated on it and in it and with it, and it’s the culture and the community that emerged in that space and has already merged with it. “And that, my friend” I told him, “isn’t yours. It can’t be yours. It’s foreign to you, and you’ll feel it”.
The secret formula of home
Many people ask me how come I continue to live and love Israel, why won’t I use immigration as a form of resistance to my government’s actions. Heck, I even threatened to do so myself, many times. But obviously I can’t. I mean, of course I CAN, technically, I’m a friendly educated person with a global consciousness that can take root practically everywhere. You can remove me quite easily from Israeli territory but you can’t remove my roots – the Israeli culture and identity – it is with the same roots that I go to a foreign land and although it will rarely be noted on the surface, my roots may never really fit in perfectly in the new soil.
Even if I wander as far as the north pole, I’ll always be asked where I’m originally from, I’ll always be held responsible to something by someone, I’ll always feel guilty about something, I’ll always care about everything that happens back home. *sigh*, yea, home will always be “there” even if whatever I had there didn’t exist anymore.
It’s not politically correct but it’s true so I’ll just go ahead and say it: as much as I am peace seeking and sympathetic to Palestinian suffering, and aware of the injustice that keeps me safe in my home, I am still grateful my home is unchanged, that the circumstances that make it my home are maintained. Living in Israel you normally meet Palestinians who speak of an independent country in Gaza and the West Bank and that seems just fine and far away, but when abroad or online you meet many other Palestinians that speak of the entire land as Palestine, that want to return to Jaffa and Safed and hey, wasn’t Tel Aviv actually “Sheikh Munis” once?…
I fear that the concept of home, like love or identity, is a complex caotic fractal, a secret formula, that if I change one component I’ll lose it entirely. Tel Aviv just won’t be Tel Aviv under Palestinian rule, with a flock of new Palestinian residents or when its people and cafes and beaches are moved, as is, to Uganda. The geography and ecology create symbiosis with the community and the culture: it just doesn’t grow the same way in a different environment, in different circumstances.
There’s no clear right or wrong, both sides have rightful claims. Palestinian grandmothers should be allowed to return to the homes they fled from and at the same time Israeli children should be allowed to live in the homes they were born in. It doesn’t matter that it’s a small territory barely spotted on the world map while vast fertile lands wait to be inhabited someplace else. This is the fu**ing home for both of us and that’s that, i guess. Go figure. May we find a more peaceful and creative way to share it in a way that maintains those secret ingredients that make it a home for all of us.
The people of Israel live, homeless
As I was wrapping up this post a miraculous thing happened. I overheard the Israeli hymn, the tikva (that means “hope”), coming from downstairs across the street on waikiki beach, played by a homeless violinist. I left the computer and went down with a video camera. By the time I crossed the street he was already playing the popular “Jerusalem of gold” and I managed to capture him with the finale of the patriotic chant “am Israel chai” (which means “the people of Israel live” and is often sung by religious people in hard times, to cheer us up and remind us of the liveliness of our people and what we accomplished after all that we have been through).
The mixed nationalities tourist audience cheered without even realizing what they listened to. During the break he took after “hava nagila”, the homeless violinist told me he wasn’t even Jewish, he just knows many popular violin tunes from different cultures and he was playing there for hours before i heard him.
Tears came to my eyes as I realized this was just a message from the universe, from God to me, a manifestation of the ability of my culture to follow me everywhere, even in the most unexpected places like Waikiki beach, and always strike a chord (pun intended this time) weather I like it to matter for me or not.
The people of Israel indeed live and they live practically everywhere in the world, but only few lucky (?) ones can come to terms with calling another place home. I am continuously amazed to meet Israeli people living in the U.S and Europe for many years, seeing success and wealth there and yet giving it all up, settling for much less, only to return home again, to Israel.
Before you have any dialog with us, I think you should understand this about us. It doesn’t justify occupation, it doesn’t justify anything. I suppose even the most serious left wing activist feels this dissonance as he or she still live here and not just write an angry blog from their NYC residence… it’s just how thing are and that’s what I wanted to talk about today. Happy peace day to everyone. I still blog for trust!
What is home to YOU? Is it a distant cultural memory or the actual smells of your mom’s cooking, the flower bushes outside your house, the angry salesman in the local grocery store….?
