When you join the universalists, cosmopolitans, and exiles, you are freed from the straitjacket of nationalism. Everyone’s life is of equal value, and you don’t have to choose sides.
No one tells the cosmopolitan, “It’s us or them,” and no one asks the universalist to kill or die for the group.
But today, the rootlessness that once provided so much relief is now generating a gnawing sense of loneliness.
I can’t go back and no longer belong, but remaining emotionally homeless doesn’t seem quite right either.
I'm exploring this topic in a new book, chronicling my move from the US to Israel in 1976, and then my self-imposed exile from that country in 1993. I built up a fierce sense of belonging to Israel as a kid, and then in high school, the youth movement, and the military.
But then, working with the Associated Press and Human Rights Watch in the Palestinian occupied territories began to destroy that sense of attachment.
I gradually got to know people from the expatriate peace-and-conflict world in the Israeli/Palestinian space, including charismatic Swiss delegates of the International Committee of the Red Cross. I began to shed my sense of Israeli belonging, moving overseas for studies, and then building a career in the US, Canada, and then back in the US. But the new identity never really gelled. Now, as I approach the age of 60, I realize that I'm trapped, suspended in metaphorical mid-air over the Atlantic and Mediterranean, neither here nor there nor anywhere in between.
I know this is a common theme - displaced persons, exiles, immigrants, travelers - and that there is a whole literature on children who grow up in mixed cultural backgrounds (Third Culture Kids is the term I've seen). It's a new area of reading, writing, and research, and I'm working it all out in a memoir and in my therapist's office. Actually, I have two therapists, one in Israel, and one in the US.
More fodder for my split consciousness, I guess.
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