Stoke Newington, London
"Immigration is an open wound," my friend told me when she came back to Israel several years ago. I told her I don't like that sentence. I don't agree with it. It is too dramatic, to definitive, and too sad. But now it is pinned to my brain. Perhaps the only way to disassemble it is to write it down here.
The reason that this sentence keeps popping up is, I assume, the way in which the coronavirus has complicated my perception of borders.
On the one hand, this period has made the world interconnected and fluid like never before. For the first time in my life, I have found myself taking part in conferences, interviews, and speeches, which have become global and simultaneous in ways that only two months were unthinkable. On the other hand, as an immigrant, I have never felt the physical and political firmness of borders more as a result of the shutting down of international travel.
Throughout all of my 13 years outside Israel, flights, and more than that – the knowledge that they exist – have helped me bridge the emotional and perceptional gap that I have often felt toward life in Israel.
But these days, taking a flight means being in isolation for a month. Two weeks on your way there, and two weeks on your way back. At a time when Israel has already forgotten what coronavirus is, with people in Britain are rebelling against the easing of the lockdown, I have never felt Israel being farther away from me, both geographically and mentally.
It has become distant, but familiar. I want to travel to Israel, but I am afraid to do so. This period has intensified the conflicting feelings I always have ahead of a visit to Israel: missing my friends antifamily alongside a fear that perhaps there is a big disconnect after a long time away; my concern on whether we will be able to bridge the gap in one fell swoop; will I feel at home or in some foreign land?
The tension exists ahead of every visit, but this time it is debilitating. From afar, I look at the newspapers, the social media, and the conversations taking place in Israel. I try to understand what's awaiting me here: a sun-speckled paradise whose residents celebrate as if there is no disease or a country where a pandemic has destroyed the democratic notion of its traumatized citizens thanks to its glorified leader and his dozens of ministers?
I am overdramatizing this. I make up stories in order to buy time. To avoid crossing borders on a flight that I can't describe. I make things up in order to avoid moving from one home to another home, which may have changed a bit. In order to avoid this unnerving feeling in which the term "home" is suspended from both worlds, two countries and two experiences, including in times when flights operate normally.
