My Oceanic Feeling

I have been trying to articulate a response to F’s great post below, but cannot somehow find the words – largely because the question she poses at the end is virtually unanswerable.
In the end, I remembered an e mail I wrote to The Girls last December, when I was on a business trip in Israel. I think this piece best encapsulates my thoughts on the issues of identity and otherness. I have been debating whether or not to post it; if I am honest, I don’t want to be pigeonholed or misinterpreted, and by posting this, I am leaving myself wide open to both of these charges.

However, re-reading my words, I think they express the dilemma of modern identity; of accepting and rejecting your past, present and future (and of being accepted and rejected); of belonging everywhere and nowhere at the same time; of being variously and simultaneously self and other. Most of all, this reinforces for me how even if you reject a constituent element of your identity, it still exists, if only by virtue of that rejection. It can lie dormant, but it informs the very core of your being. This is my post-modern identity crisis:

As soon as I step on the ElAl flight to Tel Aviv, I feel it.

This is my final business trip of 2005. I have travelled the world, opened my mind and my heart, let new people, cultures, nationalities and races into the centre of my life - and in the process, walked away from my own community. I carry my otherness everywhere with me, but I don't surround myself with my own.

I am so used to travelling abroad now that aeroplanes are like trains or cars to me. I am comfortable everywhere; in large, unfamiliar cities, I travel on the underground (Hong Kong), in small, alien towns, I use rail and bus links (rural Italy). I am comfortable, but I am still in unfamiliar
territory. Even outside of London, people adopt that much talked about glazed, detached look, so that they don't have to communicate with strangers.

The ElAl flight is different.

Full of North-west London Jews, no one can sit still. Every stereotype is on the flight, and I recognise them all: giggling girls, hand in hand, run up and down the aisles; Hassidic men store their black hats (in boxes advertising the Brooklyn store in which they bought them) in the overhead lockers; a jovial, well-rounded woman keeps on bumping into people she knows, offering her entire itinerary to everyone (Netanya for a week, followed by Herzliya, then on to Eilat for a batmitzvah party). The Eilat crowd are all staying in the Royal Gardens; a group of French lads, early 20s, on a new year's break; a very Anglicised, snobby, middle-aged couple; the husband completely demasculated by his helmet-haired wife; the modern-Orthodox man trying to mobilise a friend he has bumped into, into joining the group of men at the rear of the aircraft to help to form a minyan [group of 10 men required to pray] for mincha [afternoon prayer service]. An argument breaks out between an aggressive Israeli woman and a random man (doubtless over something irrelevant and minute), both of them uninhibitedly shouting at each other. I catch snippets of familiar, generic conversations, typical of the NW London Jewish community: whose child has won a scholarship to which top London secondary school, GCSEs, A Levels, Universities, which gap year programme in Israel their prodigal child is participating in... I recognise these people because I am all of them... and none of them.

We land at Ben Gurion airport, and everyone spontaneously and unselfconsciously applauds. This happens on an ElAl flight. In the 80s, they also used to play the song "Halleluyah", which won Israel the Eurovision Song Contest one year, back in the 70s. With the distance I have, I can see how curious this is; it's so pioneering, and not something one expects to see in 2005. Israel - with all its problems - is a modern state. I was angry with Julie Birchill for saying it, in 1996, after the assassination of the then Prime Minister, Yitzchak Rabin, but she was right. You only need to see the newly-renovated Ben Gurion airport to prove it. Until 2 years ago, you stepped off the plane and had to be bussed to the terminal. You could imagine this archaic building welcoming groups of downtrodden Jews from around the world at different times: Russian refuseniks, Ethiopians... Now, you step off the plane and walk through a large, modern, airy building with shops, bars and restaurants - much more modern than any American airport I have ever been to. So what - in 2005 - moves us all to a heightened emotional state when we touch down in Tel Aviv?

I have so distanced myself from all of this in the last year that I am shocked at the extent to which I had forgotten this feeling. I am British-English-European, I am a citizen of the world, I won't define myself by a small community, I am not a Zionist. I loathe and despise my fellow passengers for gaily and thoughtlessly running off to Israel for some winter sunshine, when elsewhere in the country, there live another people for whom there is no daily sunshine. My oceanic feeling flies in the face of everything I believe democracy and freedom to be; it defies logic and reason, and I am ashamed. I had to mask this holiday as a business trip to avoid the problematics and guilt of coming to Israel for a holiday without any other reason or purpose. I think of standing at the kotel [the Western Wall in Jerusalem; the only remaining bit of the holy Temple; the most holy place for Jews in the world]; I remember each visit there, from the age of 4. I also remember how, on the 3 occasions I have been to Jerusalem since my father died, I have burst into floods of tears on the drive up the hills into Jerusalem. It's not just the memories; it's something else - something more that I can't describe.

And here it is again: just as I reach passport control, I bump into T, one of my oldest friends. I forgot she was making aliyah (emigrating to Israel). Today is the day; she is standing with a small group of other aliyah makers she has just met. I hug them all and wish them luck.

Stepping outside the posh, modern new airport, the familiar smell (thankfully minus the stifling summer humidity) hits me. The motorway - modern, developed, unrecognisable from how the roads in the 80s - is like any other, in Hong Kong, Brazil, Italy, the US. But there is the diamond bourse on the right, and that signpost to Jabotinsky Street. And there is that newsagent I remember. The strip of road with all the bars and cafes. And finally, the road by the sea front, housing all the hotels. Inside the hotel, I step out onto the balcony. I look at the ugly apartment blocks, damaged by the sea air, the other hotels, the beach. I could be anywhere. I am used to stepping off planes and arriving in different places.

I have come home.