The Good News, I Have Two Homes; The Bad News, Both Have Termites

The countries I love the most, the US and Israel, have developed ugly flaws and I may have to move elsewhere

Last Friday afternoon, I was suffering from jet lag after a 14 hour flight to Israel. I knew I was going to a long dinner that night with friends and family in a moshav (community farm) where I’d lived during the Yom Kippur war. I needed to find a place to sleep for a couple of hours that afternoon that was beyond the nasty traffic of Tel Aviv and closer to the location of my dinner.

Where should I go? For me, the choice was obvious. Herzliya beach, a place where fifty plus years before, I’d go to when I needed a break from picking grapefruit and shoveling chicken shit on the moshav.

Back then, I’d sit on the beach, sometimes swim, and contemplate whether I should move permanently to this country where almost all of my relatives lived. The answer? Ultimately no.

I needed to live in a place where I didn’t see mothers openly weep in the street as the number of war dead climbed. I needed to be in a place where girls around my age, 17, didn’t possess the same dark coping humor of many Holocaust survivors and their children that I not surprisingly also possessed. I needed to live someplace sweeter. I needed to live in America.

But what about now, fifty plus years later, if I asked that same question? Neither Israel nor the US are what they were back then. Israel is no longer a poor country and its people on the whole are far more religious. The US has turned angry and pessimistic. Whatever sweetness the US possessed is gone. Both countries are rejecting the “elites” (which means me and likely you, dear reader), have lurched right and are coming close to embracing industrial strength authoritarianism.

Herzliya beach today is dramatically more developed than it was fifty years ago. The town of Herzliya, a place where my great uncle and aunt lived for decades and where I lived for a month before the war, was unrecognizable. What was once a sleepy town and beach is now a happening, upscale part of Israel. I struggled to find a parking space but got lucky when someone pulled out of one just as I was about to drive past.

I quickly found a spot on the beach and fell into a deep sleep on the sand. But one hour later, I was woken by a call and demand from a cousin. A Houthi missile was on its way and I needed to get to a nearby shelter ASAP. I looked around the beach after I hung up. No one was moving. I was still sleep deprived and knew I’d be staying up past midnight with a long drive to get to a cousin’s home after dinner. I went to sleep again and when I finally woke up, was a bit alarmed that I’d be late for the meal.

The Shabbat dinner was fabulous. I sat around a table with family and friends I’d first met fifty years before and have seen every half dozen or so years since then. We all have families of our own now. Children and grandchildren sat around the table. The oldest at the table was ninety-nine years old, had great grandchildren and was singing out loud with us as well as occasionally cracking ironic jokes just like she did way back when.

I love these people and this country that, like the US, has ugly flaws that all can see. It’s my second home.

For me, Israel is now like a parent who isn’t the best, but you (and all Jews) know can come home to if you get into trouble. As I drove to my place for the night after dinner was over, I revisited my old beach question of where I should live but with a twist. If both the US and Israel were to go full scale authoritarian and I had only two countries to choose from where would I live?

The “winner” would be Israel. I think I’d be safer facing an occasional array of missiles than being a Jew in a country that carts off citizens it doesn’t like to faraway prisons. I’ve seen that carting off movie before. It didn’t end well for my grandparents, aunts and uncles.

Fortunately, if the worst does happen to both Israel and the US, I wouldn’t be faced with what would ultimately be no choice at all. Either way, I’d lose my freedoms. I need more than two choices. That’s why I went to the effort to get citizenship from an EU country shortly after Trump was elected the first time. I have better options. That said, I hope to never need to employ them.