Readers of this blog know that I read all sorts of periodicals, and that my cognitive style tends toward free association. I read The Jerusalem Report, which has excellent and objective coverage of developments in Israel and the Middle East. On November 17, 2014, it carried a cover story by Bernard Dichek under the title “Speaking Hebrew in Kampala”. The story has little to do with the momentous events taking place in the region. But it moved me, and made me reflect about different ways in which human beings think about “home”

The story is about 120 children of refugee families, who were deported from Israel in 2012 as illegal immigrants, and landed in Juba (the capital of newly independent South Sudan from which they originally came). The families were befriended in Israel by Rami Gudovitch, an activist (with of all things a doctorate in philosophy), and a group of other Israelis who persuaded the government not to let the children stay in Juba (which must be a veritable hellhole). Gudovitch found a British-type school in Uganda which agreed to take the teenagers in. There is a picture of Gudovitch with the group—all smiling, the boys in white shirts with ties, the girls in neat dresses, both sporting the school logo in the sartorial style of the public schools of Uganda’s former colonial rulers. Their families were survivors of the genocide perpetrated by the Islamist regime of the dictator Omar al-Bashir in the 1990s, which killed about 2 million people (many of them Christians) in the south and west of Sudan. (Al-Bashir is presently indicted for crimes against humanity in the International Criminal Court—which has not prevented him from still being in power and living comfortably in Khartoum).

To flee these horrors many people fled to Egypt, which was hardly welcoming. Some continued toward Israel, on foot through the Sinai desert. At first the number of refugees was relatively small, and the Israeli government at first did little to stop them (especially since they were hardworking people taking low-skilled jobs that few Israelis wanted). This attitude changed as South Sudan became independent in 2011, a savage civil war erupted soon after the celebrations ended, and the trickle of refugees crossing into Israel became an incipient flood. The government took the position that, since South Sudan was no longer terrorized by al-Bashir’s militias, the refugees could no longer claim political asylum and could be repatriated under international law. This ignored the terrible conditions prevailing in Juba and elsewhere in the country.

There is a double bitter irony to this story. The refugees marching through the Sinai desert were re-enacting the exodus from Egypt of Moses and the early Israelites to the promised land of Israel. They also re-enacted the core redemptive narrative of Zionism—they “made aliyah”. Indeed, they made Israel their own “homeland”. Then, abruptly, they were thrown back into the hell from which they had originally escaped, by a government that was named “Israel”.

The refugee teenagers in Uganda had spent years attending Israeli schools, had many friends there, and spoke fluent Hebrew. Indeed they continued to speak Hebrew among themselves—fellow-students called them “the Israelis”. When the group picture was taken, Gudovitch was in Kampala on a visit to “his children”. He was introduced to a class as “a visitor from Israel”, said “good morning” in Hebrew. With broad smiles the students replied in the same language. One 17-year old student, who had lived in Israel from age 8 to 15, had this to say: “I came from a good place and suddenly there was nothing to eat. You had to boil water to drink. There was no electricity or toilets and many were sick with malaria… I couldn’t understand why we had to leave Israel. All my friends were in Israel and I felt like it was my country.” Some of the refugees were not only sick in Juba but died there, be it from disease or for being in the midst of fighting. The deputy headmaster of the school remarked: “If you were in heaven and then are taken to hell, you may not survive for a single day”.

The Austrian novelist Friedrich Torberg has one of the characters in a novel say: “Home is where one was a child.” When I first read this sentence, it seemed very plausible. After all, the phrase “mother-tongue” is applied to one’s first language for a good reason. But on further reflection one word should be added to the sentence: “Home is where one was a happy child.” Some childhoods are hellish, and those emerging from them may look all their lives for a place where they might feel at home.

According to UN statistics, there were more than 50 million refugees in 2013, half of them children. Some lived precariously in their original countries, others spilled over international borders. The governments of receiving countries are originally friendly or indifferent. This changes when the numbers grow exponentially and anti-immigrant sentiments become politically significant. Then closed borders and deportations begin. Huge numbers of refugees from Iraq and Syria are now flooding Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan, with differing reactions from governments. Deportations have begun from EU countries, especially France. Libya has become a staging area for flotillas trying to reach Italy in flimsy, overcrowded boats. The Italian navy has done a commendable job rescuing survivors at sea, but many have drowned. Deportation of illegal immigrants has become a hot political issue in the US and Australia. Governments try hard to differentiate between “political refugees”, in danger of persecution in their own country, and “economic refugees”, “only” in danger of starvation or disease. Often this is a difficult task. It is easy to condemn governments for harsh measures, but sometimes the pressures for these are enormous. (As they are in Israel, which already has increasing difficulty dealing with the fact that 20% of its own citizens are Arabs with diminishing allegiance to the state.)

I find particularly interesting cases where people identify as “home countries” states that no longer exist or where they have never been. A student of mine did a study of Bosnian refugees in the US. When asked where they came from, many said “Yugoslavia”, which they imagined nostalgically (if not altogether accurately) as a place of ethnic and religious harmony. When I was a (very impecunious) student in New York City, I had a job as a receptionist in a medical clinic on the Lower East Side, many patients were elderly Yiddish-speaking Jews, who came from what after World War I became independent Poland. Before that war the country was split between Russia and Austria-Hungary. When asked for their home country, I don’t recall anyone saying “Poland”—some said “Russia”, somewhat reluctantly, others said “Austria” with an undertone of pride. (Russia meant backward and anti-Semitic, Austria meant modern, European, with equal rights for Jews.) Anglo-Indians (a fairly large group in India of mixed-race origin) say “home” when they mean Britain—where many of them have never been. Palestinian emigrants call “home” towns and villages in what is now Israel, many of which they cannot find on recent maps because their old Arabic names have been replaced by Hebrew ones. The notion of “home” can go back to much earlier times: Even today, 500 years later, Sephardic Jews still mourn for Andalusia, from which their ancestors were expelled in 1492. Many were welcomed in the Ottoman Empire. Some of them settled in what is now the state of Israel. Then as now, they must have prayed for “next year in Jerusalem”. But some of them were in Jerusalem—which to them was exile. The city they had in mind could have been Cordoba or Granada.

Then there are ideological constructs of “home”, with no relation with reality. Thousands of refugees from the hell that is the project of the “Islamic State of Iraq and Syria” are risking their lives at sea to reach Europe. At the same time ISIS targets young Europeans to come and join jihad in “the blessed land of Shams” (an Arabic synonym for Syria). An increasing number of European teenagers, both boys and girls, are accepting the invitation. A large number comes from France. Originally these volunteers came mainly from Muslim families with origins in North Africa. Now there has been an increase of recruits coming from non-Muslim professional families—converts to Islam from Christianity, atheism (not a rarity in laique France), even Judaism. A German news magazine has published some heartrending interviews with parents of such children, who gradually adopted a militantly Islamic identity and then one day disappeared and only sent a terse message from Syria, affirming their commitment to jihad. One desperate mother, who vainly tried to have her teenage son come back, received a message informing her that he had died as a suicide bomber in order to be accepted by Allah as a martyr. Another mother received an email from her teenage daughter, announcing her marriage to an Islamic fighter. Dounia Bouzar, a French anthropologist who is a Muslim herself, has made a study of the motives of these young people who disavow their families, values and nation. There is an interesting difference in this between females and males.  The females claim that they are motivated by  justice and love of humanity which, they believe, can only be fulfilled in an Islamic society. One can easily imagine the brutal disillusion awaiting this sort of naiveté. The males, on the other hand, seek an identity as fearless warriors, “masters over life and death”. The brutality expected of them, rather than repelling them, can only reinforce this self-image. The easy availability of sex slaves may have the same effect.

The novel by Jean Raspail, The Camp of the Saints” was published in French in 1973, in an English translation in 1975. It was a dystopic vision of the end of European civilization. It begins with a charismatic leader, some sort of holy man, who calls on the masses of what was then called the Third World to get on ships and sail toward Europe and other wealthy regions and confiscate their wealth, which rightfully belongs to them. A sort of reverse cargo cult: Don’t wait for the ships to bring you all the good things of modernity – get your own ships and go there and get the cargo yourself. The focus of the novel is on Europe, specifically France. European navies first try to stop this fearsome flotilla, full of “the wretches of earth”. But the flotilla sails on, and the French and other European governments draw back from using lethal force, for humanitarian reasons but also because they know that the ships will move on no matter what – sheer numbers willing to die will even overcome modern means of violence.  Europe gives up. The French coastline is evacuated. On the last day before the invasion by presumably millions of desparate Asians and Africans, all French radio stations  broadcast nothing except classical European music. The last cry of a dying world.

The novel was republished in 2001. It became a bestseller. It was denounced as racist, and praised for pointing out an impending moral dilemma. I don’t know whether it was racist. It certainly drew attention to a moral issue for liberal democracies today.