Between Homes: Roots without Borders

I have always been from everywhere and nowhere.

Born in South Africa, an Italian citizen and raised largely in Brussels, I grew up navigating different cultures and ways of life, later pursuing my studies and international legal career across Brussels, New York, London and Paris. My life has been shaped by different places and by the people I met along the way. For most of my life, I never felt the need to define where I belonged. Home was not necessarily a country. It was a collection of places, relationships and experiences that made the world feel familiar and expansive.

For years, Europe was where much of that life unfolded. I built a career, formed lasting friendships and learned to navigate different cultures almost instinctively. I was surrounded by people whose backgrounds and beliefs differed from my own, and I took for granted that these differences were part of what made life interesting. I believed that people could disagree profoundly and still remain connected, and that identity could matter without defining an entire person.

Then October 7 happened.

The attacks in Israel and everything that followed changed something in my relationship with the world around me. Not because I suddenly became afraid to live in Europe, or anywhere else, but because I began to notice a distance in relationships I had always assumed were firmly established.

People I had known for years began withdrawing from me, personally and professionally, often without explanation. Friendships faded, connections disappeared, and relationships I had thought were built on years of shared experiences suddenly felt different. It was rarely dramatic. More often, it was silence. As it continued, I found myself wondering whether people were seeing me differently because of something that had always been part of who I was, but had never previously occupied quite the same place in my relationships with them. It is something I continue to experience, even today.

There is something unsettling about feeling yourself being pushed out of a world without anyone explicitly telling you that you no longer belong. You sense it in the silences and the distance, in the small absences that gradually become impossible to ignore. What I miss most is not a particular city or country, but the feeling of being part of something larger than myself. The quiet certainty that there was a place for me in the world I had come to know.

I had spent my entire adult life believing that being international was a strength. Moving between cultures had made me more curious, expanded my understanding of the world and taught me that familiarity with difference could deepen our appreciation of our common humanity. I had never wanted a smaller world, nor imagined that I would one day question my place within it.

I didn’t leave because I was running away. I came to Israel as a tourist. I stayed, and eventually made Aliyah. There was no grand plan, no single moment when I decided that one life was over and another had begun. It happened gradually, through a series of decisions that made sense at the time.

Looking back, I wonder whether part of me was searching for somewhere to finally put down roots. After a lifetime of moving between places, perhaps I wanted to see what it would feel like to commit to one. And perhaps there was an obvious question: if not here, then where? If my Jewish identity and history connected me to Israel, might this be a place where I could find a sense of belonging that had become harder to take for granted elsewhere?

Almost two years later, I am still discovering what that means. Because belonging, I have discovered, cannot simply be inherited.

I sometimes wonder why being Jewish should automatically make me feel more at home here than anywhere else I might have built a life. Why should ancestry create a sense of belonging that lived experience never did?

I know the history. I understand what Israel means to the Jewish people and why it matters so profoundly. I feel deeply connected to that history, too. But history and belonging are not quite the same thing.

I did not grow up here. Hebrew is not the language in which I learned to understand the world. I don’t have childhood memories of Israeli summers, schools or family dinners, or the shared references that come naturally to those who have spent their lives here. In other places, I had generally found my footing relatively quickly. Israel has challenged me in ways I hadn’t anticipated, particularly because of the importance of community in Israeli society.

Community here has a depth and intensity that I have rarely experienced elsewhere. The bonds formed through childhood friendships, family histories, military service and shared experiences create an extraordinary sense of solidarity. It is one of the things that draws me to Israel, yet it can also make integration difficult. When so much belonging is rooted in a shared past, arriving without that history can leave you feeling like an outsider, however strong your connection to the place. I am drawn to that closeness, but I am still finding my way into a society whose everyday rhythms and unwritten rules I am continuing to discover.

Life in Israel also comes with realities I had never experienced before. I had never lived somewhere where rockets could fly overhead, where the extraordinary could become part of the ordinary. I had never experienced the particular combination of fear and normality that comes with a society living with a constant awareness of security. The combination of vulnerability, resilience and everyday normality is difficult to explain to someone who hasn’t experienced it. It has given me a different perspective on uncertainty and on what it means to build a life when the future is not entirely predictable.

There is a strange experience in arriving somewhere that is supposed to feel like home and discovering that you are still, in many ways, a tourist. I am here. But I am not from here. And perhaps that distinction matters more than I expected.

Sometimes I feel as though I spent years building bridges between countries, only to find myself standing somewhere in the middle of them, unsure which side I am supposed to call home.

Perhaps that is why the wider state of the world affects me so deeply. Increasingly, I sense that what is shrinking is not the world itself, but our willingness to engage with its complexity. We seem increasingly comfortable with slogans instead of thought, outrage instead of curiosity, and choosing sides instead of trying to understand one another. People become representatives of identities rather than individuals with complicated histories and lives that cannot be reduced to a single label.

I find that very disheartening because my life has taught me the opposite. Some of the most meaningful relationships I have built have been with people whose backgrounds, beliefs and experiences were entirely different from my own. Those differences did not diminish our connections; they enriched them. I don’t want to lose the curiosity that comes from moving between cultures, or the belief that there is always something to learn from people whose experiences differ from mine.

For most of my life, having multiple worlds inside me felt like a gift. Now, that same multiplicity often feels like a fracture.

There are days when I wonder whether I was naïve to believe that I could move between cultures indefinitely without eventually having to confront the question of where I belonged. Perhaps the world has changed, perhaps I have changed, or perhaps both are true. What I know is that I no longer have the certainty I once did, and I am still trying to understand how the different parts of my life fit together. But perhaps not knowing exactly where home is does not mean I have to choose between the places and experiences that have shaped me.

What I want, above all, is to believe that complexity is still possible. That a person can be Jewish and European, connected to Israel and shaped by elsewhere, without these identities competing for legitimacy. That you can belong without becoming tribal, disagree without erasing someone, and acknowledge the importance of identity without allowing it to eclipse everything else. 

I don’t want disappointment to turn into cynicism or distance to become isolation. I want to remain open without being naïve, to build a life in Israel without pretending I grew up here, and to hold on to the parts of Europe and the world that made me who I am without assuming that my relationship with them must remain unchanged.

I am still learning how to live here, still carrying Europe with me, and still trying to understand what has changed, what I have lost and what I might yet build.

Perhaps home is not somewhere I am supposed to find waiting for me. Perhaps it is something I have to build from all the places and people that have shaped me, without allowing any one of them to erase the others. Perhaps it is less a destination than the ability to hold different parts of yourself together without feeling that one must cancel out the other.

I don’t know if that is possible. But I think it is worth trying.

Because despite everything, I still want to belong to the world. I don’t want to have to choose one part of myself to make the others acceptable. I want to believe there is room for a person to be shaped by many places, connected to different histories and at home in more than one way.

I just want the world to leave room for all of me.