No place like a homeland

By Khaled Diab

A return to an ancestral homeland is a dream that’s long inspired diasporas – often with troubling results.

9 July 2010

The Zionist vision of a “return” to the Promised Land has been both a dream come true, when you view ‘s success at forging a vibrant and modern melting pot of Jewish peoples from around the world, and a nightmare, given the decades of conflict it has engendered, and built as it is on the ruins of and the continued subjugation of the Palestinian people, not to mention the wholesale uprooting of Middle Eastern Jews.

But Jews are not the only scattered and oppressed group of people who have entertained sentimental dreams of a triumphant return to their ancestral homelands. For instance, a similar situation existed for Greeks. Like the Jews, Greeks had not possessed an independent homeland since Roman times and counted a sizeable across the Roman empire and its successors, right down to Ottoman times.

This diaspora played a central role in the creation of the modern Greek state by raising funds and awareness abroad. An example of these efforts was the Filiki Eteria (“Society of Friends”), a secret society set up in Odessa (Ukraine) in 1814 with the aim of establishing an independent Greek state. However, unlike in Palestine where Jews represented a tiny minority of the population, historic was still largely populated by Greek speakers (albeit of bastardised regional dialects) who were able, with the support of the diaspora and European sympathisers (Philhellenics like Lord Byron) , to throw off the yoke of Ottoman rule rapidly.

Just as sought to unite all the Jewish peoples in a single homeland, the Megali Idea (the “Great Idea”) aimed to unite the “unredeemed” Greeks of the Ottoman Empire in a single country and, rather megalomaniacally, to restore the Byzantine Empire. Along with the draw of living in an independent Greece, diaspora Greeks experienced the push of increasing distrust fuelled by Greece’s expansionism and the regular wars it fought with the Ottomans. This culminated, after the World War I, in the modern world’s first large-scale compulsory “population exchange” which ethnically cleansed Turkey of its Greek Orthodox population and Greece of its Muslim population, robbing 2 million people of their homes and livelihoods and bringing to an end centuries of cultural and religious diversity.

But it’s not just Greeks and Jews who have dreamt of turning back the clock and returning to Zion or Olympia. Across the Atlantic, the romantic idea of a “return to Africa” has a long pedigree among the descendants of African slaves in the Americas, although few of them could say with any confidence precisely where “home” for them is.

So, Africa as a whole has become their “Zion”. This is quite literally so for Rastafarians who believe that they will one day escape their Babylonian captivity (western society) and return to Zion (Africa) and its capital New Jerusalem (Lalibela, with its beautiful churches hewn out of the rock, in ) led by the late Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie whom they believe is the second coming of Christ.

In the 19th century, some wealthy African Americans, like Paul Cuffee, became convinced – like later would regarding European Jews – that the only way for blacks in America to gain salvation and overcome the burden of and the legacy of their enslavement was to “return” to their ancestral homelands.

Just as Zionism would later be supported by both European antisemites, who saw the creation of a homeland for the Jews as the optimal solution to the “Jewish problem”, and European Judeophiles who were inspired by the romantic redemptive power of a return to ancestral lands, many racists supported the “Back to Africa” ideal as a solution to the “black problem” and well-meaning activists backed it as a way of emancipating and empowering poverty-stricken and marginalised African diasporas.

Both currents can be seen at play in the creation of Sierra Leone (created by British philanthropists to resettle London’s black poor) and (created by American slaveholders and philanthropists). Although they may have shared similar skin tones, these western implants pitted black colonists against the indigenous populations, which felt discriminated against and marginalised on their native lands. In Liberia, this eventually led to the overthrow of the Americo-Liberian regime in 1980.

The “Back to Africa” dream was revived in the 1920s by Marcus Garvey whose philosophy, known as Garveyism, focuses on the African diaspora returning to their ancestral continent to create a prosperous and advanced United States of Africa which would be a safe haven for all Africans.

In contemporary America, despite the growing empowerment of (and continuing discrimination against) African-Americans, the dream of “return” still carries a certain cache. DNA tests which claim to help African-Americans trace their ancestry are popular and some African-Americans invest in Africa, have resettled there or have gained dual nationality.

Examples include the American actor Isaiah Washington who recently became a citizen of Sierra Leone, where he has launched a number of philanthropic projects and Haitian cook Marie Claire Rimpel who opened up a restaurant in Accra, Ghana. In fact, Ghana is actively embracing diaspora Africans by offering them citizenship and the opportunity to invest in the country, partly for their development potential and partly as a symbolic apology for the role earlier generations from the Gold Coast, as it was then known, played in the slave trade.

So, why does the dream of “returning” to an ancestral homeland carry such appeal across such diverse cultural and geographical boundaries?

I imagine that the draw is partly nostalgic, the kind of romanticising of an idyllic past that so many of us humans are prone to. As someone who has spent three-fifths of his life outside his native land, I don’t feel a particular nostalgia or sentimentality towards my homeland. As I grow to feel more and more like a global citizen, I find the notion of increasingly mystifying and narrow-minded. However, I have the advantage of not being stateless or the member of a an oppressed or persecuted group, and I speak from the comfortable vantage point of having a fairly clear-cut core national identity, and a clear home base to which I can flee if ever the need arises.

All the examples above, despite their diversity, share certain features in common. One is the inferior status of these groups in the societies in which they lived or live – which not only made them vulnerable to persecution but also lowered their self-esteem.

Another factor is Utopian thinking: made to feel somehow sub-human by their host cultures and excluded from many areas of power and polite society, diaspora groups often entertain the belief that if they ran their own country they would be better off and could even surpass the society which puts them down or persecutes them.

So, is this kind of “return” a good solution to the problems faced by marginalised diasporas?

The trouble with attempts like these to turn back the clock is that time invariable moves on, rendering the distance between dream and reality a very significant one. Most modern projects to “return” to an ancestral homeland or to create a homeland for a particular group, such as Pakistan for Indian Muslims, have resulted in enormous human dislocation, suffering and death.

This is not to question the right of any of these states to exist today – and those that reject this right, as say some Arabs do vis-à-vis Israel, are also futilely trying to turn back the clock to a past that no longer exists – but merely to highlight that, when local populations are not taken into account, efforts to “return home” can bear a striking resemblance to colonialism, with the once-oppressed playing the role of oppressors. And it is the contemporary remnants of this colonial legacy that need to be dismantled if a more just future is to be created.

This is the extended version of a column which appeared in the Guardian newspaper’s Comment is Free section on 2 July 2010. Read the full discussion here.

Author

  • Khaled Diab

    Khaled Diab is an award-winning journalist, blogger and writer who has been based in Tunis, Jerusalem, Brussels, Geneva and Cairo. Khaled also gives talks and is regularly interviewed by the print and audiovisual media. Khaled Diab is the author of two books: Islam for the Politically Incorrect (2017) and Intimate Enemies: Living with Israelis and Palestinians in the Holy Land (2014). In 2014, the Anna Lindh Foundation awarded Khaled its Mediterranean Journalist Award in the press category. This website, The Chronikler, won the 2012 Best of the Blogs (BOBs) for the best English-language blog. Khaled was longlisted for the Orwell journalism prize in 2020. In addition, Khaled works as communications director for an environmental NGO based in Brussels. He has also worked as a communications consultant to intergovernmental organisations, such as the EU and the UN, as well as civil society. Khaled lives with his beautiful and brilliant wife, Katleen, who works in humanitarian aid. The foursome is completed by Iskander, their smart, creative and artistic son, and Sky, their mischievous and footballing cat. Egyptian by birth, Khaled’s life has been divided between the Middle East and Europe. He grew up in Egypt and the UK, and has lived in Belgium, on and off, since 2001. He holds dual Egyptian-Belgian nationality.

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11 thoughts on “No place like a homeland

  • yola miryam hurwitz

    This is just to let you know how much I enjoyed the above article.

    Just one thing I feel I need to point out regarding black Americans: their ancestors did not migrate to the US of their own accord, but were forcibly shipped out from their own territories (in 18th century Africa), separated from their ethnic groups and families, and put aboard slave ships to America. Unfortunately, we still live with the legacy of this. If more present-day black Americans wished to emigrate to Africa, they would probably first have to find out from which ethnic/tribal group they originated; their ancestors originated from many tribes in West (and East Africa), making this whole issue even more complicated.

    Thanks once again for your most interesting article(s) in the Guardian, and keep up the good work!

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  • But if you are going to put Zionism into a context, then the Palestinian Disapora is surely the single most obvious context to put it into and not even to mention it seems just totally odd to me.

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  • Is the Palestinian diaspora the largest? The Lebanese diaspora, for one, dwarves it, and the Jewish diaspora is also larger. As for the dreams of the Palestinian diaspora, they are well worth exploring – and I will try to do so in a future piece.

    However, I think your reading of my article is also lopsided. The main point of the article is not that “returns are an illusion for Jews”, but that Zionism is not unique, as many anti-Israelis seem to believe, and other movements among long-established, marginalised diasporas parallel it. It’s an attempt to put Zionism and the reaction to it in a wider context.

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  • No, I just felt it was oddly lopsided. In making the point that returns are an illusion for Jews, which is a perfectly valid argument to make, then staying silent on what is said to be the largest disapora population in the world, inextricably linked to the Jewish return, just seemed very odd. As if one half of the argument had inexplicably gone missing. If there had not been so many mentions of Zionism and Israel and Herzl, it wouldn’t have mattered.It would, for me, have needed to either cut most mentions of Zionism and say, ‘look, this isn’t an I/P piece, we’re talking about something else’ or else deal with the thorny question of the current Palestinian disapora also has a utopian dream.

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  • So, Linda, is that all you came away with from the article: that it doesn’t mention the Palestinian diaspora? If so, then I’m quite disappointed.

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  • But there are numerous references to Zionism all throughout the piece and you continuously use the example of the Jewish Disapora.It’s the backbone of the article, its continuous point of refernce.. If you wanted to talk about the lesser known examples, perhaps just one brief mention.

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  • I mean many strands of Palestinian nationalism are mirror reflections of similar strands of Zionism.

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  • Point taken: they are interdependent. However, I think readers can easily see the parallels for themselves, without my having to spell them out. In the limited space available, I wanted to focus the article beyond the narrow Il-Pal axis and delve into less well-known cases. That’s also why I don’t actually talk about Zionism either, except as an entry point into the article.

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  • But the piece doesn’t actually say that. I don’t think you can talk about the Jewish return from diaspora without also talking about the Palestinian return from diaspora when the two are interdependant, politically.

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  • Yes, Linda, Palestinians do dream of return – and many even still possess the keys to their old homes. But my article is about centuries-old diasporas who have successfully established a state – neither of which applies to the Palestinian diaspora. Whoever writes a follow up in a couple of hundred years can include them!

    Of course, turning back the clock to pre-1948 is an impossible dream – with ugly consequences – which some Palestinians and Arabs cling to. The realistic option is a manageable compromise to share the land equitably between the two peoples.

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  • Um, does the pipe dream of return from a scattered Diaspora not also apply to Palestinians, whom you don’t mention?

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