A home or a tombstone

Last week, at an event at the Tel Aviv Fairgrounds, hundreds of young people joined a new "purchasing group" set to build high-rise apartment buildings in that city. Meanwhile, in Jerusalem, a storm was brewing over a plan to demolish homes in Silwan. Ostensibly, these are the two extremes of Israeli life: Glittering towers in the big city on the one hand, and confrontations between settlers and Palestinians on the other. But actually, those extremes have a common element: the centrality of the home as a symbol in Israeli society.

A home, in the form of a roof over one's head, is a fundamental human necessity, so it's a central symbol everywhere in the world. The Americans have cliches for it: "There's no place like home" and "Home is where the heart is." And here, Yankele Rotblit has written: "How good it is that you've come home, home - that's really all there is." But what is that "all"? What exactly does "home" mean to us?

Home is warmth, stability, family. Home is where you live. But do these values explain fully why it's so important for us to own our homes? The towers up for sale at the Fairgrounds event don't yet have all the necessary permits; still, the organizers said, every two minutes a new customer joined the purchasing group. Today you need more than 100 average monthly salaries to buy a typical apartment in Israel, but according to the Central Bureau of Statistics, this has not prevented 69 percent of households from owning their homes. This is one of the highest rates in the world. In Germany the figure is only 42 percent, in Denmark 51 percent, in France 55 percent and in Austria 56 percent.

It's true that it's customary to regard buying a home as an investment, although according to a recent Technion study, in Israel you're better off economically renting than buying. It's also true that we wandered the globe for 2,000 years and we want, just for a moment, the security of owning a place where we can take off our shoes without the fear of being forced to move out. However, it's also possible that the lust for one's own home is driven by a darker belief, a belief that finds expression in buying and building homes for ourselves but sealing them up or demolishing them for others.

This is because hiding away among all the pleasant and sentimental emotions evoked by the notion of a home is a primeval belief that home is not only a shelter but also the force of life itself. It's as if someone who buys a house gains eternal life, and someone whose house is demolished is wiped off the face of the earth. This not entirely conscious belief gets us into trouble. It fuels our readiness to mobilize for an enormous economic effort to become homeowners, and it ignites the impulse to destroy thousands of homes in the West Bank and East Jerusalem as a punishment, or because they were built without a permit - permits that are impossible to obtain.

The bind we're in is thus made worse because apparently this concept of a home is prevalent among Israeli Arabs, too. In urban Arab communities in Israel, 92 percent of the people own their own homes - almost the entire population. And "May your house be destroyed" is one of the gravest curses in Arabic.

Tragically, it seems that Israelis and Palestinians share the attitude that a home is proof that its owners exist, or in other words, it's a monument. That is, homes derive their power as an emblem not because they are perceived as a place for living, but because deep inside, we see the home as a place in which to die.