Fleeting Frontiers

SEVERAL YEARS AGO, ANIMATED DIGITAL MAPS made the rounds on social media, condensing a thousand years of shifting European political borders into a matter of minutes. A virtual kaleidoscope of colors on the computer screen demonstrated the ephemeral nature of imaginary boundaries drawn by humans to reflect momentary victories, whether by war, subjugation or manifest destiny; possibly, these could have even have resulted from voluntary agreements to geographically divide populations by particular affinities—along tribal, familial, ethnic, religious, racial, linguistic, or political distinctions.

As proven through millennia, however, culture and heritage cannot be confined to lines on a map; inevitably the political wisdom or military might driving such decisions spawns simmering resentment, if not open conflict, among neighbors.

Live long enough, and you are likely to witness many changing frontiers over a lifetime. In the decades since my 1947 birth in Tel Aviv, I have lived through the emergence of a Jewish nation-state carved out of British Mandate Palestine, itself under English control as the spoils of the First World War against the Ottoman Turks.

In my lifetime, the disintegration of the Soviet Empire shattered the illusory “union” of the socialist “republics” that were held captive by the Moscow regime.

As noted by German novelist Peter Schneider, observing the events of 1989, “the virus of nationalism rages most fiercely in the Soviet republics, whose citizens, even women, children and the aged, are being killed simply because they belong to a different ethnic group. What does it all mean? Have we gone back to the 19th century? Have people freed themselves of Communism only to bend to the older yoke of national frenzy and race war? Or does this herald—at least in Europe—a new multicultural beginning, an ‘internationalism” from belo