INTRODUCTION

by Ithamar Handelman-Smith

Israel is not a country; it is not even, as someone has suggested, a state of mind. It is simply a disorderly systematic collection of paradoxes that somehow seem to make sense - don’t ask me to explain how. Whatever you may say about Israel or Israelis, the opposite is equally true: every man, woman or child seems to be mobilised for war, yet every time they want to say hello, goodbye, how’s your grandmother, or what’s up, they say shalom, which means peace; and in a crazy way they make you believe they mean it. Here is no aristocracy of rank or wealth, not even a sense of rank in their army, not because they are so democratic but because everyone here thinks he’s a general. And the greatest paradox of them all is that I, Roy Hemmings, have got myself stuck here, to report on a war that will not take place…

With this monologue, director-turned-rabbi (read Dana Kessler’s beautiful essay “Metzizim”) Uri Zohar, one of Israel’s best known artists of all time, decided to open his 1968 film, Every Bastard a King.

The film is an exceptional and unique description of the Israeli-Arabic conflict; told from the point of view of Roy Hemmings, a Hemingway-esque American journalist reporting from Israel and the Palestinian (then Jordanian) territories. It is the eve of the Six-Day War, a pivotal point in the modern history of this land. Through these foreign eyes, Zohar examines the complexity of this story, the story of Israel and Palestine, even before the actual occupation. The story of the Holy Land.

Throughout history, this little piece of land in the southern Levant, stretching between the sea and the Jordan River, has had many different names: there was the biblical pagan land of Canaan, then it was the Promised Land (or simply Eretz Israel) that God promised Abraham, and there were the ancient Jewish kingdoms of Israel (Samaria) and Judah. In the Babylonian and Persian period, the land was referred to as the province of Yehud Medinata, and under Hellenistic occupation it was Coele-Syria. The Romans called it the Province of Judea, and under the Byzantine Empire it was known as Palaestina Prima. The many different Arab and Muslim conquerors gave it many different names (Al-Urdunn, Filastin etc.) and the crusaders named it the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem. Under the Ottoman Empire it was known mainly as part of Greater Syria. Then it was the British Mandatory Palestine, and eventually the state of Israel. But all along, it was the Holy Land: for Jews, Christians and Muslims alike.

As Zohar wrote, it “is not a country, it is not even, as someone has suggested, a state of mind”, but a “collection of paradoxes” that “somehow seem to make sense”. In this anthology of short fiction, poetry, essays and artworks, we try to make a bit more sense out of it all. While offering no specific political solution to the ongoing conflict over this, we try to put together diverse reflections and personal and subjective perspectives in order to shed some more light on the different places and landscapes of the Holy Land. We try to give voice to the many different communities living here, in this land today, from secular to orthodox Jewish Israelis through to Muslim and Christian Palestinians, the Circassians of the north and the Bedouin of the south. This is a kaleidoscope through which the reader might be able to see the Holy Land in new light and colour.