Love and Desire in the Promised Land: The Private Lives of Israelis and Palestinians

by Salomé Parent-Rachdi, Deloupy

Synopsis:

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict viewed through the lens of romantic relationships. A humanizing journalistic portrait of the intimate lives of ordinary people in Israel and Gaza.

Love and Desire in the Promised Land collects a dozen interviews with real-life citizens of Israel and Gaza navigating messy boundaries in their homes and bedrooms against a background of geopolitical violence.

Collecting interviews conducted before the October 7 attack unleashed a new wave of bloody conflict, the book introduces fascinating individuals and couples who speak frankly about the transgressions that define their experiences with intimacy. The portrayals represent a diverse population, including an interfaith celebrity power couple, an Orthodox gynecologist, a young gay Muslim, a Palestinian American feminist, a Ukrainian-Israeli artist, and a Palestinian lesbian in a relationship with an Israeli soldier.

Through these candid conversations, recorded by Parent-Rachdi and illustrated with a warm touch by Deloupy, the authors humanize the people living in Israel and Gaza. As conflict wages around them, these ordinary citizens struggle with their all-too-human urges and desires that drive them to cross borders and boundaries in the name of love and sex.

Salomé Parent-Rachdi’s Love and Desire in the Promised Land is a non-fiction graphic novel, attempting to shine a light on the attitudes of Israelis and Palestinians toward sex and — often, whether the interviewer intended or not — each other. I didn’t count, but it mentions including equal numbers of Palestinians and Israelis, and equal numbers of women and men. It doesn’t include equal numbers of gay people and straight people, and no trans/intersex people that the interviewer is aware of (or tells us she’s aware of, anyway).

It’s overall a pretty wordy graphic novel, which makes sense, given it needs to represent people as closely as possible to how they actually presented themselves; cuts have to be made, but where and what you cut is so important, so I imagine it’s been conservative about that.

It reads as something from a whole different time, in many ways: it mentions the events of 7th October, as part of the framing, but the interviews were undertaken beforehand, and the art shows places that no longer exist. It’s weird to read these interviews and find quite likeable people (everyday normal people, but likeable enough inasfar as you get to know them), and then discover that post-7th October they took up views that suggest that they’re pro-genocide.

The art style is… fine. Not entirely to my taste, but workable and consistent throughout.

It leaves a weird feeling and one I found was interesting… if only the two sides could see each other this way, you feel like you could hope they’d see the humanity and the common ground. Clearly we’re beyond that, but from this distance it works to put faces on both sides of the conflict, even though it’s uncomfortable, even when you still can’t agree with them.

Rating: 3/5 (“liked it”)