Love and Desire in the Promised Land: The Private Lives of Israelis and Palestinians. writer: Salome Parent-Rachi. artist: Zac Deloupy. translation: Jenna Allen. Seattle: Fantagraphics. 2026. 160pp. $24.95.
Review by Paul Buhle
Comics reader, please suspend your immediate thoughts, even or especially the most horrible and apocalyptic ones, about the current wars in the Middle East. Imagine yourself, for a moment, to be a young person in Israel or the West Bank, striving to live out a life that despite everything remains in some ways near-universal for a young person almost anywhere. That is: sexual desires and active encounters, often subrosa and undisclosed to surrounding older generations.
Parent-Rachi is a young French journalist, a sometime correspondent-journalist writing from Israel but also a creator of podcasts and collaborator on documentaries related to sexual practices. Deloupy, born in 1968 and twenty years younger, is a free-lance illustrator who earned some much-deserved fame by working under Marjane Satrapi on the 2023 anthology Femme, Vie, Liberté.
To say that the art here is wonderfully expressive would be a gross underestimate. The street scenes, the bedroom scenes, the close-ups of bars and even prison cells are captured in subdued tones, perhaps to bring a quiet clarity to the conflicts on hand or only implied.
Love and Desire appeals to this reviewer not only as a brilliantly-drawn comic but as an exercise in interviews, not example life-stories but not far away, the stories of sexual encounters that reveal much more. I feel the need to add that I have guided oral history projects and conducted hundreds of interviews, if mostly with old people and generally not concerning their sex lives. Still, the personal narrative is the key to the interview. They are wonderful here, in their candor and their careful descriptions.
In their Introduction to the book, Parent-Rachdi and Deloupy stress that the book was finished in late 2023, and if so much has happened—much of it dreadful, almost beyond words—so much still remains. An important preface by Vincent Lemire, renowned scholar of the region and co-author with Chistophe Gaultier of The History of Jerusalem, offers “Transgressing the Conflict,” the same message. Everything is messy, perhaps nothing more than breaking old bonds, yet some things remain hopeful, obviously including the wish and the willingness to transgress in order to find love.
So we have the writer herself on the streets in Israel, a normal workday, young people crossing busy streets and talking to the illustrator as they embark on the saga of Lana, 34, in Tel Aviv. She’s a Palestinian whose best friend, Jewish, signed her up for “a dating life,” (p.6). She met a young man on the beach and confessed her identity on their third date. Not a peacenik, her new lover was both too distant to understand her complicated self-identity, and too distant from her community. But they struggle with the complications and things work out somehow. There’s a happy Jewish/Palestinian ending here that I leave for the reader to discover.
In the meantime,the book transitions to a Famous Couple story, with a handsome male star of several Israeli film and television series, a renowned singer to boot, with his partner, the very first Arab presenter in Hebrew, on Israeli television. Critical of Hamas but also of the Israeli PM, she has enemies galore, and also admirers everywhere. Their families, after serious doubts, accept the celebrity pair, and so apparently does eighty percent of the public expressing opinions. The twenty percent remain bitterly opposed for their various tribal reasons, but life goes on.
Not everything is nearly that pleasant. The number of Israeli/Palestinian marriages remains astonishingly few; and sexual encounters must surely add up to thousands unrecorded. Often, one partner is a French national, confirming perhaps our old stereotype of the Romantic French!
Collective, willful ignorance about sex along with their various issues and problems of conception cloud the lives of many young people, especially those in deeply religious communities. Gay sex among the Haredim, the strictly Orthodox Jewish community, seems at first glance almost unthinkable but, of course, it happens anyway.
Our artist and writer follow documentary photo-journalist Tanya Habjouqa through Ramallah, and by asking questions she finds a lot of intense personal conflict. More than a few women have two lives, one on the street and another at night, including the bedroom. The “good behavior” of women, Palestinian or Israeli, is often “policed” whenever they appear in public.
Relative open-mindedness is not likely enough for a gay man in Gaza, where such real relationships prove daunting. The easiest thing to do is to leave, as another of her interview subjects, a man married to a Palestinian widow of the war, manages to do but only, by leaving for Jordan. He laments, not without reason, “there will always be new wars,” (p.97) and hopes that his adopted children can, at least, avoid the worst of them. Likewise, an intermarried couple seen here gives up, solving their problems by moving to France while another couple, experiencing their child born in a Tel Aviv hospital with a staff both Jewish and Palestinian, retains hopes. We can hope that they are still there, making a life under difficult circumstances.
The book nearly closes on a special part of the Israeli Jewish population, Russian immigrants, now more than a million, adding up to an amazing fifteen percent. A third live outside the religious definitions of Jewishness, according to the standards of the Rabbinate. They remain largely secular, as they were in the old Soviet Union, hoping for a better life by emigrating. A Russian woman has married a Nigerian, and like many other mixed couples, escape difficulties by making the marriage official in Cyprus. As a painter, she struggles with both the pervasive Israeli stereotype that women from Russia are probably prostitutes and racial stereotypes about people of color as common in Israel as anywhere in Europe or the US.
The last stories in Love and Desire in the Promised Land come back to the difficulties of crossing lines. That is, the odds against mutual understanding between populations that have been kept apart or kept themselves apart, for any reason, whether history, religion or exercise of military power. The intensity of the Middle Eastern conflicts creates yet more barriers.
Can engagement of one another among young people, obviously including sex of any type, smooth out the roughest parts and point toward something better? Perhaps we do not know yet. Let us hope that time is not running out.
It is no exaggeration to say that with Love and Desire in the Promised Land, the splendid work of Salomé Parent-Rachdi and Zae Deloupy have made a contribution to every reader. Fantagraphics, with its volumes by Joe Sacco and others, continues to open new worlds for comic art and ways for the mostly young readership to grapple with the troubled societies where they find themselves.
Paul Buhle is an American historian, who is (retired) Senior Lecturer at Brown University, author or editor of 35 volumes, including histories of radicalism in the United States and the Caribbean, studies of popular culture, and a series of nonfiction comic art volumes. He is the authorized biographer of C. L. R. James.
