What reporter, setting out to cover the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, has not dreamed of avoiding the beaten track? Salomé Parent-Rachdi, who was correspondent in Israel and the Palestinian Territories from 2017 to 2020, takes up the challenge by exploring a little-discussed dimension of this drama. With the designer Zac Deloupy, she sneaks into the intimacy of sixteen characters who have agreed to reveal a part of their sentimental life to them.
Ultra-Orthodox Jews, religious or secular Zionists, Ashkenazim or Sephardim, Palestinians from Israel, the West Bank or Gaza, they are separated by geographical, identity or religious barriers but nonetheless share the same thirst for love and freedom. . “What interests me,” confides the journalist, “is when desire pushes one to the ultimate transgression: to free oneself from the rules of one’s group in order to offer oneself to others or to emancipate oneself.” From Jerusalem to Gaza via Nablus or Ramallah, the authors sketch in successive strokes the cartography of temptations, taboos and tensions which govern these sentimental lives. Because there, everything, including and especially love, is political.
On the beach in Tel Aviv, we meet Lana, a blonde, blue-eyed Arab Israeli who has chosen to escape the conservatism of her community by exploring her sexuality with young Jewish men without ever revealing anything about her origins to them – for fear of break the spell. At a café terrace in Jerusalem, we listen to the confidences of Avi, a young ultraorthodox who broke with his family to throw himself headlong into discovering women. From his distant exile, a young Palestinian from Gaza recounts his youth spent hiding a homosexuality that society does not tolerate well and that Hamas represses mercilessly. Another, who remained in the enclave, recounts how he found the love and happiness of becoming a father by marrying a widowed woman – which is also not very well regarded.
We discover even more unexpected stories, like that of Samira, a Palestinian from Jaffa, who lived a passionate romance with an Israeli military intelligence officer for four years – until this split became unbearable for her. Or that of Jean-Marc, who describes himself as a “religious Zionist from the liberal fringe”. Always determined to have children, this forty-year-old searched for a long time in vain for the woman of his life, before knocking late in life at the door of a marriage agency like no other. After several unsuccessful meetings, she put him in touch with Einat, a secular architect from Tel Aviv. At first glance, almost everything separates them. Yet together they signed a “co-parenting” contract and are attempting to have a child through IVF, whom they will raise separately but in close partnership. Their story, notes Salomé Parent-Rachdi, illustrates the paradoxes of an Israeli society “very religious and conservative on certain aspects, and at the same time ultra-open on others.”
The choice to give his investigation the form of a comic strip, rather than that of an essay, was inspired by his publisher. “Thinking about it, and after getting to know Deloupy, I thought it would be the best format to show and understand this very fragmented universe,” explains the journalist, whose character appears throughout the work to link the stages of this “road trip”. The designer, who had previously published Love story à l’Iranienne and lent his pencil to the collective album Femme, Vie, Liberté, under the leadership of Marjane Satrapi, accompanied her to Israel and the Palestinian Territories in order to immerse yourself in places and meet certain characters. His drawing accurately reproduces the light and shadows of this land full of contrasts.
The album opens, the day after the massacres of October 7, with a telephone conversation between the two authors in the grip of dizziness. In this tragic and despairing context, would it not be inappropriate to publish an investigation into such a seemingly trivial subject? Flipping through these pages, we say to ourselves that their gallery of sensitive and funny mini-portraits is timely. It reveals little-known shades and illuminates areas of humanity that nestle in the smallest folds of a land saturated with hatred.
Love, sex and the promised land, Salomé Parent-Rachdi and Zac Deloupy, Les Arènes, 160 pages, 24 euros.