I remember hearing once that the Yolngu people of Northern Australia had a clever system of border demarcation. It was a simple and clear system that left no room for misunderstandings about “mine” or “yours,” thus helping the people keep friendly relations over thousands of years.¹

In the Dreamtime, so they say, creator beings roamed the land, shaping and naming the landscape as they moved through it, creating places and people as they went. The people were given names and languages, stories and responsibilities that would forever connect them to specific places and to each other. Neighboring people would share mega-stories about the same Spirit Beings and would come together for the retelling of these stories. The only way to fulfill the ceremony was to listen as each person told the segment assigned to their custodianship upon their birth. But the Spirit Beings were even smarter when it came to the issue of borders. They would enter the land speaking one language and emerge across the valley speaking another. The people who spoke these languages, and knew themselves as inseparable from that valley or hill, would know exactly where was the line that separated them in peace.

It was in Australia that I learnt about my strong heart-connection with the land of my birth, reading the words of another Aborigine describing the same interrelatedness between people, land and national myth, this time in a very familiar language. “Aboriginal Australia,” he said, “is made up of a series of “promised lands”, each with its own 'chosen people'.”² My mind raced back and forth, to the “promised land” I know so well, to the Carmel Mountain where I was born (where the Prophet Elijah stood looking down to the valley), and back to the Spirit Beings roaming the Australian landscape, shaping, naming… and then to the Bible where the stories of my people are told in the language I was given upon my birth… and Elijah, once again, showing his loyalty to God.

Thus it was in Australia that the so-familiar words of “Promised Land” and “Chosen People” received a new meaning, renewing my sense of place in Israel. But alas, I could not escape the story of Elijah, the one story the Bible tells about my beloved Mount Carmel, with Elijah, his eyes on fire, slaying 400 prophets of the Ba’al… How can I love the land through these stories? With so much blood shed into the land, so much war, conquest, cruelty? And nowadays, even more so, here are my neighbors the Palestinians, and I cannot confirm my Carmel-connection through birth, myth, people and language and in the same breath deny their same chords of the heart singing for the same place, just because it is the same place, just because someone says that there is no room, that supposedly we are enemies.

Because we are not. Across historical times, of all the peoples that lived and loved this place, only two are left. And we both tell the travels of our Ancestor Beings through the same places, same names, just the pronunciation differs. If our shared God did not give us clear borders, if our stories relate to the same space rather to adjacent plots, maybe we are meant to Share the Land.  

For 120 years we have tried to exclude each other; some amongst us still threaten to transfer Arabs or throw Jews into the sea. For the past 20 years we started accommodating each other, saying, “the land is mine, but you can stay here”, or, “the land is mine, but I am willing to give you part of it.” But this will not do, because peace is not only the decision to stop fighting, it is the capacity to handle conflicts with empathy, nonviolence and creativity.³ Empathy could mean accepting each other, accepting that you love this land as much as I do, and allowing this acknowledgement to shape reality. When this is the case, we will find a way to live together, or side by side, just as all humans are meant to live – in freedom and equity. Once our hearts and minds name this as truth, our hands will begin shaping a different reality.

[1] Nancy M. Williams (1986) The Yolngu and their Land: A system of land tenure and the fight for its recognition. Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies.

[2] David Turner, in Deborah Bird Rose (1996) Nourishing Terrains. Canberra: North Australian Research Unit, Australian National University, p. 9.