Writer Etgar Keret (Ramat Gan, Israel, 58) had planned to deliver his ninth book of short stories to his publisher on October 8, 2023. He had picked the date at random: he produces one every seven years or so and sets himself a firm deadline. Two days earlier, he told his wife, Shira Geffen — the screenwriter and filmmaker who wrote the film Jellyfish (2007), directed by Keret and awarded at Cannes — that he felt the book had become too dark because of the personal and political events that had marked him in preceding years: his mother’s death, the coronavirus pandemic, a herniated disc, the return to power of Benjamin Netanyahu with the most right-wing government in the country’s history… His wife advised him to reread it calmly the next day and, if he still felt that way, to ask the publisher for an extension.

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A tank — which isn’t really a tank — could be the national monument of Somaliland, a country that isn’t really a country. The armored vehicle, which rests beside Highway 1 in the city of Hargeisa, depicts what was once a weapon of war that rolled in from Somalia in 1988, in order to prevent this territory in the Horn of Africa from gaining independence. Today, the tank is part of the scenery in the capital of a land that declared itself a republic 35 years ago.

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