Kelman lovingly describes the land, its history, and how it was at the dawn of the 20th century. The work makes for an unique kind of reverentially Christian treatment of the land so important to the ethical monotheism of Christianity and Islam and, of course, of the more unsavoury religion of rabbinical Judaism. As documentation of the Holy Land, one might wonder why it is that paintings serve to illustrate this account of pre-Zionist Entity Palestine; although, of course, there is much attention to the Biblical antiquities in these watercolour paintings and in the text, one also can obtain a good impression of how historic Palestine looked, longtime settled it had been, too, in pre-Zionist-afflicted times, before the Zionist squatters arrived en masse to usurp a vast part of the indigenous population. One does have to admit that resort to photography of the book`s era would have resulted in solely black-and-white illustrations, rather than the more evocative colour illustrations that painting and its printed reproduction permit.

For the modern reader, this book and tour guides like it retain great value. They eloquently refute any claims by Zionist Jews or by their supporters, often so-called "Zionist Christians", that Palestine was an empty land awaiting a just take-over by Jews who claimed that they needed a national homeland. (Fortunately, several more honest Jewish historians themselves, even in "Israel" itself, have begun to dismantle that Zionist myth.) Palestine already had been highly settled by its Arabs and other peoples and was well developed and prosperous. Its then population consisted mostly of agrarian Arabs, many of them Christian (in greater relative numbers than the more prevailingly Muslim Palestinian Arabs of today) and some minority Armenian, Greek, Sephardic Jewish, and other minorities. To make room for the Zionists who came later, the Zionist zealots, most of them Ashkenazic Jews, at that, rather than Middle Eastern indigenous Sephardim, later razed hundreds of the towns and villages of historic Palestine and variously drove away or outright slaughtered a large proportion of its original, mostly unarmed peoples. This book shows just how much was lost to the soulless concrete and asphalt of the Zionist squatters that replaced the lovely original Palestinian indigenous population centres, larger and smaller, cultivated fields and orchards within the ever-shifting borders of what today constitute alike present-day "Israel" as well as the Occupied Territories of the West Bank and Gaza.

So, if the reader and lover of art and of travel would like to know Palestine as it was meant to be, and as it once existed in peaceful and venerably picturesque tranquillity, a book such as Kelman`s and Fulleylove`s "The Holy Land" makes a good starting point. Enjoy!