*The First Lady of the State of Israel Prize for Hebrew Poetry | Maya Tevet Dayan | 6 Minutes on Friday | July 3, 2026*

This week, I heard for the first time about a group of teenagers who had found a piece of unclaimed landsomewhere in Europe, claimed it as their own, and then, despite the fact that it covered only about four acres, barely enough for a small residential neighborhood, submitted an application to the United Nations asking to be recognized as a country.

A country? I thought to myself. Why are they in such a hurry to become a country? But even before I'd finished asking myself that question, something began to stir in me. A new country. New laws. Something that belongs only to you. A fresh place where nothing is inevitable. No inherited traditions. No old rules. No obligations. A blank page.

And when I felt that familiar, pleasant shiver run down my spine, I dropped everything and went to see whether, in a world this crowded, there might still be places left that no one had claimed. Maybe I, too, could found some tiny little country. Why not? It might be no bigger than two houses standing side by side, but somehow that felt like something entirely different from simply buying real estate overseas. A country is another kind of story.

The first thing I discovered was that this is an actual phenomenon. Not a huge one, and of course the countries themselves aren't huge either. They're called micronations. Although individuals and small groups have declared them sovereign, none have ever been officially recognized by other countries or by the United Nations. Some are still tied up in legal disputes. Others simply declared independence unilaterally.

One of them is practically in our neighborhood, between Egypt and Sudan. It's called Bir Tawil, a stretch of desert roughly ten times the size of Tel Aviv that, because of an old border agreement, neither country officially claims. Then there's Liberland, along the Danube between Croatia and Serbia, a self-declared country built around minimal taxation and cryptocurrency, except that Croatia prevents anyone from actually settling there. There's also Sealand, which is really nothing more than an old offshore platform in the North Sea. Not exactly somewhere you'd want to spend the night, and yet it has a flag, unrecognized passports, postage stamps, a royal family, and even survived an attempted coup back in 1978.

Another micronation, Rose Island, was built in the 1960s on an artificial platform just beyond Italy's territorial waters, until Italy decided it had had enough and sent military forces to blow it up. And in Australia, one farmer declared his property the independent Principality of Hutt River, issuing coins, passports, and stamps for nearly fifty years before the project finally came to an end in 2020.

And there are many more. Most of them were never really meant to become actual countries. They began as artistic projects, political experiments, protests against governments, or simply out of a love for history, geography, and world-building. Many have constitutions, symbolic citizenship, stamps, currencies, and even thousands of registered "citizens" online. But almost none of them exercises real control over any territory.

The deeper I wandered into the world of micronations, the more I realized that what truly fascinated me wasn't the countries themselves. It was the courage to claim something no one had ever given you permission to take. These solitary people who woke up one morning and simply asked, "Why not?"

Of course, when we're talking about nations, land, and human lives, that's an extraordinarily dangerous question. That's not what I'm talking about. But when it comes to our own private lives, it's one of the most beautiful questions we can ask. Mainly because it's the opposite of the questions we're usually taught to ask ourselves: Who gave me permission? Am I good enough? Is this acceptable? Am I allowed? And then someone comes along and declares a kingdom in the middle of the sea. How is it that one tiny star dares?

There's something feminist here, too. To this day, most of the people who have founded micronations have been men. Here and there, women have served in leadership roles, and one was even known as a princess. But I couldn't stop thinking about the contrast. While men have often felt entitled to claim countries and territories, millions of women around the world are still fighting simply for the right to study, to own property, to enter certain professions, or even just to speak in their own voices.

And that brings me to something I'd like to share with you. This week, I received The First Lady of the State of Israel Prize for Hebrew Poetry, one of the most significant honors a poet can receive in Israel. When the First Lady called to tell me I'd won, I happened to be sitting on my bed folding laundry. After our warm conversation ended, I stayed there for a while, simply breathing. Because when you're a poet, most of the time you don't actually feel like one. No one appoints you. No ministry issues you a license. There's no office door you walk through every morning with a sign that says Poet. One day, you start writing. Another day, you send something out. Another day, you publish. In a sense, you simply claim a territory for yourself.

The little micronation you build as a poet has no land. It is a country inhabited by one woman and her voice. A place. And a little stretch of shelf in the world of books. For years, whenever organizers ask me before an event, "How should we introduce you?" I answer simply, "Poet." To the person on the other end of the phone, it hardly matters. They type it onto the flyer, announce it in the opening remarks, and then hand me the microphone. And every single time I take that microphone, I think to myself, Poet. Hmm. Yes. I believe that belongs to me.

But this week, the First Lady of Israel called. And somehow it felt a little like getting a call from the United Nations, suddenly recognizing the tiny micronation you'd claimed somewhere in the middle of the sea or on a forgotten patch of land. You didn't take it from anyone. You didn't steal it. You simply believed it was yours. And then you acted accordingly.

Maybe every work of art begins as a micronation. At first, only one person believes it exists. Then ten. Then another hundred. Just like a country, it requires borders. A boundary that says: This is my time. My language. One poem. Then another. One book. Then another. And then, this week, something remarkable happened. For one brief moment, the world marked on its map the place where I have already been living for years. It flickered. I saw it. And what a moment that was.

Then I took a deep breath, and of course, I finished folding the laundry.

Wishing all of us a shabbat shalom,

*Maya Tevet Dayan*