Book Review by Avshalom Halutz, Ha’aretz
About 25 years ago, when I was visiting London for the first time, a black-and-white comic emblazoned with the name “Palestine” caught my eye at a small bookstore.
I had grown up in a lefty Israeli household, with parents who dragged me to protests against the occupation. At school, meanwhile, most of my friends were vocal against Jewish settlements in the West Bank. Yet that word in capital letters, “Palestine,” almost felt alien and hostile to me.
I was also really intrigued by it, so I decided to purchase a few issues – which were beautifully drawn. In many ways, even though I’d grown up in Israel and had lived there my entire life, reading those comics taught me more about my country than I had ever learned until then. The things I read about events in the West Bank, in refugee camps and in Gaza – as well as the depiction of life in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv – really opened my eyes, as ridiculous as that may sound.
Actually, though, first I was angry about this guy Joe Sacco, who wrote and drew the comics. I thought he must be some kind of antisemite who hates all the Jews, and I must be committing some kind of sin by reading this anti-Israel propaganda.
But then things started to make sense. After the initial rejection, I started to think about the things we hardly ever talk about here. The things we know but choose to ignore. About history. About our neighbors. About ourselves. Sacco’s drawings of soldiers, settlers, poor Palestinians and Israelis living a carefree life will forever stay etched in my head.
What I didn’t know about “Palestine” at the time is that it was an important and influential comic book. A landmark of graphic journalism. That Sacco wrote it after visiting Israel and the occupied territories during the first intifada in the late 1980s.
It would become a book I would return to whenever I was trying to organize my thoughts about life here. Me and many, many others.
Sacco dared show the occupation in all its raw, ugly detail. He dared to draw it, line by line, one impoverished camp after another. He also dared show us left-wing Israelis as most of us are. Our hypocrisy, our lack of true care for the Palestinians, our indifference.
He managed to create an entire universe that could show you this place from all angles. The bigger picture it offers is one of its major strengths.
Biblical exegesis
Since the war in Gaza broke out 14 months ago, Sacco, now 65, has returned to the subject of Palestine. He had already revisited Gaza for his historical 2009 graphic novel “Footnotes on Gaza,” having previously spent time capturing the conflict in the former Yugoslavia.
Cover of Sacco’s 2009 graphic novel on Gaza
From his home in Portland, Oregon, the Maltese-American artist created new material based on his thoughts on the current war. In order to be able to bring the work to readers as quickly as possible, he published it online as soon as a page was ready – on The Comics Journal website.
This week, the printed edition of those collected pages was published by Fantagraphics under the title “War on Gaza.” The result is nothing less than an essential, painful, brave and resonant work, possibly the most important work to be published thus far on this war.
In it, Sacco veers away from graphic journalism and offers an almost biblical exegesis for our times. His book becomes a searing commentary on the war, from U.S. President Joe Biden spewing out baby heads from his imagination, to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu dropping bombs onto civilians from the palms of his hands.
Sacco is criticizing America almost as much as he is criticizing Israel. He brings up ancient Athens and World War II, creating fascinating connections between historical events in an effort to place this war – and the mass murder Israel continues to commit – as a low point that may teach us a depressing lesson on humanity as a whole.
It was a privilege to be able to interview Sacco about his latest work, and I started by asking him about his decision to publish the book online. Did it come from the realization that something horrible was taking place, I wondered, and that there was no time to waste.
“Yes. Normally I like to take my time and draw carefully, but in this case I wanted to get my thoughts out immediately,” he says in an email interview. “I wrote and drew rapidly. I was finishing up a book at the time, but the drawings about Gaza became a side project that often muscled out my other commitments.”
From Joe Sacco’s “War on Gaza.”Credit: Joe Sacco/Fantagraphics
You made the decision not to draw the most graphic horrors we see taking place – namely, dead babies and children. In a way, I thought you were trying to hint at it with the drawings of baby heads coming out of Biden’s head. Was that done on purpose? Why did you decide to censor some of the horrors wrought by Israel in Gaza?
“I wasn’t censoring anything. First, images of burnt and mutilated bodies in Gaza are all over the internet – you can easily access video of bodies being pulled from the rubble if you want. So I didn’t feel a need to draw what people could already see on their phones.
“Second, I was revolted by what I was seeing and I simply wanted to avoid drawing it. Even before this war, I was at the point of avoiding, if at all possible, drawing graphic violence.”
The book is almost as critical of America as it is of Israel. You even touch on the financial struggles of Americans. There is also self-blame. Do you think Israel has changed America? Or maybe the other way around? To be honest, I was a little surprised you didn’t mention the American wars in the Middle East and Asia. Can you talk more about your thoughts as an American watching this massacre unfolding?
From Joe Sacco’s “War on Gaza.”Credit: Joe Sacco / Fantagraphics
How much does your age play into this book? Is there general disappointment with humanity? The mentions of your mother’s wartime memories and Athens’ cruelty made me think that this is a general look at humanity at its worst.
“Journalism as I know it is often about describing who did what to whom, on what date and for what immediate reason. It’s true, over time I’ve started to think more of humanity as a whole: who we are as a species, and what the psychological and neurological reasons are for why we do the things we do. When we are at our worst, we are quite adept at justifying our horrifying actions.
“Perhaps those things will come back to haunt us. Perhaps we’ll shrug them off and walk our children to school thinking we are upstanding people. We are very troubling creatures.”
“Palestine” came after a couple of months traveling around this area, in which you managed to learn more about this place than most Israelis do their entire lives. This time around, of course, you couldn’t be in Gaza. So is this book also a reaction to traditional media and a comment on the art of comics, and what place it has in a reality in which we are shown horrors on social media daily?
“On the Palestinian issue, the U.S. mainstream media is mostly hopeless, but now there are enough independent journalists to help give a curious person some understanding of other perspectives about the region. But I wasn’t trying to situate my Gaza drawings against or in contrast to the traditional media. I felt I had to respond in some way, but it took weeks to get my thoughts to congeal. What finally got me drawing was a friend who wrote to me from Khan Yunis [in southern Gaza], pleading with me to ‘lift up’ my voice. That was the point I put pen to paper.”
Unlike “Palestine,” this is no longer straight-up graphic journalism. Can you elaborate on that? You include a lot of fantastic imaginary images that constantly make the reader feel that this is some kind of ‘end of days’ with Gaza becoming hell, a place detached from what life should be.
“Israel has not allowed any foreign journalists into Gaza [except] for its own purposes and under the strict supervision of the Israel Defense Forces. I prefer to report and to interview people and let them speak for themselves – but the chance of me being let into Gaza was nil.
“My only alternative was to turn to the essay format and to reach back to my satirical roots and approach the war from that corner. Gaza has been turned into a hell, yes, so if my comics reflect that in some small, abstract way – good.
“As for the ‘end of days,’ I think what’s ended is the fiction that we live in a world of human progress and greater enlightenment. I get the feeling now that all bets are off. The old rules are gone. What are the new ones?”
I thought that in some parts, you chose to connect to the traditional superhero comic aesthetic. There are all-powerful villains, events that seem inhuman. Was that a deliberate choice?
“No, I didn’t think about superheroes. I seldom think of superheroes or supervillains. I just see sociopaths with a hell of a lot of power at their disposal.”
There is a powerful message to Israel in the book: You may not pay a price now, but history will judge you. History will never forget. How do you think history should remember this? How should it remember Biden?
“Yes, history will judge you – if that matters. History will judge the United States as well. Perhaps America lives under the illusion that it can still lecture the rest of the world about values and rules and morality. It’s laughable. An arrest warrant should have been issued [by the International Criminal Court] for Biden as well. If Netanyahu is a war criminal, so is Biden.”
Were you worried that the drawings of Nazi planes in the book might anger readers, as you are daring to compare Israel to the Nazis?
“Why should I worry about the anger of readers in this regard? The Nazis bombed Malta in World War II. That is a historical fact. They bombed my mother and father when they were young. I was relating the trauma inflicted on my mother, which is still spooling out till this day, to the sickening comments of [far-right] Minister May Golan, who glories in the idea of future Palestinian trauma. If it were the French or the Australians that had bombed my mother, I would have shown French or Australian planes, and my point would still have held.”
You decided to mention the October 7 attack only in a few words. I believe you don’t mention the Israeli hostages. Can you elaborate on your thoughts about that day, and how they may have changed as the war went on?
“I was shocked by the scale of what happened on October 7, particularly to civilians. I have no doubt that Hamas committed atrocities. Israel did not give anyone much time to reflect on this before starting an overwhelming bombing campaign that was killing hundreds of Palestinians each day, and the killing is still going on more than 14 months later. Netanyahu was referencing Amalek, and other Israeli leaders were relentless in their dehumanization of the Palestinians. America was and is supporting Israel to the hilt.
“My main concern quickly turned to what was going to happen to the Palestinians as a people and to my friends in Gaza individually – and my role in their catastrophe. To me, it started to smell like genocide quite early on. I’m afraid those fears have been borne out.
Credit: Joe Sacco/Fantagraphics
“As for the Israeli captives, I sincerely hope they will be returned safely to their families as soon as possible. I can’t imagine what they or their families are enduring. But I can’t imagine what the Palestinians are enduring in Israeli prisons either. There are thousands of them. Some have been tortured to death. I didn’t mention them in my comics either.”
In “Palestine,” you introduced us to two Israeli women, Naomi and Keren, who are archetypal leftist Israelis, contradicting themselves and talking in circles about the occupation. In the new book, you show the Israelis who went out to protest against the judicial coup but were too blind to see that you cannot ask for democratic values only for yourself while also occupying another people. The blindness has only gotten worse since the war began. You show soldiers and politicians, but don’t directly blame the Israeli public in the book for the horrors in Gaza. Why is that?
“In fact, I mention the lamentably high approval the Israeli public has had for its armed forces’ ruthless actions in Gaza. But I’ve never thought of democracy as a moral system – just a political one. Democracies can commit mass murder. They often have. But one thing we can say about democracies is that, technically speaking, the people, as sovereign, are responsible for whom they put into office and, ultimately, for what actions their representatives take. So, you are responsible. And I am responsible. We might go on with our lives, and there might never be any consequences for us personally for what we let happen in Gaza. But let’s see. We might live to regret what we’ve done.”
Goya’s “The Third of May 1808.”Credit: Francisco Goya, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Your book actually made me think of Goya’s war paintings – his late work showing the worst of humanity and how that never seems to truly change.
“Goya’s ‘The Third of May 1808’ poses a question we might never answer.”
Joe Sacco: War On Gaza
Publisher: Fantagraphics (17. Dezember 2024)
ISBN-13: 979-8875000904
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