Palestine

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Garfield, Bob (November 14, 2003). Sacco's New War. WNYC / National Public Radio's On the Media. Archived from the original on August 23, 2004. "Sacco's New War (transcript)". On the Media. Archived from the original on January 22, 2005.

At a time when many claimed Palestinian people ‘did not exist’—as the former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir once put it—Sacco’s portrayal of life in the Occupied Territories is a resounding rejection of that idea. Palestinians did exist, they do exist, and they will continue to exist, as real people, with lives, jobs, families, in the never-ending limbo of occupation. The nine-issue comics series won a l996 American Book Award. It is now published for the first time in one volume, befitting its status as one of the great classics of graphic non-fiction. Some years later, when Palestine was released as a single volume, I was asked: “Who should we get to write an intro?” Palestine is a non-fiction graphic novel written and drawn by Joe Sacco about his experiences in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in December 1991 and January 1992. Sacco's portrayal of the situation emphasizes the history and plight of the Palestinian people, as a group and as individuals.He decided to be a reporter and did a journalism degree at the University of Oregon (he still lives in Portland). His early jobs, however, were so indescribably boring – he worked initially for the journal of the National Notary Association – that he soon decided he'd be better off working for himself. First, he set up his own comics magazine. Later, he had a staff job on the Comics Journal. As far as his own drawing and writing goes, his influences include George Orwell and – this makes such perfect sense – Bruegel. Because the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is a controversial political topic, Palestine’s reception was mixed. Within the pro-Israel camp, the novel was dismissed as unbalanced and slanderous. In many Near Eastern and Middle Eastern studies departments, Edward Said’s enthusiasm for Palestine opened up a space for it in the curriculum, which in turn opened the door for other forms of popular culture that touch on the stories of marginalized peoples. Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalists". Los Angeles Times. Archived from the original on November 11, 2014.

It isn’t about the suffering, terror or death that Israelis and Palestinians go through. It isn’t about who hate who more. It isn’t about who was here first.

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Gadassik, Alla and Sarah Henstra. "Comics (as) Journalism: Teaching Joe Sacco's Palestine to Media Students," in Teaching Comics and Graphic Narratives (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Company, 2012), pp.243–259. The kindly old lady and Holocaust survivor travelled to Israel and found what she was looking for. Joe travelled to the same place and found something completely different. A Smorgasbord of Anger, Pain and Poverty

You look at his drawings of hundreds of men sitting in a pen one day in 1956, under armed guard, no food, no water, their hands on their heads, and you could be looking at an equivalent atrocity at almost any time before or since, and in any number of places. "There are only so many ways you can skin a cat when it comes to screening people so you can kill them," says Sacco. "It was a horrific incident in and of itself but it is also representative of any number of other incidents, even if I'm reluctant to make direct comparisons myself." The response was immediate: “Citizens of Israel…We are at war and will win.” With these words the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared war on Hamas. This was much to the detriment of the Palestinian people, as has been seen across the world’s media in recent weeks. Sacco was born in Malta [1] on October 2, 1960. [2] [3] His father Leonard was an engineer and his mother Carmen was a teacher. [4] At the age of one, he moved with his family to Melbourne, Australia, [5] [1] where he spent his childhood until 1972, when they moved to Los Angeles. [2] [1] He began his journalism career working on the Sunset High School newspaper in Beaverton, Oregon. [6] While journalism was his primary focus, this was also the period of time in which he developed his penchant for humor and satire. He graduated from Sunset High in 1978.I feel like I should say something intelligent about the art, since this is after all a graphic novel, but I'm still finding my sea legs, as it were, on the books with pix. So here's a try: Sacco has an incredibly chaotic style, which really helped to create an immersive feeling. That said, though, there's practically just as much text as pictures, and at times I wondered why he chose to tell this story as a graphic novel, rather than just straight prose. There were plenty of illustrations that were particularly affecting, and times when the images did enhance the story it was paired with, but for the most part I think this could have been text-only without losing a whole lot. Like everybody else in the world I’ve tried to understand the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But it’s a horribly one-sided story in the Western media.

Simple. In Palestine by Joe Sacco, Palestinians aren’t the terrorists or victims that the mainstream Western media always portrays them as. They’re just people. Real people with jobs, families and pain.I don’t think the book, Palestine, can be made into a film. It’s too episodic. I’ve been approached a few times, but nobody has come to me with a legitimate way of making [it a] film. Although Palestine is both visually engaging and a labour of artistic love, at its heart lies a commitment to hard-edged journalism and a challenge to the objectivity of the Western (and particularly American) media: 'I came from the standpoint of "Palestinian equals terrorist". That's what filtered down in the course of watching the regular network news.' Sacco makes no pretence of the observer's invisibility and depicts his own initial disbelief of reported detentions and torture. Nor does he shy away from revealing his own ambiguities as a visiting Western journalist. (As a street demonstration threatens to erupt into violence, we see him bolstering his confidence by repeating to himself: 'It's good for the comic, it's good for the comic.') He walks through the streets of Nabulus, dodging gangs of teenage Israeli settler’s touting automatic weapons. Reading [ Palestine]...you're astounded by the wealth of human voices, the literally warts-and-all passion of every side of the conflict. A landmark of journalism and the art form of comics. Based on several months of research and an extended visit to the West Bank and Gaza Strip in the early 1990s, this is a major work of political and historical nonfiction.