By Joe Sacco
Publisher: Jonathon Cape
ISBN: 9780224069823
Palestine’s always been one of those books that I missed at the time and meant to catch up on, but I’d not realised quite how much time had passed since its publication. The author, Joe Sacco, is a cartooning journalist and during late 1991 and early 1992 he spent two months with the Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Through the people he met and the experiences he had, he then went on to draw a comic to relate the stories of his visit. Because this isn’t a work of fiction it doesn’t follow the usual narrative rules, and in many places it’s frank and disturbing stuff, all the more so because you know that there isn’t some hero who’s going to put everything right by the final page.
What makes it even more harrowing is that we’re over twenty years later now, and the bleak and miserable existence of the average Palestinian is no better now than it was then.
It would be easy to think of this book as an anti-Israeli book, but it’s not that at all. It tries to understand the situation from an outsider’s point of view, and while both sides tell their tales of why things are as they are the natural conclusion is that one side has been getting the rawest of deals for a very, very long time, and in any other context would be roundly condemned. Interview after interview charts the experiences of the ordinary people subjected to a military presence that leaves them little rights and little comeback. People turfed off of their land, farmers who have had their olive orchards cut down by soldiers, random arrests and long detentions on the off-chance it may yield a result, and brutal beatings, torture and deaths a-plenty. It doesn’t paint the Palestinians as an innocent and blameless people as there are elements that challenge the way their people are being forced to live, but all that makes you wonder is how you’d behave if soldiers turfed you out of your own home.
Possibly the most difficult part of the book is the woman who loses two sons and a husband in a short space of time for no other reason than they were in the wrong place at the wrong time, and her treatment by the Israeli military and the authorities is simply heartbreaking. I’ve not read something this powerful since Maus, and there’s more than a smidgen of irony that that book is all about the persecution of the Jews during WWII.
Joe Sacco’s work isn’t going to resolve a difficult, bitter and complicated situation, but it does raise awareness and that’s why it’s as important a book now as it was twenty years ago. It’s a book everyone should read and learn something from.
And if you liked that: Read Maus
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