Palestine
Joe Sacco
Seattle, WA USA: Fantagraphics, 2024
Hardback 300pp RRP: $49.99
Reviewer: Robert Dixon, January 2025
Joe Sacco’s Palestine is a collection into a single volume of nine Black-and-White comics about day-to-day life in occupied Palestine. The comics were composed following a two-month visit to the West Bank and Gaza Strip in late 1991 and early 1992, where he conducted over 100 interviews with Palestinians and with a small number of Israelis. Although the nine comics were published by Fantagraphics from 1993 to 1995, they were not collected together and published in book form until 2001. Since then, the book has gone through dozens of printings and has been sold in large numbers following the Hamas-led attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, and Israel’s response. This is despite the fact that the book describes in some detail daily life in the West Bank and Gaza in the early 1990s and does not cover any of the events which have taken place since then. This most recent (2024) edition of the book includes a very interesting two-page afterword by Israeli journalist Amira Hass which was written in 2024. It also reprints a five-page introduction to the work by Palestinian-American academic Edward Said which was written in 2001. Palestine has been favourably compared to Art Spiegelman's Pulitzer Prize-winning Maus and, like Maus, is sometimes set as required reading in schools and universities.
The book itself is best described as a ‘graphic novel’ mainly because to describe it as a collection of comics is very misleading especially if we think of a comic as a series of small drawings or ‘panels’, each the same size, running side by side across the page of a newspaper. This book is slightly larger than A4 size with only a small number of drawings (sometimes only one, but usually two to five) on each page so the ‘panels’ are much larger and more variable in size than a comic strip we might see in a newspaper. The drawings appear on over 280 pages of the book and are very detailed and extremely well done - the image of the front cover of the book is quite representative of the quality of the drawings. The text which accompanies the drawings is handwritten but it is very easy to read. Also, where the drawings depict the author talking with one of his interviewees it is very easy to tell who is ‘speaking’ and the order in which the lines of text are to be read. Most panels show us the author together one or more of his interviewees and the setting (often a room inside a house or on the side of a road) where the conversation is taking place. It is easy to tell which of the characters in each panel is the author as he is one of the few people depicted in the book who wears glasses. The interviewees describe the way they are (often mis-) treated by Israeli settlers and especially the IDF. As he moves from one person or one family to another, he (and his interviewees) have to contend with checkpoints, identity checks, curfews and occasional attacks by Israeli settlers. The Palestinians he meets talk of imprisonments, torture, army raids, injuries and deaths. These events form the basis for many of the illustrations in the book. Overall there is a clear message of a people being oppressed and humiliated with little hope of there being any change for the better. Other than stone-throwing there is little treatment in the book of attacks on the IDF or Israeli civilians by Palestinians. The last chapter of the book covers the author’s (brief) time in Tel Aviv. When an Israeli tells him that he ‘should be seeing our side of the story too’, he responds that living in the US he ‘heard nothing but the Israeli side most all my life’.
I recommend this work to anyone who would like to learn more about the background to the current situation in the West Bank and Gaza.
Born in Malta in 1960 Joe Sacco lived in Australia for ten years before moving with his family to the United States at the age of twelve. Saccos’ comics reporting has appeared in The New York Times, Time magazine, Harper's and The Guardian.
The RUSI – Vic Library is most grateful to the publisher for making this work available for review.
