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Footnotes in Gaza: A Graphic Novel

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The genre/form known generically as "graphic novels" has exploded across the publishing industry over the last five years or so. While most of this is fiction, there is a rich vein of autobiography, and a few other experiments with history and biography. What Joe Sacco has been doing since well before this trend emerged, is graphic journalism. He is a foreign correspondent, albeit one who works in cartoon panels rather than the pure written or spoken word.

This latest book of his is his biggest and most ambitious. His first book, Palestine, came out around 15 years ago and was an astonishing look at the lives of Palestinian life in the occupied territories and back into the start of the first intifada, with flashbacks to 1948. He then spent some harrowing time in Bosnia in the mid-1990s, resulting in his books Safe Area Goradze and The Fixer, which are vividly raw look at the horrors of that conflict. In 2001, he returned to Gaza with fellow journalist Chris Hedges (War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning), looking into a reported massacre from the time of the 1956 war that he had seen mentioned in another Noam Chomsky's Fateful Triangle. A few lines in a U.N. Report from the era subsequently sparked his interest in another incident in Gaza, so he returned in 2003 to try and track down the truth of that incident and see what role, if any, it played in the collective memory of the town.

What results is a sprawling, complex, multifaceted work that demands attention and engagement from the reader. Broken up into short sections/chapters/scenes of a few pages, it tells the story of the 1956 Suez Crisis, the Khan Younis massacre and "incident" in nearby Rafah at the same time, and Sacco's own contemporary quest to trace survivors of both and record their oral histories, against a background Israeli army destruction of Palestinian houses along the border of Gaza. It's a challenging mix of his own observations, quotes from historical documents, eyewitness accounts, and more -- all of which combine into a sad story of how quickly time can erase the past.

Unfortunately, whether or not you find the book compelling probably depends on your existing views toward Palestinian-Israeli relations. Readers sympathetic to the plight of Palestinians will find in the book yet further evidence of past Israeli atrocities and contemporary Israeli brutality. Readers sympathetic to Israel will seize upon discrepancies in the memories of those recalling events 50 years past, the lack of an irrefutable paper trail, and Sacco's positioning the story from the Palestinian point-of-view, to dismiss the work as a smear job. Of course, neither reading is complete, and part of the whole point of the book is to demonstrate how time takes its toll objective truth.

Personally, I'm not sure what steps Sacco could have taken to placate those demanding the "Israeli side" of the two incidents: perhaps placed a newspaper ad saying "Were you involved in massacring Palestinians in Gaza in 1956? If so, please contact me so I can make your involvement a public part of the historical record." However, it does seem a little odd that he doesn't give the unit numbers or anything like that for the Israeli army forces involved. There are also one or two points in his recreation of the story where some officers and possibly foreigners take steps to mitigate the brutality, and I wished that more archival detective work had been done to try and track down these figures. It's not clear to me whether he tried and the IDF archives just didn't have that material, or what. However, ultimately, it seems pretty clear that some despicable actions were taken against unarmed civilians, including murder. It's telling to me that at the time, a few opposition members in the Knesset attempted to raise inquires into the incidents and were blocked.

Graphically, the book is another Sacco masterpiece -- from detailed facial portraits of those he interviewed, to several stunning two-page spreads of sweeping scope from a raised perspective. The ramshackle feel of the towns and refugee camps of the 1956 period stands in stark visual contrast to hustling, bustling, built-up modern Gaza. Sacco's hand-lettering isn't the easiest to read, and here it's chopped up into so many small boxes that it can be a bit of a chore to read. But this is a minor quibble for a book that is so amazingly immersive. I've lived throughout the Middle East and have been to the West Bank, Gaza, and Israel, and Sacco captures the urban and natural landscape wonderfully. The one disappointment is the cover, which is very bland and doesn't give much of a sense of the contents.

If you have any interest in the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, or the present-day situation in Gaza, I definitely recommend picking this up and challenging yourself to grapple with it. The format and discursive style offer a different lens on events and issues that will always be controversial. Even if you disagree with the approach or perspective, I think there's a lot of humanity display in the pages, and that alone is worth engaging with.

Sacco's graphic novel allows readers to see Gaza present and past for what it really is, we're not fooled by the normal transgression of events like people celebrating the holidays or writing their application statements
that Gaza is like any other place on this planet. Gaza Is Israel's modern day Warsaw ghetto. Gaza is Israel's ant farm where the food supply is strained and in some cases like last year's war on Gaza, Israel set the
UNWRA storage facilities ablaze. Israel and its watchtowers are the maniacal child whose joy is to step on the ants and destroy their natural day to day activities. Israel's policy in the Gaza strip are set by madmen
who have lost all touch with their humanity. Where are they going with this and how far will they go is quite clear for anyone who reads Sacco's graphic novel.

In a decades-long conflict, the details often get buried beneath the rubble of unending strife. Unfortunately, buried along with those details are the lives, sufferings, and losses of real human beings. In this intricately rendered and heart wrenching tome, graphic novelist/journalist and PALESTINE author Joe Sacco unearths one such historical footnote, recreating it through the eyes of those who survived.

Amid the 1956 Suez crisis, Israeli soldiers killed a large number (the exact figure is, of course, disputed) of Palestinian refugees from Gaza's Khan Younis and Rafah camps. According to a UN report, 275 Palestinians died in a November Israeli operation in Khan Younis; around the same time, scores of men were shot in Rafah.

FOOTNOTES provides the historical context for these incidents mainly through interviews with Israeli historian Mordechai Bar-On--General Moshe Dayan's personal assistant during the Suez crisis--and an unnamed Palestinian fedayee who took part in raids against Israel. Illustrating the contents of these interviews, Sacco sets the scene: a cycle of fedayeen raids and Israeli retaliation; Egypt's arms deal with Soviet-satellite Czechoslovakia; Nasser's dramatic nationalization of the Suez Canal; and the tripartite collusion between Israel, France, and Britain to gain control of the Suez.

Though he painstakingly researches the official documentation of the Khan Younis and Rafah incidents, most of the book comes from oral history interviews conducted with survivors and witnesses. FOOTNOTES tells not only their stories, but the story of Sacco's experience of getting those narratives. Interspersed with the oral histories are scenes of daily life, particularly during Sacco's March 2003 visit to Gaza. We experience his frustration with the fallibility of his sources, who are prone to forgetting things or going on tangents. We witness the large-scale demolition of Palestinian homes along the Egyptian border--part of Israel's effort to disrupt smuggling networks--and the Palestinian reaction to the start of the Iraq War. The book also offers us a glimpse into the grinding poverty of life in the Strip.

FOOTNOTES' major drawback is its one-sidedness. Sacco provides the official Israeli accounts of the Rafah incident and the home demolitions, but these appear--ironically--as a footnote, relegated to the back of the book. Entirely absent are first-person narratives from Israelis who were there. Since the Israeli documents paint a very different picture of what happened, such narratives would have added credibility either by telling a conflicting side of the story or by confirming the Palestinian testimonies. They would have also allowed readers to glean something about why these shootings happened.

The graphic novel format makes for a unique reading experience, one that is more immersive than a text with words alone. One becomes absorbed in each panel, from two-page panoramas of the camps to the expressive faces of Sacco's interviewees. The combination of Sacco's remarkable 400 pages of illustrations and the first-person accounts allow him to dredge both incidents out of the impersonal footnotes and restore their human realness.

"Well, I'm a newspaperman at heart, and for me it's never been a term of disparagement. A newspaperman wants the facts, the definitive version, not a bunch of `on the other hands,' and `possibilities,' or even `probabilities,'" writes Joe Sacco in Footnotes in Gaza: A Graphic Novel (December 2009, Metropolitan Books), a moving exploration of two brutal incidents in November 1956 during the Suez Canal Crisis, when Britain, France and Israel faced Egypt in the "Tripartite Collusion."

Fighting began on October 29 and followed Egypt's decision in July to nationalize the Suez Canal, after the withdrawal of an offer by Britain and the United States to fund the building of the Aswan Dam, which was in response to Egypt formally recognizing the People's Republic of China (during a period of mounting tensions between China and Taiwan).

In 389 chunky pages of drawings and text, Sacco - through blowing dust and debris off the hidden past, interviews and research on currently available documents - delves into the Israeli military incursions into Khan Younis and Rafah refugee camps in the Gaza Strip after routing the Egyptian army through merging the past with the present and by reaching out to a number of historical signposts. The disturbing facts and theories surrounding the beatings, shootings and collaborators when the Egyptian-ruled area was briefly occupied by Israeli forces are accentuated by Sacco's observations as he strides across the bridge of official pronouncements to the truth.

"Well, like most footnotes, they dropped to the bottom of history's pages, where they barely hang on," writes Sacco. "While we feverishly dig away at 1956, daily events are shovelled back at us, obscuring our finds, making it that much harder for our subjects to focus on the stratum in question.

"That woman we met in the last chapter, for example, 80- or 82-year-old Ta'ah Khalil Outhman...her leg was broken when her house was demolished on top of her a few days before we talked."

A modern meeting of international journalists after a day of filing stories begins the journey, with a twist to what is spoken, but actually meant, when a hot deadline is turning colder by the minute: "Waitress! What's on the menu? Bombings! Assassinations! Incursions! They could file last month's story today - or last year's, for that matter - and who'd know the difference?"

It quickly moves to following Sacco and Abed, a respected individual in Khan Younis, who can open very slightly the closed doors to many reporters, based on a special trust that cannot be won through good deeds by outsiders: "We believe there is a hidden agenda behind each Western donor - especially American donors. Their idea is to make us focus on how to democratize ourselves and to forget that we are still slaves."

Some interviews with eyewitnesses flow with a candidness that the many years did not erase, but Sacco meticulously goes through a number of recollections and juxtaposes the remembrances with knowledge that was unearthed through a variety of other sources. Patience was oftentimes the hardest part, which is shown as Sacco attempts to ask specific questions to a former guerilla fighter, who actually provides amazing background information that sheds new light on a number of issues. The rocky road of the reporter leads to tangible snapshots at the two locations and the slaughter that took place.

"The U.N. report presents two incompatible versions of the Khan Younis `incident,' and so in this case, as in many others, history-by-document drops us into a muddied soup of `on the other hands' and `possiblies' seasoned, perhaps, with a few `probablies,'" Sacco writes. "But, clearly the refugees' claim in the U.N. report dovetails the eyewitness testimony Abed and I gathered many years later. Namely: the fighting had stopped; the men were unarmed; they did not resist.

"And I remembered how often I sat with old men who tried my patience, who rambled on, who got things mixed up, who skipped ahead, who didn't remember the barbed wire at the gate or when the mukhtars stood up or where the jeeps were parked, how often I sighed and mentally rolled my eyes because I knew more about that day than they did."

I literally could not put this book down. It had me hooked and engaged from beggining to end.

Footnotes literally tells the story of the massacres committed by the Israeli Defense Forces in the Gaza strip during the 1957 Suez war in which Israel, France, and Britain invaded Egypt.

In classic reporting style, Joe Sacco tries to piece the puzzle of just what happened during the days of these brutal massacres.

The result is an intelligent, engaging, and pro-active book that will leave the reader breathless.

How can we take time to learn from the past during a dire and urgent emergency? As both war journalist and cartoonist, Sacco depicts the bleak existence of Palestinians living in the Gaza strip with incredible skill. He documents his interviews and the situation in contemporary Gaza while trying to piece together the events of a massacre in 1956.

The entire investigative tale, with its demolished homes and weathered inhabitants, is illustrated in jaw-dropping, painstaking detail. Sacco captures the omnipresent grief, pain and anger, along with occasional moments of humanity and levity.

Over 400 pages long, this is not a mere comic book. This is a hefty, eye-opening read that will tug at your heart.

Sacco presents readers with another work of impressive artistry and challenging journalism. As in his previous works, Sacco inserts himself into the story. In Footnotes in Gaza, we follows along with Sacco, who seemingly self-deprecatingly is always drawn far more cartoonish than any of the other characters we meet in his books, as he attempts to discover the truth about two incidents that occurred in two Gaza strip towns (Rafah and Khan Younis)in 1956. These incidents may have resulted in the deaths of hundreds of Palestinian civilians by Israeli military. Sacco discovers the incidents when doing research. As he probes further, he is amazed to find that the incidents have never been completely investigated and very little seems to be known about them. In an attempt to find out the truth, Sacco travels to Gaza and seeks out every single person he can find who might provide details about what happened on these two days.

What is so impressive about this (and other works by Sacco) work is how Sacco details the work of a journalist. He not only tells us the story but shows us the steps it takes in attempting to uncover this story. He lets us not just on the finished project but on the process involved in creating that product. As he investigates, he uncovers memories and collects personal stories that vary greatly in specific and general details. Ultimately, that is what is so compelling about this story: the degree to which time can impact the truth and how everything that has intervened in the years between the past and the present can color the truth and cloud memory.

Joe Sacco had already developed an important graphic work, well worth of its recognition, looking at personal research in conflict zones such as the former Yugoslavia or the Palestine revisited in these "Footnotes in Gaza". The frustration of an uneven and often untold conflict shines through the research of the events and killings of Khan Younins and Rafah well over fifty years ago with poignant relevance.

The graphic narrative driven out of his personal-research where he becomes another character, another agent in the conflict, is truly outstanding. Sacco offers an intriguingly open and critical account of his efforts and perceptions as he explores the events of the 1956 killing in Palestine, while he visits a region about to witness the US war against Iraq that would topple the regime of Hussein. In doing so, not only he reveals a poignant account about the difficulties and importance of recuperating memories, even the smaller ones, but leaves a trite and cogent account of the past and current circumstances faced by Palestine.

Exploring these footnotes in history, sure enough will unfold universal truths for those willing to pick them up, but more importantly sets a memorable and committed effort to develop a graphic journalism with a cause, explored with rigor, on the ground, and setting new narratives worth sharing with a passion.

This book written in "graphic" style, is not a graphic NOVEL, but rather a work of journalism produced in black and while ink drawings by author/cartoonist Joe Sacco. I think this book is pretty effective in what the author seems to be trying to achieve, and it did keep my attention. Joe Sacco, while living the Gaza strip area, along with his Palestinian guide, Abed, manages to get pretty close to many of the Palestinians whom he interviews. He is trying to put together pieces of the past that he feels are important and have a large impact on the current situation. The most interesting thing about the book to me was the concept of human memory--how the same traumatic event, for instance, can be remembered quite differently by people who went through it in person at the same time. And the memory to each one is so vivid that they often explain it as if it were being constantly replayed like a film in there heads. Sacco took the time to carefully interview participants, and he reports their comments in detail, drawing out the scenarios and comparing them so that the reader can see the similarities and differences in the various tellings. There is a lot of detail in this book, and think I learned a lot. Do not expect a balanced, two-sided telling of events and conditions in Gaza; at times Israili interviews and data are indroduced, but "Footnotes" is largely a representation of Palastinian point-of-view, and therein lies it's usefulness.

I love comics. I learned to read with the strips in the daily newspaper. My first purchases with my allowance were comic books for a dime. This book looks like a big comic or a graphic novel.

It is not.

The author/artist went to the Gaza Strip in 2001 on assignment as an illustrator for Harper's Magazine. He says "I recalled a reference I'd read many years before. . . about a large-scale killing of civilians in Khan Younis in 1956.. . . we should add this barely noted historical episode to our story if it turned out to have some validity and current resonance." The editors at Harper's cut the few paragraphs about Khan Younis from the published story. So he went back in 2002 and 2003 to research that event, and a similar tragedy at Rafah. Documentation at the time from UN investigators said about 275 were wrongfully killed at Khan Younis, and another 100 killed at Rafah under conditions which seem well beyond the normal fog of war.

Now that is a long time ago. Sacco found few people in either town who had believable recollections of the events of that time. But the pain and anger at the injustice remain.

The drawings make the situation in Gaza today much more comprehensible than reading news reports from either Arab or Israeli sources. Better understanding of Gaza is fundamental to understanding what it will take to have peace in Iraq or Afghanistan. Sacco calls these two events, in Khan Younis and Rafah footnotes to the present permanent crisis between Israel and Palestine. But like a properly crafted scholarly text, the footnotes are essential to understanding the main text.

There is passing reference to the US and British involvement in these events in 1956. It is not an unreasonable interpretation of those events to hold the Americans and the Brits were happy to see this all happen, as a lever to regain control of the Suez Canal, with the people of Egypt, Israel, Gaza as only trivial data for the grand maneuvers of the major powers.

The pain and destruction seems to me to go endlessly. These people have little hope and little to lose. Inflicting pain on others seems to be a reflex. "An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth" brings only a land of the blind who can eat only soup.

This book gave me a feel for the kind of life the people of Gaza must live each day now. Much stronger than any tv newscast or documentary I have seen. It did not portray the Israelis as evil, or the Palestinians as helpless victims. Both seem to be locked together in a situation that is only destructive.

Read it carefully. Linger over every 'cartoon' panel. There is much to learn therein.