Don’t screw with the Jew, he kicks the butt!

Sacco’s Palestine

In the press, readers rarely see the faces of displaced Palestinians living within refugee camps or hear the individual stories of Palestinian men and women who are unable to get to their jobs because of military checkpoints. Lost in major news stories are the scores of young men who have served over a year in prison for violating an 8:00 p.m. curfew, and rarely do we see the tree stumps from razed olive tree orchards (these being a major staple of what was the Palestinian economy) and the ghettoized neighborhoods in which families must raise their children.

Perhaps this lack of “human” information – that which is beyond casualty statistics – is a fault of the newspaper medium. It is expensive and time consuming for a major publication to send a journalist, be it reporter or photographer: the faces of suicide bombers and militants, the numbers of Israelis killed or injured (almost always mentioned before that of Palestinians, especially when it comes to children), and how Prime Minister Sharon and his right-wing party plan to respond.

Journalist Joe Sacco solves this problem of lack of human context in Palestine, a 285-page graphic novel. Through a format traditionally associated with fantasy illustration and narration, Sacco finds the balance between the potent images and text necessary to enable a historical and cultural understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Palestine, which documents the author’s two-month stay during late 1991 and early 1992 in various occupied territories, offers the stories of several individuals and families who have suffered during the first intifada. Readers meet many conflict-weary Palestinians who, despite their chronic unemployment, are more than hospitable to the American journalist and eager to have their stories told overseas.

One of these families “invites us in … As usual, all the time is tea time, and there’s chocolates left over from the Greek Orthodox Christmas.” The mother tells of an Israeli settler accusing her son (no older than 15) of throwing stones at his car, prompting Israeli soldiers to beat him in his home. The boy’s grandfather tears up as he recounts the day Israeli soldiers forced him to cut down his olive trees himself after a molotov cocktail was thrown from his orchard. Sacco asks “How did it feel?” To which the elderly man replies, “I was crying. I felt I was killing my son when I cut them down.”

Sacco puts this story in perspective as the cartoon frame depicts the journalist getting into a car with the family, giving him their farewell s, among the aforementioned tree stumps. “And his is just a teardrop in the bucket … Six Palestinian trees? 17? 70? Pfft! The Israelis uprooted 120,000 plus in the intifada’s first four years. … for ’security reasons’ like in these cases … or in constructing the network of roads that link Jewish settlements to Israel… .”

Some of the book’s more violent images are found in the chapter “Ansar III.” Sacco describes Ansar III as Israel’s largest prison, “holding 6,000 inmates as of Nov. ‘91. It opened in March ‘88 specifically to deal with the intifada overflow … .” An Ansar “alumna,” as they are frequently referred to in the book, describes the inhumane conditions of the camp. One of the rooms ” …was 3×4 meters, with 21 persons. The metal door faced the sun from noon on. The ventilation was very bad, just a coin-sized hole in the door for injecting gas in case of a riot.”

 

This kind of treatment in prison was not reserved just for men. A young woman, arrested “for something she says she didn’t do – underwriting nationalistic pamphlets,” tells how ” …in the Russian Compound the Shin Bet stood her up in the ‘coffin’ half a day after she’d undergone a liver biopsy… . ‘[The coffin is] a small closet, you stand up in it, it’s 80×60 cm, two meters high, very dark… .” Sacco continues “But worst of all was isolation, her cell, which was besmirched with filth, she says, and where she was left without toilet paper and sanitary napkins… .”

The gritty images of prison cells and Palestinian homes with sand for floors are in a later chapter contrasted by the bright images of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. Sacco debates politics with two young Tel Aviv architects (who happen to be women) in an outdoor cafe framed by high rise resorts. When Sacco asks “What about when Palestinians take military action against the occupation forces? Do they have that right at all?,” one of the women angrily responds, “We just want to live our lives, okay? We have our lives! We have jobs and families and we go out and live just like you do … We don’t think about this stuff all the time, and we get a bit tired of hearing about it!”

Although it may be easier for Americans not to hear about the military occupation in Palestinian territories and the civilian casualties from U.S. manufactured weapons, Sacco’s reporting and images make the history more digestible than what is usually found in Western media. Fortunately, Sacco refrains from moralizing the conflict as well. Instead, he offers readers a better understanding of the too-often neglected Palestinian experience.

Check out more Sacco graphic novels here.

See what the BBC have to say about Sacco here.

Facebook

The conflict over land in the Middle East is fought out not only on the ground in Israel and the Palestinian territories. Now the pages of social networking site Facebook have become the latest scene of dispute.

Jewish settlers living inside the occupied Palestinian West Bank complained when they found their addresses identified them as living in Palestine, rather than Israel. More than 400,000 people live in settlements in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, all of which are widely considered illegal under international law.

In true Facebook style, they set up groups to petition their cause. Channah Lerman, a Jewish settler, now has more than 1,730 members in her group: “Facebook – stop discriminating Yesha!” – which uses the Hebrew acronym for the West Bank and Gaza. Another group calling itself “It’s not Palestine, it’s Israel” numbers more than 13,800 members.

After a campaign of several days Facebook relented and now allows settlers in three of the largest settlements, Ma’ale Adumim, Beitar Illit and Ariel, and in the tense and divided city of Hebron, home to around 600 settlers, to choose either Israel or Palestine as their home country.

“We only support 18 cities in the West Bank at this point, so most settlements are not yet supported, though we certainly intend to add them,” said a spokesperson for Facebook.

For some this is a battle that is still being fought. In a post on her group’s discussion page Lerman wrote: “What I hope even more is that people keep on fighting against mentioning these towns in Palestine. That’s something that doesn’t exist and will never exist.”

Not surprisingly the campaign generated a swift response from Palestinians and their supporters, who set up groups such as “It’s not Israel, it’s Palestine”. On a page for the 8,800-strong “All Palestinians on Facebook”, one noted that Palestinians in East Jerusalem have their country listed as Israel, even though the Israeli annexation of East Jerusalem has not been recognised by the international community. The writer addressed the operators of Facebook: “For you to interfere in such a political issue and sideline with one party in the conflict is simply outrageous.”

Check out the Los Angeles Times article here.