Palestine By Joe Sacco

Sunday, April 11, 2010

BOOK REVIEW: Intifada’s Ground Zero, revisited —by Anum Raza Hasan

Jonathan Cape 2003; Pp 286

“Theirs (Palestinians’) is an improvised life on the fringes of their homeland in which they have become that saddest and most powerless and contradictory of creatures, the unwelcome alien. Nevertheless their land is still expropriated, their dwellings are still bulldozed, their olive groves are still uprooted.”

In a glaringly media saturated world in which a huge preponderance of the world’s news images are controlled and broadcast by the influential few based in global headquarters such as London and New York, a tributary of comic book images and words, assertively outlined, at times grotesquely blunt to match the extreme situations they depict, provide a remarkable revelation.

Joe Sacco’s gripping Palestine combines the techniques of eyewitness reportage with the medium of comic book storytelling to explore a complex, emotionally weighty situation. His nine issue comic series won a 1996 American Book Award and now published for the first time in one volume befits its status as one of the great classics of graphic nonfiction. The events in the book take place over a two-month period in late 1991-92, with occasional flashbacks to the expulsion of the Arabs, the beginning of the Intifada, Gulf War and other events in the more immediate history. Sacco spent this time meeting with Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza as the narrative focuses on the minute details of everyday life in the occupied territories, presenting the daily struggles, humiliations and frustrations of the Palestinians.

In Joe Sacco’s world what we get is seen through the eyes and persona of a modest, laidback yet inquisitive American man who appears to have wandered into an unfamiliar, hostile world of an atrocious military occupation, arbitrary arrests, harrowing experiences of houses demolished and land expropriated, torture and sheer brute force generously if cruelly applied, on whose pity Palestinians live on a daily, indeed momentary basis. There is no attempt to disentangle or complicate what is for most part a scanty, “anxious existence of uncertainty, collective unhappiness and deprivation and a life of aimless wandering within the place’s inhospitable confines, wandering and mostly waiting, waiting, waiting” (page 3). The calm and aimless wanderings enunciate that Sacco is neither a journalist in search of a story nor an expert trying to nail down the facts in order to produce a policy paper. He is there to find out why things are the way they are and why there seems to have been a categorical deadlock for so long.

Nowhere does Sacco comes closer to the existential lived reality of the average Palestinian than in his depiction of life in Gaza. The vacancy of time, the dullness, not to say sordidness of everyday life in the refugee camps, the network of relief workers hoping against hope for positive deliberations, bereaved mothers, unemployed fathers, disillusioned youth, teachers, police, hangers on, the tea or coffee circle, the sense of confinement, permanent muddiness and ugliness conveyed by the refugee camp that is so iconic to the whole Palestinian experience. Joe the character is there sympathetically to confirm that this experience must somehow be accounted for in human terms in the narrative sequences, which any reader can identify. A dollop of humour helps the history go down, saving it from an overindulgence of sentiments on the way. And if he tenderly pokes fun at his subjects, he ruthlessly jabs it at himself too. Beneath all that, there is his understated indignation and mourning on behalf of, as Edward Said put it in his introduction to Palestine, “history’s losers”.

One fails to express enough disgust at a state that systematically imprisons tens of thousands of people without trial, fires live rounds into demonstrations and tear gas into schools, beats wounded men and women lying in their hospital beds, bulldozes people’s homes, desecrates their farmland and steals their water supply, imposes curfews and collective punishments such as cutting off electricity supplies — the list is endless.

In one of the most heart wrenching chapters in the book, Sacco describes how, beneath the surface — “traffic, couples in love, falafel-to-go, tourists in jogging suits licking stamps for postcards” — and behind closed doors, other things are happening for “reasons of national security” — “people strapped to chairs, sleep deprivation, the smell of piss”. Some confess it is better to be dead than take the burden of being alive in such a setting.

Perhaps the sorest point is Israel’s dominance of Palestinian water resources where the Israelis pump West Bank water to Israel and Jewish settlements at such a rate that only 17 percent is left for Palestinians. Israel controls 35 percent of the water supply in Gaza and the drilling of 200-metre wells from the settlements has increased the salinity in shallow Palestinian wells to dangerous levels. Moreover, Israel has expropriated two-thirds of the West Bank for its own use, including the settlement of Jews, but like Prime Minister Shamir says, “If we establish a settlement here or expand a settlement there this is only natural. We are operating according to the understanding that the land belongs to us.” And with that “understanding” in mind, the World Zionist Organisation’s ‘Master Plan 2010’ points out that only five percent of the West Bank is “problematic for settlement”.

Statelessness. Disenfranchisement. Desperation. Fear. Exhaustion. Hopelessness. It is a dreary narrative, but so is the reality of Palestine. In Sacco’s Palestine, the reader becomes involved in the Palestinian plight. We begin to sympathise with the hurdles they must face in order to prosper in business. We feel the pain of the parents whose children have been hit by bullets. We shiver in their cold rooms and we squint through their dark nights. We tremble when unnamed soldiers appear on the muddy streets of refugee camps.

Joe Sacco remains convinced that the Palestinians and Israelis will continue to kill each other in low level conflict or with shattering violence until the very central fact of the Israeli occupation will be addressed as an issue of international law and basic human rights. For the uninformed, Palestine offers a concrete, palatable introduction to the issues. For the well-informed, it humanises the story in a way that a news article never could. In short, Sacco’s reporting of his encounters with Palestinians and his re-telling of their stories of woe and tragedy are gripping and compelling. On completing Palestine you can be pardoned for feeling exasperated by the Israel-Palestine situation, but also overwhelmingly restless to actively stimulate conscience towards the modern day apartheid as savagery and injustice continue to hold Palestinians hostage for generations and beyond.

Anum Raza Hasan is a freelance journalist and human rights activist with an academic specialisation in International Development, and can be reached at anumhasan@dailytimes.com.pk

http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2010%5C04%5C11%5Cstory_11-4-2010_pg3_5