Footnotes in Gaza: A Graphic Novel

AUTHOR: Sacco, Joe

ARTIST: Joe Sacco (illustrator)

PUBLISHER: Metropolitan Books

FIRST BOOK PUBLICATION: 2009

Publication History

First conceived in 2001 during Joe Sacco’s research with journalist Chris Hedges for a Harper’s Magazine piece that was never printed, Footnotes in Gaza was specifically inspired by the lack of coverage given in the American media to two Israeli mass killings of Palestinians in Gaza in November of 1956. Wanting to research the massacres more deeply, Sacco returned in November of 2002, then again in March of 2003, to gather and record the testimonies of eyewitnesses. As Sacco explains in his foreword, the events of 1956 “hardly deserved to be thrown back on the pile of obscurity. But there it lay, like innumerable historical tragedies over the ages that barely rate footnote status in the broad sweep of history—even though they often contain the seeds of the grief and anger that shape present-day events.”

In Footnotes in Gaza, the massacres at Khan Younis and Rafah are brought from the periphery of history and turned into an award-winning exposé. As is noted in introductory matter to the special edition of Palestine (1996) and again in his foreword to Footnotes in Gaza, Sacco gathered all of his data before drafting his illustrations, eventually working carefully from detailed notes and photographs.

Metropolitan Books published the initial hardcover edition of Footnotes in Gaza in December of 2009 and released a paperback version the following year.

Plot

Footnotes in Gaza develops episodically through numerous testimonials of witnesses and family members directly affected by the massacres. In November of 1956, during the Suez Canal Crisis, Israel Defense Forces (IDF) rounded up and massacred Palestinians in Khan Younis and Rafah. Sacco shows the unfolding events in a complicated but highly rewarding manner, piecing together testimonials and carefully crediting each witness. The resulting narrative is as follows: On November 3, 1956, the IDF entered Khan Younis. IDF members began rounding up adult men (some were killed in their homes) and forcefully instructed them to line up against a wall of a fourteenth-century castle at the center of town. According to the United Nations, the official death toll is 275, but a death toll of “more than a hundred” was reported.

On November 12, 1956, the IDF entered Rafah and began herding Palestinian men toward the town school and school yard. The men were forced to sit for hours, pressed against one another with their heads down, while the IDF implemented a “screening operation” to weed out collaborators with Egypt or other anti-Israeli fighters, such as the fedayeen. In the process, according to the United Nations, 111 Palestinians were killed. More survived this ordeal than the previous massacre and were able to testify about the details. Even so, there are many inconsistencies among the stories, which Sacco foregrounds in his efforts to have the reader understand his journalistic ethic. For the most part, he relies on only accounts that were confirmed by two or more witnesses; however, he is careful to point out the subjective nature of oral history even in such cases. In the end, Sacco portrays himself as a desensitized story collector who briefly forgets compassion in his zeal to find details. With a redirection in his final pages, Sacco wordlessly reminds the reader where the real story is, giving the reader close-ups from the perspective of those brutalized in the massacres.

Characters

•Joe Sacco, the author and narrator, has prominent round eyeglasses, which are used as a masking devise that allows readers to see events from the author’s perspective. He is portrayed as a comically bumbling character, a humble exaggeration of Sacco himself.

•Abed Elassouli, Sacco’s primary guide and interpreter, is a large Palestinian man who always has a creased brow. He is even-tempered and resourceful and facilitates interviews by convincing potential informants to trust Sacco and his intentions, primarily by taking advantage of the trust he has established in the community. He shares his memories of the first intifada, when he was thirteen or fourteen years old, during which he was shot in the leg by an Israeli soldier.

•Mohammed Yousef Shaker Mousa witnessed the massacre at Rafah, survived it, and fled to the coast. He is a key informant for Sacco on the Rafah massacre.

•Mohammed Atwa El-Najeeli witnessed and survived the massacre at Rafah, in spite of being shot multiple times in the head. He is another key informant for Sacco.

•Jemal Abdel Nasser, a.k.a. Gamal Abdel Nasser, the president of Egypt from 1956 to 1970, was a leader idealized by many of Sacco’s Palestinian informants.

•Ariel Sharon was the controversial commander of the IDF at the time of the Khan Younis and Rafah massacres and is widely considered responsible for others. He was the prime minister of Israel from 2001 to 2006, during which time Sacco made research visits to the country.

•David Ben Gurion was a Zionist leader and first prime minister of Israel, serving from 1948 to 1953 and from 1955 to 1963.

•Moshe Sharett, a.k.a. Moshe Shertok, was the prime minister of Israel from 1953 to 1955, during which time tensions between Israelis and Palestinians escalated.

•Moshe Dayan was the chief of staff of the IDF from 1953 to 1958 and, thus, was the leader of the Israeli forces at the time of the Khan Younis and Rafah massacres.

•Khaled, who joined the Palestinian political party Fatah at the age of fourteen, tells of detecting and killing Palestinian collaborators with Israel. He becomes a key facilitator of important interviews.

•The Fedayee, which is a pseudonym he uses to protect his identity, was a former guerrilla fighter with the fedayeen. He tells of some activity by the Palestinian resistance, providing political balance to the narrative.

•Dr. Abdullah El-Horani lined up against the wall at the castle with other adult men during the Khan Younis massacre, but he escaped by running at the last minute.

•Ashraf, a.k.a. the Lion, a large, mustachioed man, is first seen when his home is threatened by Israeli bulldozers that are leveling Palestinian housing to make way for Israeli settlers. Later, his home is demolished, and he takes a pivotal role in facilitating interviews in Rafah.

•Awad Mohammed Ahmed sketches out the herding of Rafah men into a school yard. His map is reproduced by Sacco.

•Rachel Corrie, an American activist, was killed in Rafah in 2003 by an Israeli bulldozer while she was protesting to protect Palestinian homes.

•Yasir Arafat, a.k.a. Abu Ammar to Sacco’s informants, was an Arab nationalist, leader of Fatah, and the chairman of the Palestinian Liberation Organization.

Artistic Style

One of the first artistic aspects a reader might notice about Footnotes in Gaza is the surprisingly comic, Robert Crumb-like parody of a self-portrait the self-trained Sacco uses to narrate his work. This style belies the earnestness of Sacco’s graphic journalism. It demands intense participation from the reader to piece together this narrative of horrific events. Sacco has deft eyes and ears for character and is able to capture body language exactly to convey complex emotional states, which allows the illustration to “speak.”

To aid in presenting the intense drama, Sacco often shifts perspective radically and avoids standard panels. Frames are dense, irregular, and often overlapping. Sacco makes use of a masking effect to foreground details that convey the sobering reality of living in an occupied territory. Though his own image is somewhat laughable and vaguely deflecting through his blank eyeglasses, the settings are meticulously detailed: Sudden sweeps to full double-spread layouts show panoramic views of devastation. For instance, after Ashraf’s home is demolished and time has passed, the reader sees birds have nested in holes in the remaining wall, and the intricacies of slaughtering a bull for Eid al-Adha, the festival of sacrifice, are documented. The latter is made more effective when juxtaposed with Israeli soldier-turned-journalist Marek Gefen’s description of the aftermath of the Khan Younis massacre as a “human slaughterhouse.” The images are always shown in black and white, with cross-hatched shadowing.

Themes

The main themes of Footnotes in Gaza correspond with the book’s primary genre of graphic journalism. The novel focuses on how the genre can be used to redress the political imbalance of the American media, to reveal what traditional, camera-dependent journalism cannot, and to excavate history in a truthful manner in order to reflect on its silence and contemporary relevance, as well as how the politics of a region can teach the reader about the world. Sacco’s primary motivation is to correct the imbalance of the American media coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as it is often biased in favor of Israeli agendas.

One of Sacco’s strengths is to coax members of a community that fears the pro-Israeli forces to speak openly about the massacres; in doing so, he captures the struggle of an occupied people to be represented politically. As is not uncommon in Palestinian testimonies, characters in Sacco’s text use the Holocaust as a historical reference point to highlight the hypocrisies of certain tactics of the state of Israel. They ask, essentially, why would a people who have been massacred themselves inflict such violence? One interviewee cries, “Hitler didn’t do this to them!” as Israeli forces demolish Palestinian homes. To parallel the experiences of the Palestinian and Jewish people, Sacco uses a recurring image throughout the book: The countless abandoned shoes of the men herded for “screening” and lined-up for execution reminds the reader of a scene from a Nazi concentration camp.

Sacco foregrounds the journalistic challenge of objectivity, making it clear that oral history is powerful but necessarily subjective. This fact becomes apparent when, for example, he realizes that an informant’s memory is of 1967 events, not those of 1956, or in instances in which multiple and impossibly conflicting accounts are reproduced. He even includes the embellished touches of his interview subjects, such as with “the legend of the doves,” which includes reports of a dove landing on a British soldier’s shoulder when he interrupts the unjust proceedings at Rafah. Sacco also mocks the almost gleeful, and therefore inappropriate, detachment he develops in response to some of the best and most harrowing stories he collects, which in itself offers a critique of the journalist’s task. Ultimately, however, Footnotes in Gaza uses journalistic and graphic technique to further the understanding that oral history can enlighten the reader about the world. Accordingly, many critics comment on the importance of the 1956 massacres to understanding the cyclical cultures of hatred and vengeance.

Impact

Joe Sacco’s primary influences were not visual artists but prose writers such as George Orwell, Noam Chomsky, Michael Herr, and Hunter S. Thompson. Like the New Journalists, he utilizes the full expressive potential of reporting. In addition, he uses his power to draw from memory those views he cannot access with a camera, such as the demolishing for defense or resettling of Palestinian homes along borders, where cameras are forbidden. The possibilities for visual detail allow Sacco to do what Harvey Kurtzman of EC Comics envisioned for war comics, to take the reader there and to educate. Furthermore, where conventional documentary methods, such as photographic stills or film, could produce an overwhelming sense of life under Israeli occupation, Sacco’s untutored graphic style allows for frequent unexpected lightness.

Sacco will likely influence many comics artists in the future. The positive responses to Sacco’s work from critics—who are repeatedly surprised by the graphic novels genre, which has been considered a juvenile medium—attests to the strength of Sacco’s impact. That his work has appeared in such mainstream and nongraphic venues as Harper’s Magazine and that his books have been reviewed in such publications, which rarely give attention to graphic works, signify the magnitude of Sacco’s accomplishment.

Further Reading

Al-Ali, Naji. A Child in Palestine: The Cartoons of Naji al-Ali (2009).

Folman, Ari, and David Polonosky. Waltz with Bashir: A Lebanon War Story (2008).

Modan, Rutu. Exit Wounds (2007).

Rall, Ted, ed. Attitude: The New Subversive Political Cartoonists (2002).

Sacco, Joe. Palestine (2007).

Bibliography

Blincoe, Nicholas. “Cartoon Wars: The Israeli Occupation Gets Hard-Hitting Treatment from the Comic-Book Genius Joe Sacco in Palestine.” New Statesman, January 6, 2003, p. 26.

Cockburn, Patrick. “They Planted Hatred in Our Hearts.” The New York Times Book Review, December 27, 2008, BR13.

Hajdu, David. “Joe Sacco and Daniel Clowes.” In Heroes and Villains: Essays on Music, Movies, Comics, and Culture. Cambridge, Mass.: Da Capo Press, 2009.

Venezia, Antonio. “New New (Graphic) Journalism.” Radical Philosophy 161 (May/June, 2010): 58-60.