Joe Sacco’s Footnotes in Gaza is a comic book like no other. It has no super-heroes, and not many laughs, but few would expect much levity in a story set in a territory under constant siege and bombardment by the Israelis. But Gaza’s present plight simply forms the backdrop against which the book’s main character, the cartoonist himself, wanders through 388 finely-crafted pages, dodging Israeli missiles and sniper fire as he tries to re-construct events surrounding two massacres of Palestinians in Gaza by Israeli soldiers in 1956.
Sacco’s project leaves many Gazans dumbfounded, sometimes even angry: 1956 was a long time ago, they keep telling the American author, as Israeli choppers fire cannons at fleeing militants and bulldozers tear down Palestinian homes deemed too close to Israeli positions. Why not write about the here and now? But Sacco is as dogged as a noir detective; he never gives up after being told by an Islamic militant that one of the massacres, in Khan Younis, had “left a wound in my heart that can never heal… (They) planted hatred in our hearts.”
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This explanation has a certain weight, coming from Abed El-Aziz el-Rantisi, who, as Sacco explains in the prologue, is a senior figure in Hamas later assassinated by an Israeli rocket. And in the course of his investigation, award-winning cartoonist-reporter Sacco, who has published works on Bosnia and the Palestinian territories, makes a convincing case that these two mass killings — “foot notes” which rated only a few sketchy lines in UN dispatches and press reports of the day — are key to understanding the despair and rage of 1.5 million Palestinians trapped inside Gaza today.
In one of the early scenes, at a boozy Jerusalem party of jaded journos, Sacco muses that “They could file last month’s story today — or last year’s, for that matter — and who’d know the difference?” That’s sadly true; a British colleague of mine once accidentally sent the wrong computer file to his editors in London, who dutifully ran his stale Gaza story without noticing that they’d run the same piece a week before. There is a numbing sameness to stories about Gaza, but Sacco’s illustrations, backed by his methodical research, bring the Gaza of 1956 bleakly to life, using the past to explain the present in a way that rarely makes it into today’s news stories. He inks his characters and scenes with the same meticulous detail that he invests in his reporting.
(See pictures of life under Hamas in Gaza.)
[Sacco reminds us, for example, that the vast majority of Gazans are refugees driven out of their homes on Israel’s coastal plain in the war of 1948, and barred from returning. And in one of the most startling observations in the book, he shows that Israeli leaders understood exactly why the Palestinians of Gaza would turn to violence. He quotes General Moshe Dayan, Israel’s most celebrated military commander, at the April 1956 funeral of a kibbutznik slain by Palestinian fedayeen near the Gaza border, warning Israelis that they faced an intractable conflict that they had no choice but to fight . “Let us not cast the blame on the murderers today,” Dayan said at the funeral. “For eight years they have been sitting in the refugee camps in Gaza, and before their eyes we have been transforming the lands and the villages, where they and their fathers dwelt, into our estate… Let us not be deterred from seeing the loathing that is inflaming and filling the lives of the hundreds of thousands of Arabs who live around us. Let us not avert our eyes lest our arms weaken.” Dayan’s view that Israel’s survival depended on crushing any effort by the Palestinians to regain by force of arms that which they’d lost in the war of 1948 shapes the thinking behind the 1956 operations in retaliation for fedayeen raids from Gaza that form the focus of the book — the same logic that was at work in last year’s Operation Cast Lead.]
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In a way that eludes most linear print stories about Gaza, Sacco’s drawings capture not only the despair of its benighted citizens, but also their indomitable vitality, their generosity and their gallows humor. “Palestinians in Gaza haven’t had the luxury of pulling back and examining the past,” Sacco told TIME in a telephone interview, explaining why he had exhumed these ancient events. “Besides, in Gaza, every generation has its own ’56.”
His investigations hone in on two events in November 1956: first, in the town of Khan Younis, where U.N. records and eyewitnesses say that Israeli soldiers herded around 275 Palestinian men out of their homes, lined them up against the wall of a 14th century castle and executed them. This was in retaliation for attacks on nearby Israeli kibbutzim. Then, several days later, in Rafah, another 100 or so Palestinians were shot and clubbed down as thousands were marched to a barbed-wire pen in a schoolyard for interrogation by Israelis hunting for renegade Egyptian soldiers and Fedayeen guerrillas. The Israelis deny that either event was a massacre, disputing the casualty figures and suggesting their soldiers killed smaller numbers of Palestinians in the course of suppressing riots and other resistance.
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One theme running through Sacco’s chronicle is what he calls, “the frailty of memory”. Sacco does his best to sort out the contradictory testimony, made hazy by the passage of time and successive repeats of similar traumas over the decades. The survivors of the Rafah killings, for example, all remember the appearance of a flock of doves soon before they were freed, but they can’t recall if the birds settled on the shoulders of the officer who appeared to demand the Palestinians’ release, or if the doves hovered above the officer’s head, or if their uniformed savior was Israeli, British or even a French woman from the U.N.
Despite his focus on the past, the present invariably comes crashing in. Sacco and his fixers are shot at by an invisible Israeli sniper in a watchtower. They meet a man who pleads with militants not to use his home as a firing position because the result will be the destruction of his house; and they witness a Rafah home demolished by an Israeli bulldozer that “scooped out the earth as if it were ice cream.” Back in 1956, the Palestinians saw the faces of the Israeli soldiers bursting into their homes, but today, in Sacco’s cartoons — as well as in reality — Gazans seldom if ever see their enemy, who fires on them from inside tanks, helicopters and other mechanized cocoons.
Sacco’s stay in Gaza involves several encounters with militants, haggard, sleep-deprived men always on the run from informers and Israeli assassinations. One of them, “Khaled”, comes to a telling realization: “Okay, I hate the Jews but I can live with them.” As Sacco tells TIME, “This was a strange and almost hopeful moment — that people who didn’t like each other could still live side by side.” Most of all, says Sacco, “You meet many people who aren’t caught up in rage and anger, they just want a normal life.” And it is these ordinary people of Gaza — teachers, merchants and family men — all trying to survive in the midst of the lopsided battle between Palestinian jihadis and the Israeli army, that Sacco brings indelibly to life. In his Footnotes he has helped Gazans regain their memory and, through it, their bruised proud collective identity.