Joe Sacco highlights how the mainstream media has always been one-sided, on the side of Israel.
Since last October, there has been a growing resurgence and demand for Joe Sacco’s Palestine. Known as the pioneer of Comics Journalism, Sacco reports conflicts through the medium of comics. He draws himself into the story (literally and figuratively), positions himself as the observer-reporter-narrator, and portrays how subjectivity and perspective are inevitable in reporting, especially while reporting a conflict. He critiques the idea of neutral, objective reporting, arguing that that objectivity entails conforming to the power structures and telling their version of the story. What does it mean when a book written over two decades ago is gaining popularity now? What is the significance of reading Joe Sacco’s Palestine today?

Comics for reporting
Although Comics Journalism has the word comics, Palestine is not for easy or light reading. Like other Graphic novels, this text demands close reading, going back and forth between the details on the page and outside the text, where critical thinking is required to make full sense of the text. In an old interview, Sacco explains Why comics for reporting: Comics offers “an easy entrée into a complicated subject,” it is a “subversive kind of medium”, “the subversive thing is that you can pack a lot of things into a comic book, at least as much as in a documentary film” to make hard, undigestible matters and events accessible. In a recent interview, he explains why he chose to write about Palestine: “I began to see how deeply wronged the Palestinians were historically and how badly misrepresented they were” and thus he wanted to highlight the everyday details of life under occupation.

In the history of Graphic novels, Maus (1991) by Art Spiegelman, which details graphic accounts of the Holocaust and intergenerational trauma, is acclaimed as one of the most important milestones. Around that time, Sacco was working on Palestine, published two years later, detailing the persecution perpetrated by the same community that was persecuted in the Holocaust, like a painful irony of history.

To understand the advantage of this medium of narration for a topic as complex, multilayered, dynamic as the Isreal-Palestine conflict, one can compare it with texts such as The Question of Palestine by Edward Said, Gaza in Crisis: Reflections on Israel’s War Against the Palestinians by Noam Chomsky and Ilan Pepe, On Palestine by Noam Chomsky and Ilan Pepe, and The Fateful Triangle by Noam Chomsky. While these are important texts, they might interest an academic scholar more. What Sacco brings to the table is the accessibility of the issue to common readers through visual-verbal media and careful detailing.

Blurring the Boundaries
Sacco’s work is different from other journalistic and historical, scholarly accounts for many reasons. It blurs the boundaries between genres such as journalistic reporting, historical documentation, memoir, travelogue and graphic essay, along with a commentary on historiography through media representations. It is interspersed with personal observations, highlighting Sacco’s positionality as a Westerner, consumed in mainstream news media, his subjectivity, perspective, opinions, emotions and prejudices. It makes no pretence of objectivity (generally held as the hallmark of “good” journalism). He uses internal monologue as an effective technique, with humour, irony, and satire to mark his impressions and observations, accompanied by unconventional drawings of peoples and situations.

He uses his drawings and captions to pack several historical references in minimal visual and verbal depictions leaving the reader to connect the dots. For instance, the first chapter is replete with references such as Camp David Accords, Anwar Sadat, Begin, Suez Canal Crisis, the years 1956, ’67, ’73, Klinghoffer’s killing, 1972 Munich attack on athletes and the Lod airport massacre, with a satirical commentary on American media coverage. Through these references, he sets the stage for what he seeks to investigate in the rest of the book.

He critiques the idea of the promised land, which drives the logic of occupation, war, and absolute denial of human rights and justice. With his use of contrasts and perspective, he exposes the eviction done to give a false impression of a “Land without people” and the absurdity of homecoming by occupation. In another panel, he draws an Israeli soldier basking in a checkpost overlooking Gaza and uses the caption “Welcome to Marlboro Country”, drawing the reference to the genocidal annihilation of the native American population and cultures in the progress and expansion of the American nation.

In the last chapter, he meets two Israeli women, with whom he has a conversation. This chapter functions as a contrast to chapter 1 where he uncovers and calls out the misrepresentations in media and public perception, and emphatically takes a stand. The chapter is aptly titled “Through the Other eyes”, highlighting how the mainstream media has almost always been one-sided, on the side of Israel.

Black and White
While he debunks the notion of objectivity in journalism, as he exposes the biases parading as objective reporting, he is also conscious of his subjective position. The problem with media representation is mediation itself, as it works like a double-edged sword. It is in this respect that he is most conscious of his positionality of being a Westerner, an English speaker, who has to rely on a translator/interpreter in his interaction with the people. This self-awareness of the author and self-reflexivity of the narration compels the question, “Can we make full sense of the text or the issue in black and white?

An important factor in this storytelling is scale. The prevalent narratives around Israel’s occupation of Palestine depend on both-side-ism fuelled by popular media. Joe Sacco takes the scale into his own hands, contextualising years of Palestinian suffering by providing a perspective almost impossible to find on a global scale. The massive re-issues of Palestine after October 7, 2023, underscore a key point: mistrust towards global news outlets highlights that only through diverse perspectives can one have a nuanced understanding. An article in The Guardian called him “one of the world’s leading exponents of the graphic novel form”. Joe Sacco placed his research in a crystal-clear communicative medium, making his subject matter more accessible yet impactful.

Authors: Prof. Rajitha Venugopal, Faculty of Literary and Cultural Studies, FLAME University, & Mannav Jaisinghani, FLAME Alumna.