A review of Joe Sacco’s books Palestine, 296 pages, Jonathan Cape (January 2003); Footnotes in Gaza, 432 pages, Metropolitan Books (October 2010); and War on Gaza, 32 pages, Fantagraphics (December 2024).

In April 2024, prominent French Jewish cartoonist Jean Sfar published a graphic novel entitled Nous Vivrons (“We Shall Live”), which dealt with Hamas’s barbarous 7 October 2023 attack on Israel and the worldwide wave of antisemitism it generated, with reference to French Jewry. After receiving death threats from Muslims, he was forced to live under police protection.

On the other hand, Joe Sacco, a prominent American cartoonist/journalist has required no police protection, though he has been publishing cartoons and graphic non-fiction books lambasting Israel’s behaviour towards the Palestinians for years now. In December 2024, he published a 32-page graphic booklet called War on Gaza, in which Israeli atrocities allegedly committed during the current bout of hostilities figure large.

But Malta-born Sacco’s obsession with Gaza—a crowded 141 square mile (365 square kilometre) strip of arable land and sand dunes along the Mediterranean, bordered by Israel, Egypt, and the sea—began two decades earlier. In 2001, he published Palestine, which covered the iniquities of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem since 1967 and the First Intifada of 1987–92. His second volume, Footnotes in Gaza, was published in 2009, to great acclaim. According to the New York Times, it constituted “investigative reporting of the highest quality. A gripping, important book.”

Footnotes zeros in on two little-known massacres committed by Israeli troops in the towns of Khan Yunis and Rafah at the southern end of the Strip in the immediate aftermath of Israel’s Sinai Campaign, which began on 29 October 1956. The Sinai Campaign was Israel’s part in the ten-day joint Israeli, French, and British assault on Egypt usually referred to as the Suez War. Khan Yunis and Rafah have loomed large in the current Israeli–Hamas war, too. Khan Yunis, the Strip’s second largest city, was the birthplace of Hamas’s leader, Yahya Sinwar, who was long known as “the butcher of Khan Yunis” for his treatment of suspected collaborators with Israel, some of whom he strangled with his bare hands. Sinwar also masterminded the 7 October 2023 assault on Israel, which claimed some 1,200 lives, most of them civilians. He was shot dead in Rafah, on the border with Egypt, by an Israeli patrol in October 2024, after a months-long manhunt employing drones, bombers, and special forces.

Sacco spent the early months of 2003 in the West Bank and Gaza, investigating and illustrating the massacres that took place in Khan Yunis and Rafah on 3 and 12 November 1956 respectively, after Israel routed the Egyptian Army and captured the Strip along with the Sinai Peninsula. Sacco interviewed dozens of old-timers who had witnessed—or at least heard first-hand reports of—what happened to relatives and friends during those fateful two days. His grey-scale cartoons depict himself in conversation with his interviewees, alongside graphic portrayals of the savagery and slaughter they relate. Interspersed among historical scenes are illustrations of his 2003 visit, showing meetings between Sacco and his various local mentors and guides, as they scour the alleyways of Gaza’s refugee “camps”—actually, suburban slums—in search of old-timers to interview, discussing past and present events as they go.  

The Second Intifada or Palestinian rebellion in the occupied territories (2000–05) provides the backdrop of Sacco’s project: he describes and portrays Israeli patrols, mass arrests, house demolitions, and firefights. He devotes a few pages of illustrations to the Gazans’ joy at reports of American troops being killed in the Second Gulf War, which had begun in March 2003—“I hope their bodies were cut to pieces”—and to TV shots of Saddam Hussein riding “across the screen brandishing a sword” just before his capture by US troops. Rafah’s minarets blare out sermons with such messages as “Israel, America and Britain: The Three Pillars of Evil!” and “My Brother Muslims should realise that the future is Islam’s, but for that we must pay the price!” In one row of illustrations, Sacco admits that he ‘baulked’ at this at first: “The footage of the [American GIs’] bodies disturbs me.” But his guides respond: “They are soldiers Joe, they came to kill” and “If America wins this war, Palestinians will be the first losers.” Sacco comments: “In their minds, [this] is what’s at stake: An American victory [in Iraq] would assure Israel of its never-ending supremacy.”  (Sacco is an American citizen who lives in Portland, Oregon.)

In the foregrounds of Sacco’s cartoons are depictions of the author conducting door-to-door interviews, as well as blow-by-blow depictions of the 1956 massacres. First, the IDF over-runs the Strip and the Egyptian troops cast off their uniforms and shoes and run away, as do many of their Palestinian auxiliaries. Then, on 3 November, occupying troops go from house to house in Khan Yunis, looking for Egyptian and Palestinian combatants. They pull “young men” out of their houses and shoot them or force them to assemble outside the walls of the town’s fourteenth-century castle, where they are executed. In the neighbouring refugee “camp,” soldiers execute individual Palestinians alongside small groups of young males. Sacco provides step-by-step illustrations of the story of Dr Abdullah el-Horani, who was a young teacher in 1956, but had become a PLO official by 2003, when Sacco met him. El-Horani is lined up against a wall with half a dozen other youngsters, but manages to escape down an alley, evading his pursuers, while the other youngsters are mowed down.

According to the “Special Report of the Director of UNRWA (Covering the period 1 November 1956 to mid-December 1956),” presented to the UN General Assembly in 1957, which Sacco partially reproduces in an appendix, “the exact number of dead and wounded [in Khan Yunis] is not known, but the Director has received from sources he considers trustworthy lists of names of persons allegedly killed on 3 November; numbering 275 individuals, of whom 140 were refugees [from the 1948 Israel–Arab war] and 135 local residents.”  The Israelis, writes the Director, claimed that there had been “resistance” but the locals said that all resistance had ended by the time the Israelis began the hunt for Arab soldiers during which the killings occurred.

The circumstances of the massacre in Rafah, which occurred more than a week after the end of hostilities, were different. On the morning of 12 November 1956, a newly-arrived IDF unit searching for hidden arms, as well as for Egyptian and Palestinian troops and fedayeen (Egyptian-led Palestinian fighters), ordered all adult Arab males to leave their homes and gather in a central school courtyard. As the men rushed through the streets and alleyways toward the school, Israeli troops sporadically fired at them, killing some. To reach the entrance to the courtyard, the Arabs had to run the gauntlet of Israeli soldiers, who beat them with clubs and rifle butts, killing a few. Then, in the courtyard, hundreds or perhaps thousands of men were forced to sit through the day with their hands tied over their heads, without water or food. Many wet themselves, according to testimony elicited by Sacco. His interviewees reported wading through masses of discarded shoes at the entrance to the courtyard. Hooded collaborators walked among the sitting figures and identified individual combatants, many of whom were taken away to detention centres. In an appendix, Sacco reproduces statements made a few days afterwards by Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, Foreign Minister Golda Meir, and IDF chief of general staff Moshe Dayan, according to whom the Rafah killings were triggered by a Palestinian “riot,” during which looters attempted to pillage food stocks at an UNRWA site.

But while, in his first two volumes, Sacco conveys an overwhelming picture of Israeli brutality—even inhumanity—he does make some efforts to portray the other side of the story. When Sacco depicts Israeli police and troops shooting at or arresting Arabs during the first and second intifadas, he often describes the Arab provocations that preceded those actions, showing children, teenagers, and adults throwing stones or occasionally even firing at the Israelis. During one of his walkabouts through a neighbourhood of recently demolished Palestinian houses, Sacco encounters an old Arab woman whom he describes as “overcome by emotion and obliquely blam[ing] the Palestinian resistance [i.e., Palestinian gunmen] for the destruction wrought by the Israelis.”

When describing the tit-for-tat Palestinian terrorism and Israeli reprisals along the Israel–Gaza border in the mid-1950s—which largely triggered Israel’s Sinai Campaign—Sacco quotes Dayan’s famous April 1956 eulogy at the graveside of Ro’i Rothberg, a Nahal-Oz kibbutznik who had just been murdered by Gazan infiltrators:

Let us today not cast blame on the murderers. What can we say against their terrible hatred of us? For eight years now [since the 1948 War] they have sat in the refugee camps of Gaza and have watched how … we have turned their lands and villages, where they and their forefathers previously dwelled, into our home …. Let us not fear to look squarely at the hatred that consumes and fills the lives of [the] Arabs who live around us … That is the fate of our generation.

The passage shows Dayan’s frankness, even empathy, while at the same time underscoring some of the causes of Palestinian hostility.

But Sacco omits to mention the Palestinian Arab terrorism and the massacres of Jews that took place between the 1890s and 1947—before the 1948 War had even begun and before Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza in 1967. Sacco’s brief description of the 1948 War itself is also heavily distorted. In Footnotes in Gaza, he writes: “What about 1948? … one must start somewhere, that watershed year, when Israel declared independence and Arab armies attacked the nascent state … [and speak of] the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who fled the fighting or were expelled by Israeli forces, 200,000 [of whom] ended up in Gaza.” Sacco repeats this in Palestine: “In Jabalia refugee camp, I met an old Palestinian who told me about the home he fled in 1948 after Israel declared independence and the Arab armies invaded.”

A Stupid Cartoon and the University Ideology

Frantz Fanon, Stokely Carmichael, and the roots of the uproar over Zionism.

QuillettePaul Berman

But the 1948 War did not start with the Arab armies’ invasion of Palestine in May 1948. It started six months earlier, in November 1947, when Palestinian militias launched the hostilities that snowballed into full-scale civil war just one day after rejecting the UN’s compromise proposal to partition the country into Arab and Jewish states. During that civil war, hundreds of thousands were uprooted from their homes and lands, and then, on 15 May 1948, the armies of the surrounding Arab states attacked Israel. But it was the Palestinians who launched the war that resulted in their mass dispossession and refugeedom. This fact is never mentioned in any of Sacco’s books, even though 1948 was the crucial year in the conflict that began in the 1880s and is still ongoing today.

Sacco seems occasionally uneasy with Palestinian views and social mores. He is critical of the Palestinians’ blanket distrust of Westerners—even of those activists and do-gooders who go to the occupied territories to help them.

“I don’t like them. They’re not Muslims. And God knows if they are with us or against us,” one Palestinian tells him. Another asks if he is a Muslim, which prompts the following exchange:  

—“No, I’m not a Muslim.”
—“Then you’re going to hell.”
—“Does it make you angry that I’m not a Muslim?”
—“No … you’re not my enemy.”
—“But I’m not your friend, right?”
—“That’s right.”

In another passage, Sacco describes meeting a young, “highly educated” Palestinian who “works for an American government aid agency” and who tells him: “My work focuses on democratization and setting up Palestinian civil society. Basically, it’s bullshit.” 

Some of Sacco’s Arab interlocutors express support for the murders of Israeli women and children and even of non-Israelis in suicide bombings and other attacks—though he also quotes some dissenting voices. Indeed, in one conversation his interlocutor seems to change his mind on this as they talk. Perhaps he sensed that Sacco was unhappy about his sanguinary views.

Sacco takes Palestinian Arab society to task on a few other counts, too, including its attitudes towards women. He criticises Hamas’s imposition of hijab as a discriminatory and even dehumanising dress code. In one passage, Sacco highlights Palestinian indifference to—and even endorsement of—honour killing and forced marriage, including the marriages of 14-year-old girls to middle-aged men. He repeats stories of Palestinian men beating their wives.

Interestingly, Sacco also periodically admits that the veracity of some of the testimony he receives is doubtful. At one point, he quotes an “eyewitness” who tells him about groups of Arabs who were killed on their way to the school courtyard in Rafah on 12 November 1956. “One young man …. claims to have followed several family members and neighbors … and watched from a distance as they were lined up against a wall and shot,” his interlocutor states. But, Sacco notes, “Abed [Sacco’s guide] is somewhat skeptical that the man actually witnessed the killings … and [for me] Abed’s doubt is as good as a veto.”

He asks his readers, “Who decides what is credible and what is not?,” but quickly answers his own question:  

Abed and I, that’s who, sitting in our living room drinking coffee … In the absence of UNRWA records, of Israeli records—and could we rely on them if we had them?—it’s up to us to fill history’s glass with as much truthful, cogent testimony as we can. If some truth spills along the way, we apologize.

At one point in Notebooks, Sacco addresses this problem head on. He tells his readers:

You have just finished reading a string of personal recollections that tell the story of the widespread killings of Palestinian men by Israeli  soldiers in Khan Yunis on November 3, 1956. … Now allow me to kick at the pillars upon which our story stands. I don’t need to tell you memories change with the years, and the memories we have excavated here [in 2003] are decades old. Memory blurs edges, it adds and subtracts.

He dissects the accounts of one incident, in which IDF soldiers allegedly murdered a group of four brothers. The supposed eyewitnesses to this contradict each other’s versions. “What are we to make of this?,” Sacco asks: 

I cannot untangle the twining guilt and grief that envelop a person who survives what so many others did not; nor can I explain what might induce a traumatized individual to recall a brother’s death if he was not there—assuming he was not. I … acknowledge the problems that go along with relying on eyewitness testimony in telling our story.

The documents Sacco unearths in the UN Archive in New York are equally fraught with contradictions and uncertainties:

To the historian who rubs his hands together as the archivist wheels out a cart loaded with forgotten files, a contemporary document … can represent a more definitive version of events than decades-old memories. But the [UNRWA director’s] report indicates ‘there is some conflict in the accounts given as to the causes of the casualties. … The UN report [elsewhere] presents two incompatible versions of the Khan Yunis ‘incident,’ and so in this case as in many others, history-by-document  drops us into a muddied soup of ‘on the other hands,’  and ‘possibles’ seasoned, perhaps with a few ‘probablies.’

But despite these disclaimers, all three of his books—War on Gaza, Footnotes in Gaza, and Palestine—rely heavily on oral evidence.

Sacco occasionally allows the reader a glimpse of his own feelings. In one of the most powerful mini-chapters of Footnotes—titled “Feast”— Sacco describes the slaughter of several 650 kg bulls for the Muslim holiday of Eid el Adha. He describes the demise of one bull in the following way:

Ideally it should be killed with one stroke … but the man wielding the knife can’t manage; the bull takes a lot of hacking before it succumbs … and even then a couple of men have to add their weight to quell its spasms. The street, as they say, is running with blood, and the kids use the goo to make handprints on the walls.

(The bloody hands are eerily reminiscent of the famous photograph from the slaughter of two captured IDF reservists by an Arab mob in Ramallah during the Second Intifada, in which one of the killers leans out of a second-storey window to triumphantly display his bloody hands to a waiting crowd.)

Sacco describes the slaughter of a second bull, destined for consumption by his host family, in similarly bloody detail:

The bull knows something is up. The butcher sharpens his knives while his son expertly lassoes a front leg and then the opposite hind leg …. Everyone gets in on the act. The ropes are crossed and pulled … and the bull goes down. The butcher … steps forward. He strikes three times before he breaks through the hide. The son … has a small knife, but he drives it in so deep that his fists disappear into the bull’s throat. As he hacks, the butcher works to extend the cuts to the sides …. Other men join in, cutting through the neck and twisting off the head … while the legs are cut off at the knee joints …. The stomach and intestines are dumped on the sidewalk. The toxic spleen is handed gingerly to a boy who throws it like a grenade into the street.

Afterwards, the meat is portioned out among the members of the extended family.

The descriptions and illustrations are vivid—perhaps Sacco is really serving up, in metaphor, the horrors of the occupation and of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict itself, and the stomach-curdling feelings they elicit in him. Though there are occasional touches of humour and light-hearted banter, Palestine and Footnotes are infused throughout with the sheer awfulness of the conflict and of life in the territories before the current war. Suffering, incarceration, and torture are daily fare.

Israel’s Occupation of Gaza in 1956–57

Many of the questions that have arisen since October 7 have been raised before.

QuilletteBenny Morris

Sacco’s attitude follows a clear trajectory over the course of his repeated sojourns in Palestine. We can trace this in the three books, as he shifts from open-mindedness and scepticism through understandable empathy with the suffering Palestinians to anti-Zionist advocacy and vilification of the “genocidal” Jews. By the end of War in Gaza, there is no balance, little context, and all nuance has disappeared.

What we get instead is a book whose cover shows Israeli bombs protruding from stuffed body bags. There are no mentions of the slaughter of Israeli kibbutzniks, of the mass rapes, of the abductions of women, children, and the elderly—nothing about the actions that triggered the Israeli devastation of the Gaza Strip and the killing of many thousands of Palestinians—nor any admission that many of those killed must have been gunmen and their accomplices, even if some were innocents.

Sacco tells his readers that he created War in Gaza at the request of a friend who told him to “raise the voice up against these [Israeli] crimes.” He tells us that he once told his friend that the Palestinians should imitate Gandhi. The Gazans, he allegedly advised, “ought to march peacefully to the Israeli barrier … so the world would laud their non-violence and shame the Israelis into ending their oppression.”

And, according to Sacco, in 2018–19, the Gazans did just that, in the form of the Great March of Return campaign, which resulted in daily demonstrations along the border. But, he says, “as my friend had predicted they were shot down in droves. A couple of hundred were killed and thousands were wounded … The world yawned and moved on. After that I had no more suggestions for what the Palestinians ought to do.” He makes no mention of the bombs occasionally thrown by the demonstrators—though admittedly these led to very few Israeli casualties.

Sacco provides neither text nor illustration showing what the Gazan terrorists did on 7 October 2023, preferring to skip straight to Israel’s response, which he initially proposes we call “genocidal self-defense.” Later in the book he simply calls it “genocide.”

At this point, Sacco segues to anger at President Joe Biden who “overnighted planeload after planeload of 2,000-pound bombs and 155 mm artillery rounds to Israel …. The Israel Defense Force[s] was pre-approved for war crimes.” Later—probably to appease the US electorate—Biden pressed Israel to allow food supplies into the Strip and halted some bomb shipments. “America had just invented Kinder Gentler Genocide,” concludes Sacco, who mocks Biden’s credulity in believing that the Muslim gunmen beheaded Israeli babies. He concedes that the Palestinians did commit atrocities on 7 October, but he neither names nor illustrates them. The Israelis, he comments, responded by loosing “the Righteous Rampage that smote the People of Darkness … Amalek.” Sacco is horrified that his IRS payments go toward the ordnance America supplies to Israel. In the forthcoming US presidential elections, Sacco comments, the American people will have to choose between “a president who facilitated a genocide” and “a former president who will ‘end our democracy.’”

Sacco then abruptly shifts to a description of his 95-year-old mother, who endured the Nazi bombardments of Malta during the Second World War in a clear attempt to draw an analogy between Israel and Nazi Germany. He quotes Shay Golan, the Israeli Minister for Social Equality and the Advancement of the Status of Women, who declared: “I am personally proud of the ruins of Gaza, and hope that every baby, even eighty years from now, will tell his or her grandchildren what the Jews did.” But what Sacco omits to tell his readers is that Golan, a radical right-winger, is held in contempt by most Israelis.

Sacco also full-throatedly supports the Free Palestine campus protestors, whom he claims are simply trying to “stop a genocide.” He proffers vivid illustrations of brutal American police clubbing peaceful demonstrators. He laments that “Never Again” seemingly applies only to the Jews. “Gaza is where the West went to die,” he concludes.

War on Gaza does make some important and unfortunately truthful points. The IDF has not emerged as “the world’s most moral army,” as Israeli propaganda would have it. Sacco offers illustrations of grinning Israeli soldiers walking amidst the ruins of Gaza’s universities and taking grinning selfies with women’s lingerie, as well as of West Bank settlers destroying Arab olive crops and murdering Arab farmers.

But elsewhere he is unfair in the extreme. Sacco mocks the masses of Israelis who protested in the months before the war against the Netanyahu government’s efforts to undermine Israel’s democracy and erode the independence of the judiciary—his view seems to be that Israel never had a democracy to begin with. Sacco compares Israeli democracy with that of ancient Athens—a society in which women had few rights and no vote and whose socioeconomic order was underpinned by masses of slaves. He points out that in the year 416 BC, the Athenians slaughtered all the adult males on the island of Melos and sold the women and children into slavery because the islanders refused to join their fight against Sparta. Still, surely even an imperfect democracy is preferable to the theocratic totalitarianism of Hamas and Islamic Jihad and to the other barbarous tyrannies of the Arab world. To these, Sacco is determined to turn a blind eye. Incredibly, in War on Gaza, he makes no explicit mention of Hamas or Islamic Jihad at all and only occasionally speaks in vague terms of “fundamentalists.”

Sacco’s illustrations are hard-hitting and sometimes brutal. They are not for the squeamish. The Arabs and Israelis depicted in scenes from 1948, 1956, and 1967 look grim; so do Sacco’s interviewees from the 1990s and early 2000s. Except for some of the latter-day Israelis and Westerners, they all look like victims, people with History weighing heavily on their shoulders—including Sacco himself, invariably pictured with outsized teeth and opaque glasses.    

Perhaps the last word should go to one of Sacco’s Arab interlocutors, “an old man, an ex-schoolteacher,” interviewed in the West Bank town of Jenin, which is currently the scene of daily firefights between Palestinian gunmen and IDF raiders. The interview takes place “under the gaze [but out of earshot] of Israeli soldiers in a rooftop position” across the street. Sacco visited Jenin at the end of an extended sojourn in the territories toward the close of the First Intifada. The conversation takes place just hours after three Israeli soldiers, in a tent encampment just across the border inside Israel, were butchered by axe-wielding Palestinian terrorists.

Sacco: “How do you think the Israelis will react [to the slaughter], will they get harder …?”
Old man: “Harder softer, softer harder, it doesn’t matter … it will go on forever and forever.”
Sacco: “What about the [ongoing Oslo] peace process?”
Old man: “It was dead before it was born.”

A friend of the old man comers along and briefly joins the conversation.

Old man: “This man, the Israelis destroyed his house … His son threw a Molotov [cocktail]. His sentence is 11 years [in an Israeli prison].”
Sacco: “Do you think there will be peace?”
Friend: “I don’t think it will come from this peace process. We Arabs, we are one religion, one history. One day there will come new leaders to Jordan, to Syria, to Lebanon … and then … We must have our freedom! We will take it! You will see!’

The friend departs.

Old man: “He believes we will get help from other Arab governments … You know who is the Jew? [Egyptian President Hosni] Mubarak! Because he betrays his people and he does it all for the money [from] the Americans … There will never be peace! Never!”
Sacco: “You don’t think the Israelis will leave [the occupied territories]?”
Old man: “They will never [willingly] leave. They will only flee.”
Sacco: “Can Jews live together with Palestinians in separate states [in a partitioned Palestine]?”
Old man: “Never! They want this land [i.e., all of Palestine]! We want this land [all of Palestine]. Even if they go [i.e. withdraw] behind the Green Line [the Israel–West Bank border], what if I own a cave by Haifa? That is still my cave.”

Another man comes along.

Old man: “This man, he had land and a house on the other side of the Green Line, they took it from him …. The Israelis have his olive trees now. Ask him if he will ever give up this land.”
Sacco: “What’s he saying?”
Old man: “He says if they give him all the land between here and Pakistan, he wouldn’t give up a rock of the land they took from him.”
The old man laughs: “Hahahahaha.”

Unlike America’s anti-Israeli “progressives,” Sacco actually comes from a recent former colony that suffered—albeit at Nazi hands—because it was a British outpost and bastion. He is therefore a real, not a pretend, “postcolonial.” So his pro-Palestinian tilt is perhaps natural. But ultimately his vision portends a bad future for both the Israelis and the Palestinians. Over the past 140 years, both peoples have manoeuvred themselves into a reality of growing brutality and extremism and a conflict that appears to have no exit.