The Art of War: Palestine, by Joe Sacco

No one in their rational mind can support the barbaric killing of innocents, whether in Israel or Gaza. But the argument being presented from several quarters that Palestinians are going to lose the sympathy of the world for the October 7, 2023 Hamas attacks begs the question – what use has this sympathy been to the Palestinian people in all these years?

At a time like this, Maltese-American cartoonist and journalist Joe Sacco’s Palestine has become essential reading for anyone who wishes to understand the complex history of the place and this ongoing “conflict” which has ravaged the ordinary lives of people in this Middle-Eastern region for decades.

This is a seminal piece of work that offers its readers an intimate and deeply political account of everyday life in occupied Palestinian territories, written during Sacco’s visit in 1991 and 1992, often laced with biting, ironic humour.

Palestine was originally published as a nine-issue comic series in 1993, which were collected and republished in a single volume in 2003, with an introduction by noted academic and literary critic Edward Said. Sacco’s words and his riotous, monochromatic illustrations in the book chronicle his interviews with those persecuted during the first Intifada, “motivated by collective Palestinian frustration over Israel's military occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip”.

This is as much a work of hard-hitting journalism as it is a historical document of the horrors of a devastating war. Sacco wants to inform and infuriate; some of his panels are deliberately absurdist but none of them are any more strange or outrageous than what we are reading today in the headlines daily.

These stories are nearly three decades old, and the greatest tragedy is how little has changed even now. No conflict or act of retaliation originates in vacuum, and while Palestine is not adequate but it’s certainly a definitive place to start reading about the situation to know how it got to this place – followed by Footnotes in Gaza, another searing volume by Sacco.