As the cartoonist behind Palestine, unquestionably a seminal piece of graphic journalism, and its follow-up Footnotes in Gaza, Joe Sacco’s commentary on the genocide in Gaza over the last year was always going to be regarded as some of the key comics work on the subject. Now collected in a print volume War on Gaza, the Broken Frontier Award-winning series of comics and cartoons, originally ran over at The Comics Journal last year. It hardly needs saying that it’s a powerful collection of work that takes a different presentational approach to his previous related books and, at the same time, makes the reader want to go back and revisit them.
At 30-something pages you might think that War on Gaza would be a relatively quick read but it’s not. For a start so affecting are some of the shorts in this collection – the scene of Israeli snipers, for example, targeting Palestinian protestors on the Great March of Return in 2019 with shots that would inflict life-changing injuries – that some downtime between them will be an instant emotional reflex for many. Secondly, each instalment asks the reader to pause between comics/illustrations to digest the enormity of the atrocities being perpetrated.
War on Gaza’s commentary is often laced with an element of bleakly dark humour. An early one-page cartoon of raining missiles (from which the cover is derived) asks the much debated question as to whether Israel’s response to the October 7 Hamas attacks was self-defence or genocide. “Let’s make everyone happy and say it is both”, he opines, before arriving at the new terminology of “genocidal self-defense”. Later he focuses on Joe Biden’s role in supporting the horror and the White House’s attempt to play both sides by bolstering Israel’s campaign but also sending in humanitarian aid. “America had just invented kinder, gentler genocide. The patent is pending.”
It’s scathing material but it’s anger born of compassion. From the way language has been redefined and reapplied to justify the unjustifiable in Gaza to the casual way in which the words “Never Again” seem now to have lost their universality, Sacco is eloquently caustic in his thoughts. Sometimes the imagery here is horrifying for the violence and brutality it depicts. Sometimes, as in the case of Israeli tank soldiers posing for a chummy selfie in front of the ruins of buildings they have just destroyed, and civilians they have slaughtered, the outrage comes from the blithe indifference to the magnitude of their actions.
Sacco’s combination of elastic caricature and gritty realism forges a direct emotional bond with the reader. War on Gaza may be just 30-odd pages in length but it’s 30-odd pages that will linger and haunt you long after you have put the book down. As I said before Christmas when we included War in Gaza among our December Broken Frontier Staff Picks: “With his ever keen and incisive eye on events it’s some of Sacco’s finest work … This isn’t easy reading, and it may not be the kind of material that you want to be experiencing in the lead-up to the holiday season, which only makes it all the more important that you do. We live in a dark and bleak timeline. We cannot continue to look the other way when confronted with the moral obscenities that surround us. Essential reading.”
For more on the subject in comics form check out our work-in-progress Palestine resource list here.
Joe Sacco (W/A) • Fantagraphics Books, $12.99
Buy online here
Review by Andy Oliver
