Balkan blood feuds, the “war on terror” and the agonies of post-diluvium New Orleans are just a few topics taken up by graphic journalists of late. No doubt, some intrepid cartoonist-correspondent is roaming Port-au-Prince, sketchbook and flip-cam in hand.
Sacco, 49, isn’t just one of this evolving medium’s most skilled advocates. He’s widely credited with inventing a new genre, the investigative-reported war comic book.
Among his books are “Palestine” (2001), which won an American Book Award, and “Safe Area Goradze: The War in Eastern Bosnia 1992-1995” (2000), a chilling account of his sojourn in the former Yugoslavia.
But as Sacco sat in a West Hollywood cafe one recent morning, he was vexed by thoughts of the Haitian earthquake and how the rest of the world will handle its humanitarian aftershocks.
“People respond so well to victims of a natural disaster,” said the author, who was born in Malta and raised in Australia and the United States and now a resident of Portland. “But give it a couple of weeks, and when they see that a victim of a natural disaster is going to get angry about something or impatient, people are going to lose interest or feel they’re not grateful or something like that. Our hearts break for about a week, and then we kind of want to move on.”
Sacco’s unease goes to the core of “Footnotes in Gaza,” his latest book-length comic from inhumanity’s front lines. A disturbing first-person chronicle that’s also a work of forensic anthropology, it attempts to reconstruct an all-but-forgotten chapter in the long, bloody history of Arab-Israeli relations: the alleged massacre of hundreds of Palestinian civilians by Israeli troops in late 1956, during the Suez crisis.
Earlier that year, as Cold War tensions spilled into the Middle East, a series of cross-border skirmishes broke out between the Israeli Army and Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. Israeli troops entered Gaza, determined to quell what the Israeli leadership viewed as an insurgency spearheaded by Egyptian-backed guerrillas.
All the ingredients were present for a violent denouement. It came, according to a United Nations report, when 275 Palestinians in Khan Yunis and 111 in Rafah, near the Egyptian border, were killed during Israeli operations. The Israelis insisted they were rooting out a hostile enemy, but Palestinians contended that armed resistance had ceased before the troops arrived.
Sacco chose to excavate these events because he thinks they crystallize the ongoing conflict.
By dialing back the clock, Sacco said, he hopes to bring insight to a cycle of violent retribution and political stalemate that is as tragically timely as this morning’s Twitter feeds.
“I’m not necessarily saying that ’56 informs how people now are reacting. But ’56 brutalized a generation of Palestinians,” he said. “Ultimately that generation is going to convey frustration, anger, bitterness, maybe hatred to kids who are also undergoing their own incidents and their own problems. So it’s like this compounded history.”
Sacco also was drawn to the subject because it had generated so little historical or journalistic writing. He recorded the testimony of many Palestinian eyewitnesses and survivors. He also interviewed a number of Israeli historians and such boots-on-the-ground figures as Mordechai Bar-On, who served as right-hand man to Moshe Dayan, Israel’s former defense and foreign minister.
Employing cinematic techniques (extreme close-ups, aerial perspectives), “Footnotes” leapfrogs between 1956 and 2003, when Sacco did his field research.
The 418-page book, which took about 61/2 years to complete, contains four appendixes and a bibliography.
