A View of Gaza and Palestine Through Comics

Claude Lanzmann, the director of Shoah (1985), the immense nine-hour-long documentary about the Holocaust, believed that the only way to address the horror and barbarism was through the direct testimony of the victims. According to this view, fiction was superfluous in transmitting to future generations the memory of something that should never be repeated, especially if it took the form of a medium like comics, so little regarded at the time, confined to mere adolescent entertainment. Contrary to this position, Art Spiegelman won the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for his canonical comic work on the subject: Maus.

Although there has been a notable evolution since then, there remains considerable reluctance among many readers to take comics seriously as a valid mode of expression for telling stories of a certain significance. Without disparaging those who didn't understand the creation of a National Comics Award to honor someone for "drawing stick figures," in most cases, what happens is that there is still a great lack of awareness about what can be achieved through comics, or graphic novels, or whatever you want to call them. But the truth is that today there are very high-quality comics that deal with all kinds of topics, no matter how dramatic, and a good example of this is the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, of which we will look at some examples.

Alfonso Zapico brings us closer to the origins of the conflict in Café Budapest (2008), recounting, against the historical backdrop of the creation of the State of Israel, the story of a Central European Jew who, along with his mother, a survivor of Auschwitz, emigrates to Jerusalem to take over a café where Jews, Arabs, and Christians coexist, more or less in harmony, until everything explodes on May 18, 1948, with the approval by the newly created UN of the partition of Palestine.

Another way to understand the difficult coexistence in that part of the world is offered by Canadian Guy Delisle in Chronicles of Jerusalem, winner of the Best Album Award at the 2012 Angoulême Festival. The author accompanied his wife, a member of Doctors Without Borders, between August 2008 and July 2009, and the culture shock caused by the intransigence and lack of communication, not only among Christians, Muslims, and Jews, but also among the most fundamentalist and ultra-Orthodox factions of each of these religions, he summed up with a surreal and brilliant "Thank you, my God, for making me an atheist."

In Waltz with Bashir (2009), Aris Folman and David Polonsky explore Aris's own memory, unable to recall anything of his participation as a soldier in the invasion of southern Lebanon in 1982, and of the Israeli army's failure to prevent the massacre committed by Maronite Christians in the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, killing hundreds of Palestinians, including women, children, and the elderly. One of the plates in this work is a perfect example of the narrative power of sequential art to wordlessly convey the horror of war. In the first panels, a red vehicle approaches a group of Israeli soldiers resting in front of a burger and kills them. In the following panels, another group of Israeli soldiers fires indiscriminately at the vehicle and the buildings behind it. At the end, the targeted vehicle emerges unharmed amid the smoke and rubble of the buildings.

I have left for last the author who has worked most on Gaza, the Maltese Joe Sacco. Palestine, winner of the 1996 American Book Award, launched him to fame for his account of the intifada in the Gaza Strip during December 1991 and January 1992. However, I prefer Footnotes from Gaza, which is more narratively complex, in which he recounts his return visit to Gaza in 2002 to investigate two massacres of civilians in the Palestinian cities of Khan Younis and Rafah that occurred in 1956, in the context of the Suez Canal crisis.

If the two previous works can be considered in journalistic terms as great news reports, The Gaza War (2023) would be the equivalent of an editorial column in which Sacco forcefully dismantles the argument of those who temporize with Israel for being the only democracy in the region, with the historical reference of how ancient Athens understood democracy: in the 5th century BC, after the island-state of Milos rejected the Athenian ultimatum to ally with them, Athens killed all its men, sold the rest into slavery and sent settlers to occupy the houses on the island that had been left empty.
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