At 40 kilometres long and 12 kilometres wide, the Gaza Strip is one of the most densely populated places on earth. It is also the focal point of Footnotes in Gaza, in which comic journalist Joe Sacco investigates the controversial Khan Younis killings of 1956, the first time Israel took control of the contentious region during the Suez Canal crisis.
While the region is currently under siege by Israel in response to the multi-pronged attacks by Hamas, a Palestinian militant group that Israel and its allies consider a terrorist outfit, Sacco’s graphic narrative gives context to the conflict by focusing on “a sideshow of a forgotten war”. In a 2009 foreword, Sacco labels the need to write about the killings as they are one of the “innumerable tragedies over the ages that barely rate footnote status in the broad sweep of history…even though they contain the seeds of grief and anger that shape present-day events.”
Footnotes to a framed narrative
Footnotes in Gaza opens in West Jerusalem with the backdrop of the Palestinian ambush of Hebron in 2002. At the time, Sacco was attending a party, where, along with journalists and development sector workers, Palestinians and Israelis at the same club seemed indistinguishable from each other. The next day, when he visited Khan Younis, Sacco describes a starkly different atmosphere, with Israeli pilots circling above, and a Palestinian checking out his Browning pistol below.
Such juxtapositions recur as he remains the outside witness to the conflict, and as the story progresses, we gain an insight into the wilful and disproportionate use of force that has led to such a state of constant confrontation. Between the open, free, technologically advanced Israeli images that he places next to the cramped and crumbling frames of Palestinian refugees, there is a dystopian quality to the everydayness of violence that Sacco witnesses. This seeps into the visual vocabulary of the book and sets the tone for the rest of his narration.
Amid frames of crumbling buildings, Sacco admits that the events in Khan Younis are a tiny speck on history’s canvas. Since then, there have been thousands of deaths in the region, each death becoming a mere footnote to the past. In 2014, 2,251 Palestinians, of which 1462 were civilians, along with 67 Israeli soldiers and six civilians, were killed over 50 days of fighting. In May 2021, after the Israeli police raids at Al Aqsa mosque, 250 people died in Gaza and 13 in Israel. In 2023, the death toll had already crossed 1800 a few days ago. As Sacco himself puts it, “History chokes on fresh episodes and swallows what footnotes it can.” Sacco’s retelling of the Khan Younis killings attempts to wrest the truth of what happened from the realm of memory, probabilities and possibility before it is invisibilised by collective amnesia.
The diverse cast of characters in Sacco’s storytelling
As Sacco investigates the past through the lens of the present, his first interviewee is his guide, Abed. Abed is a Hamas supporter wounded by Israeli bullets during a demonstration and angered by the 1993 Oslo Accords. The Accords had ended the First Intifada, and led to the withdrawal of the Jewish settlers to fixed posts but doubled the number of occupiers on occupied land. Abed leads Sacco through Gaza, telling him about the simmering resentments that led to the Second Intifada in 2000, and the retaliatory measures by the Israeli government, accompanied by chilling frames of Israeli Defence Forces destroying Palestinian homes with bulldozers on nebulous claims of terrorism. Interviews such as Abed’s provide insight into the discontentments within his community that have given Hamas popular support.
Sacco meets a diverse cast of characters – a mother intent to show him the cramped quarters of her home, a student writing an exam, an uncle, disgruntled at his choice to write about 1956, and a widow who lost her sons. While he does cover treaties and timelines, Sacco’s story centres on the faces and names of the people they concern. He fields questions about the 1897 Zionist conference in Basel where a resolution was passed calling for a Jewish homeland, and touches upon the creation of Israel in 1948, and how the country’s Arab neighbours declared war on the new nation. He speaks to those who fled trying to escape the crossfire.
Sacco’s interviewees narrate how they started from scratch in the desert in the 1950s after the United Nations brokered an armistice between Israel and the Arabs, and how the dispossessed Arab refugees went from living in tents in the desert to having brick-and-mortar homes which sometimes house over 12 people in a room. As he interviews both Fedayeen members and American-funded NGO workers, Sacco traces the events that led to the nationalisation of the Suez Canal and to Israel’s invasion of Egypt in October 1956, relying on personal recollections of people who saw the killings.
His interviewees also include former Israeli soldiers – Mark Gefen, Naftali Carni and Mordechai Baron, who corroborate and complicate the testimonies shared by the refugees in Gaza and also shed light on the manner and method of Israeli retaliation.
As the narrative proceeds, Sacco informs readers of the Israeli position that the men were part of the (armed) resistance; and the Palestinian one ( that the fighting had ceased and the soldiers had fired on unarmed civilians); providing irrefutable evidence that allows readers to come to their own conclusions.
Investigative reportage and history from below
Footnotes from Gaza is Joe Sacco’s second foray into the Palestinian region, after his Eisner Award-winning comic Palestine, which interweaves the story of the Balfour Declaration of 1917 with the lives of the Palestinian people living under occupation, as “history’s losers”. With its vivid account of the imbalances in power and artistic juxtaposition of past and present, Sacco’s account is one of the most detailed and granular pieces of investigative reportage to have emerged from the region. This is also partly because of its timing. Sacco’s interviews were conducted before Hamas established control over Palestine in 2007, and Footnotes was published in 2009 after Israel declared the Gaza strip an enemy entity. It is unique because its focus is on the people who are caught in the crossfire, relegated to being statistics or footnotes in histories of States and debates about nationhood. The history Sacco writes is a history from below.
While Sacco does not claim to be objective, his writing cannot be dismissed as propaganda. He is open about how his visualisations come with their own degree of refraction. His deeply moving images rely on United Nations Relief Works Agency reports and archives, and the memories of the Palestinians and Israelis who bore witness to the scene. Unlike most writing about the Palestinian people, Sacco’s characters aren’t mere tragic figures or terrorists, they are human beings with agency, aspirations, and their own different viewpoints. As are the Israelis who he interviews. Sacco acknowledges the limitations of memory but does not dismiss those who remember things differently than what would suit his narrative expectations. He asks uncomfortable questions to those in power and does not settle for easy answers. Nor does he allow his readers to.
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