Word: sacco
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...Sacco reminds us, for example, that the vast majority of Gazans are refugees driven out of their homes on Israel's coastal plain in the war of 1948, and barred from returning. And in one of the most startling observations in the book, he shows that Israeli leaders understood exactly why the Palestinians of Gaza would turn to violence. He quotes General Moshe Dayan, Israel's most celebrated military commander, at the April 1956 funeral of a kibbutznik slain by Palestinian fedayeen near the Gaza border, warning Israelis that they faced an intractable conflict that they had no choice...
...that eludes most linear print stories about Gaza, Sacco's drawings capture not only the despair of its benighted citizens, but also their indomitable vitality, their generosity and their gallows humor. "Palestinians in Gaza haven't had the luxury of pulling back and examining the past," Sacco told TIME in a telephone interview, explaining why he had exhumed these ancient events. "Besides, in Gaza, every generation...
...theme running through Sacco's chronicle is what he calls, "the frailty of memory". Sacco does his best to sort out the contradictory testimony, made hazy by the passage of time and successive repeats of similar traumas over the decades. The survivors of the Rafah killings, for example, all remember the appearance of a flock of doves soon before they were freed, but they can't recall if the birds settled on the shoulders of the officer who appeared to demand the Palestinians' release, or if the doves hovered above the officer's head, or if their uniformed savior...
Despite his focus on the past, the present invariably comes crashing in. Sacco and his fixers are shot at by an invisible Israeli sniper in a watchtower. They meet a man who pleads with militants not to use his home as a firing position because the result will be the destruction of his house; and they witness a Rafah home demolished by an Israeli bulldozer that "scooped out the earth as if it were ice cream." Back in 1956, the Palestinians saw the faces of the Israeli soldiers bursting into their homes, but today, in Sacco's cartoons - as well...
...Sacco's stay in Gaza involves several encounters with militants, haggard, sleep-deprived men always on the run from informers and Israeli assassinations. One of them, "Khaled", comes to a telling realization: "Okay, I hate the Jews but I can live with them." As Sacco tells TIME, "This was a strange and almost hopeful moment - that people who didn't like each other could still live side by side." Most of all, says Sacco, "You meet many people who aren't caught up in rage and anger, they just want a normal life." And it is these ordinary people...