A few thoughts about Joe Sacco's Footnotes in Gaza
I've been thinking a lot about Joe Sacco's Footnotes in Gaza, which I've been slowly re-reading since Hamas attacked Israel on October 7.
I'm not naive enough to think a book recommendation will ameliorate the current suffering in Gaza, or push Israel to stop its vicious, catastrophic bombing of Palestinians. But this is a space for books, and I am here to gently suggest you find a copy of Footnotes. For me, it's been just as valuable as any prose book I've read about Palestine and Israel.
Sacco is a comics journalist and he’s known for his dense, book-length graphic narratives about conflicts around the world. Footnotes in Gaza is his second comic about the experience of Palestinians living under occupation. (His first, simply titled “Palestine,” has been recommended on bookstagram a lot recently. It’s good, and you should read it, but Footnotes is both less visible and more consequential.)
Footnotes explores the margins of history, resurrecting decades-old violence against Palestinians in Gaza that was nearly erased from the official record — events that were literal footnotes in United Nations reports about Israel’s 1956 war with Egypt.
Sacco meticulously reconstructs, by way of extensive interviews, how hundreds of Palestinian civilians were massacred by Israeli troops in the Gazan cities of Khan Younis and Rafah. Because Sacco is a journalist, not a historian, the book also moves constantly between past and present, drawing connections between old violence and the dreadful humanitarian situation in Gaza in the early 2000s, when Sacco was working on the book.
It’s hard enough to grasp the scale of what’s happening to Gaza in the present. So my suggestion that you read an emotionally difficult book about war crimes that happened nearly 70 years ago may seem, at best, irrelevant.
Still I returned to Footnotes because I wanted to remind myself that there is a history here. Hamas butchering Israeli civilians was awful and unjustifiable; but so is Israel's bloody retaliation. And so were the killings Sacco reports on. And it’s worth understanding how Israeli soldiers — to paraphrase words from one of his sources — sowed hatred in the hearts of survivors.
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