Learning about Israel Part 1
In the 2004 film Control Room, Lt. Josh Rushing, a press officer from US Central Command, said that his experiences in Iraq revealed to him how important the Israel-Palestine question was in the Middle East. Since being in Iraq, he took it upon himself to educate his friends and family back home about how that question informed every aspect of how the U.S. is viewed in Arab states.
I was a senior in college on September 11, 2001, and at that time, I probably couldn’t have told you that the modern state of Israel didn’t exist before 1948. Since then, I’ve come to feel that the violent dispossession of 750,000 native Palestinians and the overtly racist rhetoric of the early Zionist movement constitute a humanitarian crime with striking similarities to the experience of the Native Americans.
I believe that the lingering after-effects of that crime (only 58 years old), the continued displacement and dispossession of Palestinians scattered throughout the Middle East, and the ardent refusal of Israel and the U.S. to acknowledge that a crime occurred is still the prime motivating factor in anti-U.S. sentiment throughout the Arab world.
We live in the era of post-colonial thought, where intellectuals are breaking free of the prejudices of an earlier era, taking responsibility for the sins of their fathers, and actively addressing the need for reconciliation and restitution. The state of Israel is the most recent instance of racist colonial conquest. There has still not been an institutional recognition on the part of Israel that every scrap of their land was deliberately taken by force at the expense of 750,000 Palestinians, whose decendents numbered between 4 and 9 million worldwide in 2001.
When I undertake an effort to learn about something new, I find the best place to start is often a comic book. Consequently, here comes my review of Palestine by Joe Sacco.
Joe Sacco is a cartoonist/journalist who makes a habit of hanging out in warzones, interviewing their inhabitants and rendering the experience in comic-book format.
Palestine was valuable to me in giving me a starting place in learning about the history of the Zionist movement which led to the forceful displacement of the native Palestinian population, with illustrations and quotes from some of it’s key players, such as early Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir’s infamous quote: “It was not as though there was a Palestinian people considering itself as a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist.”, contrasted with Israel’s founding father David Ben-Gurion’s quote “In each attack a decisive blow should be struck, resulting in the destruction of homes and the expulsion of the population.”
Historical vignettes such as these are sparingly interspersed with the illustrated conversations and experiences that Joe had spending time in various cities in the Occupied Territories in the winter of 1991-1992.
Palestine illustrates the human reality of being a Palestinian in the Occupied Territories. Everyone is under curfew, movement is curtailed, most of the men have spent time in giant Israeli prisons under dubious charges, and most everyone Joe meets spends their time swapping gallows humor in shabby houses which are regularly knocked down out of hand by Israeli bulldozers.
Sacco writes with a charmingly self-deprecating style, painfully conscious of his own role as a Western observer and comic book doodler being given the royal treatment by the poor households of Gaza.
Perhaps the most valuable contribution to my own exploration came from the forward, written by Edward Said. Edward Said was a literary scholar and social critic, whom Joe Sacco cites as a personal hero. Said was Palestinian-born, but his family permanently relocated to Egypt in his youth, shortly before 1948. Over the course of his life, he came to terms with his Palestinian identity and sense of rootlessness and alienation, and devoted most of his remaining years to wrangling with the Palestinian Question. His writings have been my best guide so far in understanding the origins of Israel, the Palestinian experience, and putting the modern peace process into context. The next two parts of my Learning about Israel posts will be about what I’ve gained from the two collections of his writings that I’ve recently finished.
Until then, I highly recommend Palestine as the appropriate comic with which to begin any serious inquiry.