The pro-Israeli slant of the Western coverage of the Middle East conflict has been widely noted. But in Britain at least, the media are not entirely indifferent to the Palestinian point of view. Last month, the British commercial television company Carlton broadcast John Pilger’s incisive documentary “Palestine Is Still the Issue,” which exposed the systematic humiliation many Palestinians suffer daily.
Broadcast, perforce, late in the evening, Pilger’s program nonetheless made a big impact, all the bigger because of the outrage with which it was greeted by many British Jews. Carlton’s own chairman, Michael Green, condemned the program as a “tragedy for Israel” so far as accurate reporting was concerned. A strong complaint against it was lodged with the Independent Television Commission. Far from upholding the complaint, however, the ITC ruled that, for all its polemical intent, Pilger’s portrayal of Palestinian oppression respected the perspective of the Israeli government.
The documentary offered a salutary, if rare, corrective to the well-documented tendency of the British media to leave viewers uncertain as to who are the victims and who the aggressors in the struggle between Palestinians and Israel. Yet if the British media is inherently biased against any proper understanding of what is going on in the Middle East, this is doubly true of the US media. In the United States, informed and sympathetic analysis of Palestinian affairs forms little part of mainstream public discussion. It was unease about the paltry effort in the American media to speak up for the Palestinians that prompted the graphic artist-cum-journalist Joe Sacco to look for a challenging new way of presenting their predicament. In his book “Palestine”, recently published in London, Sacco employs a remarkable sequence of sharply drawn cartoon strips to dramatize the Palestinian story. Rarely have cartoons had such a serious message to impart.
Born in Malta but educated at the University of Oregon, Joe Sacco spent two months in the occupied territories at the beginning of the 1990s. Together with an impassioned introduction by Edward Said, the nine original installments are only now available in book form for the first time. Over the course of the past decade, of course, much has happened in the Middle East - not least the inception and ultimate derailment of the peace process. It is, alas, a measure of how fundamentally unaltered the Israeli/Palestinian conflict remains, that the contents of Sacco’s ten-year-old cartoons seem wholly contemporary. The images and dialogue in “Palestine” might have been composed last week.
Sacco figures in his own cartoons in caricatured form, as a goofy, insatiably inquisitive American tourist, who wanders about places like Nablus and Hebron, searching for the truth and nursing a keen sense of what he is up against in trying to communicate the human reality behind US media images of Palestinians as murderous fanatics. Sacco recalls the case of the American Jew Klinghoffer, who — while enjoying an idyllic Mediterranean cruise aboard the Achille Lauro — was assassinated by the Palestine Liberation Organization. From his grief-stricken wife to what he put on his cornflakes, every aspect of Klinghoffer’s story was endlessly milked by the American news media for emotional effect. Millions wept over the fate of a kindly man who fell victim to pitiless Arab thugs.
The cartoons set out to counter this institutionalized bias to tell Palestinian “human interest” stories which underline the helplessness of great numbers of Palestinians in the face of Israeli oppression. Sacco meets farmers whose olive trees, the basis of their livelihood, have been gratuitously decimated by Israeli soldiers for ‘security’ reasons. An old man explains to him how — because a Molotov cocktail was thrown from his olive grove - soldiers ordered him to erect a fence around it. The old man did not have the money to comply with this demand, so the soldiers made him cut down his own trees, equipping him with a chain saw for the task. Because olive trees take many years to mature, the old man says he felt as if he was killing his own sons.
As well as sorrow, there is more than a little (mostly black) humor in “Palestine”. Evoking the Israeli prison Ansar 111, Sacco introduces his readers to a former prisoner who describes how thirty-five men occupied a single cell with a barrel for a toilet, which was soon full to overflowing. During the night, a prisoner with a weight problem got up to use the barrel and toppled it. The images depicting the episode — eyes and mouths distended with horror — are hilariously vivid. Another former inmate tells how prisoners about to be released regularly swallow plastic capsules with messages inside them. Once freed, they are pestered by people anxious to know if they have any messages from inside for them. “Yes,” runs the standard reply, “but perhaps not until tomorrow.”
What makes Joe Sacco’s book such a powerful piece of work, however, is that it combines piquant anecdotes with a great deal of hard information about the precise ways in which Palestinians are victimized. Sacco discusses, for instance, Israel’s monopolizing of Palestinian water resources — how the Israelis pump West Bank water to Jewish settlements at such a rate that only a trickle is left for Palestinians. And he reports, among much else, how tomatoes grown in Gaza are deliberately left to rot at Israeli airports so that they reach Europe in degraded condition, with much resultant damage to the good name of Palestinian farmers.
At the close of the book, Sacco is in Jerusalem talking to two well-educated and articulate young Israeli women. Though relatively liberal (one of them concedes that there is a ‘moral problem’ with the Occupation), they are greatly more preoccupied with what Palestinians have done to Israelis than with what Israelis have done to Palestinians. At the same time, they confess that they are tired of talking about the rights and wrongs of the issue and just want to get on with their lives.
Joe Sacco’s richly informative book goes a long way toward explaining why — so long as Palestinian grievances remain unaddressed — they and their fellow Israelis are likely to be thwarted in this seemingly innocent aspiration.
— Neil Berry is a freelance journalist based in London.
