Arnold Buckley
Joe Sacco draws lot of pictures of Israel in discussing the Israeli-Arab conflict in a voluminous graphic art book called "Footnotes In Gaza". Sacco draws the story of the city of Rafah which is a town of total squalor in the Gaza Strip where rubble buildings and narrow streets is the environment of thousands of Palestinians driven from their land into this narrow strip of land. Sacco draws up the story that he personally investigated and went to see which was a massacre of hundreds of Palestinians in the 1956 story and this is basically this 400 page book. It clearly must of taken Joe Sacco much time to draw and write this book as he immerses himself into daily modern Rafah trying to uncover witnesses and clues to this event long forgotten in history.
This book tells of the continuing struggle of these people many of whom are losing their homes as the Israeli army quite literally bulldozes their structures out of existence. Sacco goes through much travel and trouble to uncover the causes why the Jews acted like Nazis in September of 1956 and basically lined up unarmed civilians and shot them down as their own version of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. The cruelty and brutality of the Israeli army in rounding up citizens and putting them onto a school rounds as collaborators signaled out their felloe citizens who were to be executed was excellently illustrated in this brilliant piece of visual reading and art geared towards the younger reader.
Sacco is a visually unique artist and does a job capturing the fear and destruction of 1956 Israel and modern days in Rafah as generations of Arabs lose all of their processions. The investigative journalism of Sacco on this subject is intense as this is a subject he obviously wanted to go in-depth and has a passion. many of the Palestinians he talked too even wondered why he was so interested in one massacre from a quick war that was a victory of a coalition of Britain, France, and Israel that threatened a world War and soviet intervention before the Americans pressured their three allies to back off of their conquest of the entire Arab world they likely had planned of retaking. The high-level detail of this guys drawings are amazing and his attempt to retell the Suez Crisis and the historical research he does makes this an incredible read
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