Second frame of third section:
This is a book that is both weirdly out of date and weirdly timely. It is about an obscure incident of Middle Eastern history: the massacres of civilians in the Gaza Strip by Israeli forces on the margins of the 1956 Suez war, 275 killed in Khan Yunus on 3 November and 111 in Rafah on 12 November. In these awful days, it’s probably healthy to cast our minds back almost seventy years to the brief months of the first Israeli occupation of Gaza, when most of its inhabitants had fresh memories of the Nakba and realistic expectations that they might be driven out of their homes again.
The other startling aspect of the book is that the research was carried out in 2002 and 2003, when the second Israeli occupation, started in 1967, was (as it turned out) on the last legs of its direct phase, and Fatah was still in political leadership among the Palestinians, though Hamas and other militants were clearly a rising faction through the Second Intifada, especially within Gaza. The death of Rachel Corrie happens just off screen.
Between the research on the book and its publication in 2009, the Israelis withdrew their military and settlers from Gaza (2004), Hamas won the Palestinian elections (2005) and seized control in Gaza (2006). I hardly need remind you of events since 2009, especially the last twenty months. But I’m writing here about Joe Sacco’s book, not about more recent history.
Sacco portrays the daily grind of life under the occupation vividly, and also the difficulty of getting eyewitness accounts of events from almost half a century before. Even for those who were there, 1956 was comparatively small beer compared with 1948 or 1967, unless you or your family happened to be directly involved with either of the massacres. Accounts differ on the details, but the broad account of brutality is the same, and the graphic medium brings home the human impact as words alone never can.
It’s an account from one side of two particular incidents, because the Israelis largely covered them up (apart from an interesting debate in the Knesset); Sacco interviews a senior Israeli securocrat to get their perspective, and he is also clear about the Fedayeen incursions into Israel in 1956, and indeed the suicide bombings and internal Palestinian violence five decades later.
It’s important that individual incidents in any conflict get the dignity of a permanent record, even if they cannot achieve closure for victims and perpetrators. (Needless to say, I think of an incident in 1972 which was more local to me.) At the time the book was published, these two massacres from fifty-three years before were the largest killings of Palestinians on Palestinian soil, a record that I suspect may no longer stand. I’m glad to say that Ha-Aretz posted a positive review of the book when it came out.
My one complaint, and it is a serious one, is that my copy of the book was wrongly bound, and instead of pages 245-276; there was an extra set of pages 117-148. Fortunately Martin Wisse was able to sort me out with the missing pieces, but it was almost a metaphor for the difficulty that Sacco faced in assembling the truth. If you are lucky, you can get a full copy here.
Truth is really important and also sometimes really difficult to get. As I was writing this, someone in my Facebook feed posted a summary of Palaestina ex monumentis veteribus illustrata (1714) by the Dutch scholar Adriaan Reland / Hadrianus Relandis, claiming that Reland’s research on the ground in the early eighteenth century “proved” that there were almost no Arabs living in Palestine at that time. This meme is completely false; Reland never visited the Middle East in his life, and there is no attempt to calculate the contemporary population in his book, which is about Biblical and classical references to the place names of the region. As usual, if a propaganda claim from either side looks too good to be true, it probably is.
Footnotes from Gaza was my top unread comic in English. Next on that pile is Final Cut, by Charles Burns.
