War on Gaza

January 1, 2025
Voicing his anger over the Mideast. Sacco uses words and illustrations to document stories: He's a self-described comics journalist. He has combined both forms to great effect in numerous works of graphic nonfiction, includingPalestine andSafe Area Gorazde, that tell of overseas conflicts. One monumental wordless work, The Great War, depicts the first day of the 1916 Battle of the Somme. Sacco returns to the subject of the Mideast in his latest book, a slim overview of Israel's recent invasion of Gaza. The urgency of the project is evident in a short introduction in which he writes of beginning it after a friend in Gaza pleaded with him to "plz raise the voice up against these crimes." Sacco's answer: "So here, my friend, for whatever it's worth, I 'raise the voice up.'" That he does. The book is an impassioned polemic against Israel's devastating response to the raid of Oct. 7, 2023, in which more than 1,200 Israelis were slaughtered by Hamas fighters. "The scale of the deaths of Israeli civilians left me horrified," Sacco writes. So, too, did Israel's retaliation, which has killed tens of thousands of people. "I was only theoretically prepared for the worst," he continues. "The reality of the assault on Gaza...was almost beyond my comprehension." Unlike Sacco's earlier works that feature on-the-ground reporting--the testimony of ordinary citizens imbuing the pages with power--this book is more of a visual op-ed, his scathing critique of the U.S. and Israel accompanied by caricatures of President Biden and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and biblical-style language: "The way was greased for the Righteous Rampage that smote the People of Darkness." Elsewhere, he writes, "America had just invented Kinder, Gentler Genocide. The patent is pending." A biting commentary that suffers from heavy-handedness.

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Starred review from December 13, 2024

Having previously explored the region in works such as Palestine and Footnotes in Gaza, internationally acclaimed cartoonist and journalist Sacco delivers a bold and unflinching meditation on the devastation of the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict with honesty, outrage, and grim humor. Published in the aftermath of the harrowing events of October 7, Sacco's book channels both the paralysis of witnessing atrocities from afar and the necessity of bearing witness. Through stark black-and-white artwork, he brings Gaza's anguish to life: the rubble-strewn streets, the haunted faces of survivors, and the suffocating despair of life under siege, creating a visceral sense of the human cost of war. As powerful as these depictions are, Sacco's profound sorrow and disgust at the suffering in Gaza are most powerfully evoked in wryly humorous sequences addressing the complicity of global powers and the failures of education and politics to foster peace, especially in a memorably excoriating sequence that imagines Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a wrathful deity barking orders to his prophet, President Joe Biden. VERDICT Not an easy ready, but an essential, necessary indictment of political systems, military aggression, and global and personal complicity.--Thomas L. Batten

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