A powerful non-fictional account of life in the Gaza Strip, told in a stark yet emotional style through the graphic novel medium. If you have been trying to become informed on the Palestine/Israel issue, this is a must-read. ( )

The kind of journalism we need, and I enjoy. This book explained more to me about Palestine and life in the refugee camps in the nineties than years of average mass media journalism floating in politics but never landing to the ground where real people live, love and struggle. ( )

Sacco provides a perspective on the foreign relations and Palestine that we often don't get a chance to see in American media. His brand of storytelling is frank, grim, and honest. His illustrations and descriptions are detailed and reveal his experience as a reporter. The vignettes offer an additional dimension to the perspective.

Apart from being a little dated (Sacco visited Israel in the early 1990s), if this book has a flaw, it is that it is partial to a fault, with not even a hint of the Israeli side of the struggle. Sacco does admit to this in his foreword - his intention was to write from only one side of the issue. Being a US-educated journalist, he felt he had never been educated about the Palestinians and thus set out to write their, and only their, story. And he does it extraordinarily well. The stories of these children, women, and men are heart-wrenching and their powerlessness is palpable. Sacco admits to being very naive about the situation when he went on his trip, which adds to the narrative in that his reactions to the people he meets come across as very genuine. The fact that he is (in the foreword) still - almost 20 years later - defending his own naiveté at the time is a little disappointing, however.

Ultimately, I think this is a book about human hardship and how the "little person" suffers because of their powerlessness in the face of national and international powers. The story of Sacco's Palestine is not limited to the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. Indeed, it plays itself out all over the world, every day of our lives, whether we get our news from papers, TV, word of mouth, or decide not to get our news at all.

Sacco's drawings (especially in the later part of the book, where the style gets less cartoonish) are nothing short of amazing, particularly when you get to see photos that he based his drawings on side-by-side with the finished work. Photos that are not all that remarkable in and of themselves are given an extraordinary potency with the help of mere ink - a sharper shadow here and a refined layout there boosts the narrative exponentially.

The fact that he dedicates only a few pages (and very little passion) to the women's rights issues is probably the most upsetting to me, personally (honor murders gets less than a page and no commentary). I almost wish he hadn't included the issue at all, rather than give it such a diminutive place in the larger narrative.

The book is important, if not indeed necessary, to read as part of a bigger study on the topic if you grew up in a country that is pro-Israeli. For those (like me) who grew up in a country explicitly pro-Palestinian, it's not that much of a shock to see Sacco's story unfold –it is in fact a lot less gruesome than I had expected. ( )

In 1991, aghast at what his U.S. tax dollars were financing and how poorly the U.S. media was covering it, journalist and comic artist Joe Sacco went to the Occupied Palestinian Territories to research material for a comic book (Sacco eschews the term "graphic novel") about the Israeli occupation. Palestine is a forthright documentation of that trip: a mix of stories of the Occupation, plus his own roller-coaster of emotions as a privileged outsider, alternately perceiving himself as champion and vampire. Many times he is challenged by the people who tell him stories: they have told these stories many times before; what is the point of telling them again, to him? Will his retelling be listened to any better than anyone who came before him? And more importantly, will anyone ever support them in anything more than words?

Sacco does not try to tell "both sides" in Palestine: as he points out in the introduction, he can safely assume that U.S. audiences are familiar with Israel's side. Instead, Sacco gives a short overview of the socio-political history of Palestine, 1917-1948, itemizes life under military occupation, and details the Catch-22 legal web of economic colonization. Sacco is correct: these are stories that are not often told by the U.S. mainstream media. But even though Sacco doesn't aim to tell both sides, both sides are there, but viewed against the context of the Occupation. As the pages went by, I began to hear the oft-repeated phrase from Israeli interviewees, "We just want peace," as not a desire for peace but a desire for the Palestinians to stop fighting back. At the end of Sacco's trip, two Tel Aviv women insist on telling Sacco the Israeli side of the story -- but my eye is distracted by the coiffures, the clean lines of their suits, the wealth of the Tel Aviv streetscape behind them.

Personally, I found this a very difficult book to read: the language of Zionism is the language of Manifest Destiny, right down to the rhetorical notion that Palestine was empty ("a land without a people"), just waiting for industrious "Pioneers" and "settlers" to make it blossom. (I would list more parallels -- they never seemed to end -- but gah.) Usually, I blow through a graphic novel in a few days. This one took months, just because it took that long to process the rage many of the details triggered. It's not like I didn't know that American contritition about Manifest Destiny was false; believe me, I knew. But that it's all playing out again, and with U.S. backing, as if not a damned thing had been learned... I wish someone else was writing this review, because I cannot find a center to write it from.

There's good stuff here. The introductory materials for the Special Edition are also strong, with Sacco discussing the pitfalls of what he tried to do in the comic, and some of the poor choices he made. (Early on, for example, Sacco drew in the Bigfoot style, with the effect of making everyone into highly racialized caricatures.) That introspection appears in the comic, too, as Sacco narrates his reactions to the stories he was hearing. Sometimes the in-comic meta seems tiresome; other times absolutely necessary. If nothing else, it keeps bringing the reader back to the questions: Why did you choose to listen to these stories? And now that you are hearing them, what do you intend to do?

The ending is heartbreaking and brilliant. The final spread:

The bus taking me away left Israel and entered the Gaza Strip on its way to the Rafah border crossing... We carefully skirted Palestinian population centers, but it soon became apparent and word spread -- the driver was lost... He stopped at a Jewish settlement for directions... But a few minutes later we were heading for what looked like a Palestinian refugee camp or town... You could see the kids in the distance taking cover on each side of the road... If we continued that way, we were going to get stoned... The driver backed the bus up and turned it around... He stopped at a small army post and asked for more directions...

And with that final ellipsis, the comic ends. He stopped at a small army post and asked for more directions...