Book Review: Footnotes in Gaza by Joe Sacco

Footnotes in Gaza is a graphic book written by a journalist and is well-supported by his investigation about two comparatively unknown massacres of people in the Palestinian towns Khan Younis and Rafah in 1956, committed by Israeli army. Joe Sacco is a brilliant graphic journalist whose offerings from the war-torn areas from across the world, in the graphic report form, are said to be matchless.

Working through the memories of survivors and UN/govt. files pertaining to these two episodes, ignored as insignificant events in the Middle East, Sacco documents what really happened then. Though the story is consigned to be nothing but forgotten footnotes, Sacco feels it is imperative to tell it because the past and present are a remorseless continuum and history must be built from these obscure blocks.

If viewed on the lines of Mossad, Footnotes in Gaza, rather, is an influential work. Joe Sacco, of Maltese-American origin, has no personal axe to grind. In the early 2000s before Hamas takes over Gaza, leading to its (US-EU backed) total blockade, Sacco went and lived in several towns of Gaza to collect data. He makes allowances for unreliability of eyewitnesses due to passage of half a century of time and also due to partisan bias. Thus, he infuses some objectivity to the account of Israeli brutality in the face of their opponents' helplessness.

The writing is measured. The narrative oscillates to and fro effortlessly giving perspective to a long forgotten episode. The drawings are poignant and intense, each frame contributing to the story just how a paragraph in a literary book would do. The combination of these two, the author's unhurried construction of the events, his objective rendering of emotions in the frames bestows tremendous character to this graphic journal.

The extraordinary writing and pictures of Footnotes not only relives the poignancy of brutal massacres in distant time and space, but also tells why and how hatred was planted in hearts of people. The best graphic book ever produced on the war-torn theme.

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