Yeah, Sacco's great. Good luck finding
Palestine in a library outside of San Francisco or Berkeley, though.
As a Jew, I've gotten really tired of the old-hat Zionist perspective that most of my family takes. It's like they're progressives on every issue, but when it comes to
our ethnicity, they're militaristic nationalists who believe in mixing synagogue and state and harbor a subtle, persistent ethnic hatred for Arabs - which is silly, because Arabs and Israeli Jews are so similar. It's like hatred between Arabs and Persians - kind of pointless, yes?
I'm not saying that the Palestinians are perfect, defenseless angels, mind you, but how would you feel if you were fenced in from every side, deprived of critical supplies, prevented by walls from seeing your family, had your home bulldozed (it's full of TERRORISMS!), and then a bunch of ultra-orthodox loons built a fancy settlement next door, fenced in with security towers, IDF protection and special Jews Only access roads?
Whatever you think about the origin of the conflict, it's clear that the Israeli government is not blameless.
I think that Sacco's mission was to capture the human side of things, and keep high-minded editorializing to a minimum, and he achieves that: the book (like
Safe Area Goražde) is about recounting the stories of human beings embroiled in a conflict, how he meets them, what they do, the stories they tell. It's not really about analyzing or passing judgment, although he does have a certain political perspective which he doesn't exactly make secret.
His newest work,
Footnotes In Gaza, I haven't read - though I hear it's quite good.
See if your library has
Safe Area Goražde, at least. It's worth checking.
The comics thread seems to be largely "Marvel! DC! Yayyy!!!" so far. Leave it to the nerds, I guess.
