The other day Joe Sacco, author of Footnotes in Gaza, which centers on a 1956 massacre in Gaza and is featured on this site, was on the Leonard Lopate show on NY’s public radio station. The opportunity surely came about because Sacco got a great review in the New York Times, and Lopate is better about the Israel/Palestine issue than his colleague Brian Lehrer (Lehrer is more communitarian, which works out to be Jewish-communitarian). Still it was a weird interview, formal, stiff, and indicative of the mainstream media’s complete discomfort with any alternative to the pro-Israel narrative.
Lopate felt the need to ask Sacco some tough questions: Well the Palestinians have also killed people, haven’t they? Sacco: Yes of course they have. And then: Well why didn’t you focus on Israeli deaths. Sacco: Well I thought there has been far less attention to this part of the story, and that’s why I wanted to tell it. Lopate also expressed some ignorance about the status of the refugees in Gaza. Happily, I forget most of the rest of the interview, but the general feeling was: This whole situation is a big complicated mess and who would want to go near it. To his credit, Sacco was completely unflappable and calm. But at the same time he didn’t take Lopate on, didn’t say: Well there has been a pattern of this kind of violence and ethnic cleansing, directed at civilians and refugees, from 1948 to 1956 to last year’s Gaza war.
Later I found a far better interview of Joe Sacco, here, with Laila El-Haddad at Al Jazeera. This interview reveals the poverty of our discourse. Note that Sacco is able to talk about his passion for the issue, and to speak directly about the media’s failure to cover Palestinians fairly:
Why 1956 in particular?
Mainly because it seems like a very large event. This is not to downplay anything [else] that happened. But we’re talking about hundreds of people. We’re talking about taking people out of their homes, or shooting them in their homes, or lining them up against the wall or in the streets and shooting them.
I just wondered why this wasn’t a story I’ve been able to read about.
And in the end, you just become attached to getting the story; you go from sort of justifying in your own head why you’re doing it to feeling like you are after something come hell or high water….
[Referring to his introduction to the matter years ago:] Every time the word ‘Palestinian’ came up on the news it was in relationship to a bombing or a hijacking or something else like that. And that is objective journalism: just reporting what’s going on. ‘This is a fact’ and leave it there. What it meant was that I had no education from the American mainstream media about what was going on there.
I knew nothing about the Palestinians. I didn’t know why they were fighting at all or what they were striving for. It never seemed to come up in the American media.
