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.
The framing is a key part of the propaganda.
The assumption is always one that ostracizes the person shining a light on Palestinian suffering/history, as if that aspect is verboten, criminal, immoral by its very nature. As if to say that any person of good conscience and moral fortitude should, nay must, side with Israel from the outset.
That’s pure propaganda and it seems the Israel firsters in the American media have much in common with their fellow hacks, the Sean Hannitys and the Wolf Blitzers out there.
“That’s pure propaganda and it seems the Israel firsters in the American media have much in common with their fellow hacks, the Sean Hannitys and the Wolf Blitzers out there.”
Do you try to use every leftest hackneyed talking points on your posts or is it the way you think. I would guess you are a very young person with little real world experience who has taken the Palestinians on as a religion.
Good man Sean Hannity. Is he on radio in Israel?
Is that supposed to hurt us Julian? You can never back up the stuff you say with things like gee, I dunno – facts and evidence.
You just presume you’re inherently correct. Not very convincing, Jules.
Do you try to use every leftest hackneyed talking points on your posts or is it the way you think. I would guess you are a very young person with little real world experience who has taken the Palestinians on as a religion.
As you continue to make assumptions – par for the course for you – you continue to make an ass of yourself. I sure hope you’re not about to change your behavior any time soon as it is very helpful for “my religion” in proving the Zionist farce.
You could be 130 years old for all I care, but your passive aggressive act proves you’re mentally juvenile. Again, no surprise there given your inability to think beyond myths and lies that were fed to you with a spoon. A mature person, would at the very least show some intellectual curiosity.
little real world experience
Must you project your own insecurities and deficiencies onto others?
Nope, not a human being.
Its interesting.
When you read Sacco’s book, many of the Palestinians continually ask him why he wants to know about 1956 when “today” there is so much to talk about in relation to Palestinian suffering.
Then on the opposite side of the spectrum we are told that Sacco should have focused more on the Israeli side. I’ve even heard some people call it a “blood libel” because of how it depicts the massacres that took place.
In the end the book however was a wonderful read and gives us a more human aspect to all the suffering we see the Palestinians endure on a daily basis.
And I think that is what Sacco was trying to convey.
He should do a book about a real event the Ma’alot Massacre. It would be interesting to read how the Palestinians targeted school children and slaughtered them.
D- in reading comprehension Julian.
Julian, if you want to go back and forth we can. What about forced-labor camps?
pg. 202/203 of ‘The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine’ by Ilan Pappe:
Arbitrary killings, rape, etc.:
link to img.photobucket.com
link to img.photobucket.com
And Julian, you should first try to contradict the historical events of Sacco’s book, before saying it didn’t happen at all.
Deaths of Palestinians aren’t real, then.
They aren’t blond American girls.
The point of emphasising Joe Sacco’s 1956 massacres in Gaza is that was the first time the Israelis actually invaded a whole nation (Egypt) rather than conducting raids as they earlier did with Jordan (Qibya, etc). The Israelis didn’t get control of Gaza until 1967, and were left holding it when they made peace with Egypt and gave the Sinai back in 1979.
Since then, of course, they’ve conducted less discriminatory massacres in Gaza, with impunity.
That, in a nutshell is a good summary of Israel’s past, present and future policy in regard to the so-called peace in the Middle East.
The Israeli established recognizes that Israel stands to lose land and some natural resources in a possible peace treaty. Also, it recognizes that should a just and true peace prevail, Israel’s hegemonic position in the region will be diminished.
So, to maintain supremacy and hegemony, Israel has been and will continue to ‘manage the conflict’, if you will. That is to say that in the Israeli government’s view, bombing or invading neighboring areas and states every now and then to silence any dissent or resistance stemming from its illegal and unjust policies is far more advantageous than actually reaching a peaceful understanding that which addresses the concerns of both parties. For if it promoted the latter, it would no longer be a hegemonic regional actor.
As an aside, it seems that the US has adopted that strategy on a global level, namely the use of low intensity warfare to ‘manage’ growing dissatisfaction with its foreign policy and to assert its position and power in various regions.
“”It’s a big exaggeration,” said Meir Pail, a leading Israeli military historian and leftist politician. “There was never a killing of such a degree. Nobody was murdered. I was there. I don’t know of any massacre.”
Sacco’s passion for the Palestinian cause has opened him up to accusations of bias. ”
I woinder why Sacco didn’t interview those who said this never happened?
Pail is pretty much to the far left and was there Sacco wasn’t.
Pa’il’s an interesting character, but his criticism of Sacco (“Sacco’s passion for the Palestinian cause has opened him up to accusations of bias“) goes double for him. He is a classic left-wing Zionist, who believes that Israel was (almost) entirely just before ’67, when things started to go wrong. He’s famous for his damning testimony of the Etzel/Lehi massacre at Deir Yassin, but was and remains a Palmachnik, IDF officer and apologist for Labour Zionism. In his mind, Deir Yassin was one of a few isolated incidents, carried out by the “bad Zionists”, in no way reflecting on the goals or actions of his “good Zionists”. He may have been in Gaza in ’56, but he was there as an IDF officer and a deeply convinced Zionist. Hardly the “objective” historian he likes to pass himself off as. I’ll take a good journalist (with passion and compassion) over an ideological fossil with a PhD any day.
Julian, politics aside – you can’t expect to cite Pail and by implication, refute Sacco, when Pail only utters a couple sentences. Offering no analysis. His comments are just like that of the ex-HRW boss. The latter did not provide an argument as well.
So if you want to discuss the issue sincerely, then present some evidence to the contrary.
The massacres in Gaza are documented by Benny Morris in Israel’s Border Wars, the Afterward.
link to haaretz.com
Well, thankyou, Julian, for pointing me to the Haaretz article.
Its’ a well-balanced review of the book, and I think we can forget the Israeli apologists quoted.
Haaretz – A brilliant book by Joe Sacco.
link to haaretz.com
There is nothing I loathe more than people who throw abuse at an author and his book, but have not even read it.
I suppose that one cannot expect much more from the Zionist apologists here.
You will not find that degree of candour about Israel’s behaviour in the US MSM, so put Haaretz on your must-read list
Perhaps the only thing left of Israel’s democracy is their very free press.
Still subject to censorship, though. And I see far fewer articles the last year or so from the Palestinian point of view, far viewer from Levy and Hass, for example.
Great review, thanks Jules.
Not a bad review, for AP (the source of the Haaretz article), although Sacco could do without Folman’s bear hug. I doubt very much that they “share exactly the same opinions about what’s happening in the Middle East“. The opening paragraph, pitting “fans” against “detractors” frames the whole review in terms of the standard false dichotomy that crops up every time Israel is accused of wrongdoing – oh that pesky Middle East again, no truth, no facts, two sides to every story, etc.
On the bright side, I too am glad to see that Julian has expanded his horizons beyond Arutz Sheva and the Jerusalem Post – even if his quotes are rather selective. Extra points for providing the link.
You guys have got to be kidding me. You do not know why there would be few words, and a bit of an adversarial interview on NY public radio? LOL Any form of public communication in NY is tightly controlled, and an interviewer of a “controversial” (only in America) book like this by a radio host is like an IDF soldier refusing to obey orders when he is told to shoot Palestinians indiscriminately.