Sacco’s Palestine, Our Palestine

The enduring appeal of a graphic novel on the horrors of life under Israeli occupation among young Indians signifies their rejection of the Zionist narrative and anti-Muslim Hindutva rhetoric

The rousing response to American cartoonist-journalist Joe Sacco should quell fears of official India hollowing out the Indian’s empathy for the Palestinians suffering under Israeli occupation. It should dispel the assumption of those who believe the truths of history can be effaced by rewriting it. Above all, it should spawn hope that the Indian will not be silenced from expressing her/his views that run contrary to the State’s.

I make these claims because even though Sacco’s oeuvre is varied, he is largely known in India for his graphic novel Palestine. Its sales shot up from 2,000 copies a year to 4,000 this year, and counting. Decidedly, Israel’s brutal retaliation against Hamas for invading its territory, on October 7, 2023, has piqued public curiosity in Sacco’s Palestine.

His popularity became evident as a crush of people, mostly comprising the youth, thronged Delhi’s Midland bookstore, where he came last week to sign his books. Over 250 copies of Palestine flew off the shelves. The auditorium at Delhi’s Jawahar Bhavan overflowed with people at an event organised for engaging with Sacco on his art of indelibly imprinting, through cartooning, the tragedy of Palestinians on his readers’ hearts.

Sacco’s presence in India has become an occasion for expressing solidarity with the Palestinians, relentlessly bombed and killed. Buying Palestine and getting Sacco to sign it, or flocking to his talk, is not just a measure of his popularity. It is also a signifier of his readers rejecting the Indian State’s narrative on Israel’s oppression of Palestine, and their defiance of official attempts to stamp out meetings against the brutalisation of Palestinians.

Over 50 people in different states, whether ruled by the Bharatiya Janata Party or the Congress, have been booked for participating in such meetings. In Srinagar, even a case was filed under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act against “unknown persons” for waving Palestinian flags during a Muharram procession. Universities have cancelled lectures on Palestine by public intellectuals.

Against this political backdrop, the enduring appeal of Sacco’s Palestine among Indian youth is of immense socio-psychological interest. He’s got a strong following not because he has the reader guffawing; his humour, in fact, is dark. Nor is Palestine a tale of adventure in West Bank and Gaza, where Sacco lived for two months in 1991-92, when the first intifada—the rebellion against Israeli occupation—had already begun to flag.

Over 250 pages of intricately drawn cartoons, Sacco records the quotidian experience of people living under Israeli occupation. They are routinely humiliated and labour under curfewed nights and days. Their homes are demolished and land usurped. They are ruthlessly tortured during arbitrary incarcerations. He etches the admirable fortitude of parents whose children were shot dead, and courage of those who dare to battle the occupying army.

Even more significantly, he records Palestine’s history from 1917, the year in which Britain issued the Balfour Declaration, publicly professing that it favoured the “establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.” He tracks the migration of Jews from Europe under the patronage of Western powers, and who ethnically cleansed villages in 1947-48, overnight turning 800,000 Palestinians into refugees.

Sacco’s Palestine must have come as an awakening for young Indian readers weaned, like their counterparts around the world, on the dominant narrative that the Palestinians are terrorists on a mission to destroy Israel and establish Islamic rule. Their reading of Sacco turned them political. They were presumably inspired in later years to deepen their understanding of the torrid truths of Palestine they perhaps first encountered, in such graphic details, in his novel. This not only has them disbelieve Israel and the West’s narrative, but has also enabled them to contextualise Hamas’s attack on Israel, perceiving it as more than senseless terrorism.

For the same reason, they do not buy into the shrill rhetoric of Hindutva leaders who have been projecting Israelis as the victims of the violent followers of Islam. This rhetoric is driven as much by Hindutva’s historical antipathy against Muslims as it is for consolidating Hindus against an imaginary Islamic onslaught. Their flocking to Sacco’s events is a testament to their rejection of Hindutva.

Sacco’s Palestine has also lessons for older Indians, including journalists who swear by the principle of objectivity. In Palestine, Sacco is asked as to why he hasn’t tried to get the Israeli side of the story. Sacco replies, “I say I’ve heard nothing but the Israeli side most of my life.” Journalism’s mission is not to merely tell both sides of any story, for it often leads to repeating dubious claims; it is, rather, to find out the truth. This is what Sacco does in Palestine.

This is what most journalists don’t do, preferring to subscribe to the Zionist lie that Palestine was a country without a people before a people (Jews) without a country inhabited it. Palestine was never theirs. It is the perfect example of settler colonialism. As Gandhi, in 1938, wrote, “Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English or France to the French. It is wrong and inhuman to impose the Jews on the Arabs.” That wrong continues to this day, in all its barbarity.

The writer is a senior journalist and author of Bhima Koregaon: Challenging Caste
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The views expressed in this column are the individual’s and don’t represent those of the paper.

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