War on Gaza

Sacco’s novella-length follow-up to 2009’s Footnotes in Gaza sounds a short but sustained scream of despair. Originally serialized online in the wake of the October 7th Hamas attack and Israel’s subsequent bombing of Gaza, Sacco’s bitterly satirical comics castigate Israel for cruelty and the U.S. for complicity. “Is it genocide, or is it self-defense?” he asks. “Let’s make everyone happy and say it is both.” In one moving selection, Sacco contrasts the memories of his mother, who survived the siege of Malta in WWII, with an Israeli minister stating that she’s “proud of the ruins” caused by the siege of Gaza. In another, he casts Netanyahu and Biden in a skewed version of the biblical tale of Abraham pleading with God to spare Sodom for the sake of its righteous men. Sacco, a pioneer of comics journalism, has been covering Palestine since the early 1990s, and this salvo finds him in fine form—alternating between caricature and pathos in bold, evocative lines—but out of strategic solutions, and left only with rage and sorrow. Not every story hits the mark, and references to Biden’s reelection campaign already feel outdated. Still, it’s a bracing slap in the face of complacency. (Dec.)