Palestine through Graphic Novels

Palestine

By Joe Sacco

No reading list about the Middle East would be complete without the groundbreaking work of comic book journalist Joe Sacco’s graphic novels. Sacco, who spent several months in the Occupied Territories in Palestine during the first Intifada, wrote nine long form comic/articles about his experience that became the 1996 graphic novel Palestine, for which he won the American Book Award.

Footnotes in Gaza

By Joe Sacco

Joe Sacco’s nearly 400-page long graphic novel, Footnotes in Gaza, in pen-and-ink is about the Israeli military’s massacre of Palestinian civilians in Khan Younis and Rafah (Gaza), during the 1956 Suez Crisis.

Baddawi

By Leila Abdelrazaq

The final two graphic novels are coming of age stories, one of which is part of a series. The first, Baddawi, by artist Leila Abdelrazaq, describes her father’s childhood growing up in a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon. Like Amir and Khalil, with Zahra’s Paradise, she began Baddawi as a serialized web comic and it caught the attention of a publisher and became a graphic novel. Through a child’s eye, the reader revisits history, the stigma of being a refugee in Lebanon, but also young love.