Middle East Conflict Primary Sources | Palestine

Excerpts from Palestine

Written and illustrated by Joe Sacco
Published originally as individual comics between 1993 and 1996
Republished as a collection by Fantagraphics Books in 2001

"Look, on your side there are some extremists, and on our side there are some extremists."

During the winter of 1991–92, Maltese-American comic artist Joe Sacco (1960–) traveled to the Middle East, where he spent several months in Israel and in the Occupied Territories of Gaza and the West Bank. (The Occupied Territories are portions of land bordering on Israel that are claimed by Palestinians but occupied and ruled by the Israeli army ever since the Six-Day War of 1967.) Sacco arrived near the end of the First Intifada, an Arabic word for "uprising." The First Intifada was a Palestinian effort to use street protests, strikes, and small-scale violence to draw international attention to...