History Forgotten

While I have been very lackadaisical in regards to posting lately, I do intend to make it all up by the time the schoolyear ends. Hopefully before Wednesday's class period.

Now, in regards to Palestine....

It was very difficult for me to get accustomed to Sacco's style of comics. I find his drawings very unaesthestic, especially the grotesquely oversized mouths. The details are amazing, but the way he draws his people...I honestly do not see anything attractive about the two Israeli girls he drools about in one of the first few chapters. But the form of his comics was also really confusing at first; maybe I'm stupid or something, but I had difficulty separating the different content bubbles. He has thought bubbles, rectangles with words, and speech bubbles all intertwined so it's difficult to follow a conversation. Superficialities aside, though, Palestine stands out thematically.

Sacco himself is an amusing if ironic observer. It is what he portrays, though, that is really shocking. I am ashamed of America's foreign policy on Israel now, and especially Israelis' treatment of the Palestinians. It's like once the European Jews got out of the Holocaust, they turn around and apply the "lessons" the Nazis taught them to the Palestinians. Now, don't get me wrong, I have strong sympathy for the Jewish people, having a somewhat morbid fascination with the Holocaust--accounts like Art Spiegelman's Maus and Martin Amis's Time's Arrow (even though it's fictional) really open up your eyes to the horrifying extent of the atrocities that were committed. I've read the philosophical treatment of the Holocaust and bigotry in Sartre's Anti-Semite and Jew, and reacted with anger upon learning in AP US History class about the Roosevelt administration's apathy to the plight of the Jews.

But all this history does -not- give the Jews an excuse to give the Palestinians treatment that is pretty much on par with the treatment they received at the hands of the Nazis. I don't know if Sacco is making a conscious comparison, but his anecdotes about Palestinians strike some uncanny resemblences to things I have learned about the Holocaust. For instance, the Palestinian stories about Israeli settlers throwing rocks through windows is eerily reminiscent of Krystallnacht. The prison camps, like Ansar III, are concentration camp-esque. The dominance of the Israeli military, the torture, the overzealous responses to minor Palestinian infractions. Some aspects of the conflict seem to be disanalogous--the intense hatred and terroristic subversion on the part of the Palestinians, for instance. They are not merely submissive victims (not implying that the Jews were), but what is really painful about the situation is how the Israelis dehumanize the Palestinians to the point where prominent leaders such as Golda Meir deny the very existence of the Palestinians.

Don't the Jews remember that they, too, were once victims of an attempt to erase them from history?