Palestine (Joe Sacco)
A few years ago I picked up Joe Sacco's Palestine and never got around to reading it. I'd say now seems like a relevant time if not for the fact that this shit has never stopped. The Palestine comics cover a period in 1991-1992, and in the foreword written ten years later, Sacco says,
[T]he "peace process" has not provided the Palestinian people living in territory conquered by Israel in 1967 with many tangible benefits. In fact, their land is still expropriated, their dwellings are still bulldozed, their olive groves are still uprooted. They still encounter an occupying army, as well as the settlers, who are often the armed adjuncts to the occupying army (or vice versa, it's hard to tell sometimes). Through closures and the lasting effect of long-term strangulation by Israel of the Palestinian economy, the lives of Palestinian workers and their families have been made even more wretched than they were when this work was first published.
One thing to be cognizant of is that these comics deal with a less information-saturated time when minds changed more slowly. Especially in the early comics Sacco is sometimes frustrated and uncharitable, and while he's clearly documenting these moments in the interest of being honest about where he's coming from rather than because it reflects his beliefs at the time of writing, this doesn't mean you're obligated to like it. There's also antisemitic conspiracy type stuff mentioned by one or two of the interviewees, most notably one who probably picked up those ideas in the US.
It's clear where Sacco's sympathies lie, though, and most of what we see is the people of occupied Palestine trying to live as normally as possible under a constant barrage of violence and indignity. Schools shut down by the IDF, hospitals raided and the staff arbitrarily dragged away. All sorts of people, journalists, teachers, librarians, lawyers, interrogated or imprisoned or deported for no discernible reason. Children beaten and shot. The West Bank and Gaza economies impeded, in part so that Palestinian men can be used as cheap labor to fuel Israel's capitalist machinery. Foreign reporters (including, sometimes, Sacco himself) processing suffering into entertainment. Blasé liberals and disappointing peace activists whose interventions do too little and happen too late. The explicit late-1940s policy of expulsion evening out into a slow-motion genocide.
Sacco conveys all this with an eye for minute detail, a brutal sense of pacing, and an uncanny ability to imply color on a black and white page, but saying the art's good almost feels like a disrespectful digression. He isn't using visual rhetoric to invent or exaggerate a problem; the problem demonstrably exists. He's exposing the mechanisms that make the horrific numbers go up. I don't think the message here is "Palestinians are human too!" which is both trite and something you already believe unless you're an absolute monster. It's an investigation into the tools and processes used by a government and its allies to effect the destruction of a people and conduct the industrial-scale gaslighting that makes this seem like the right thing to do.