Articles
Southern California Chronicle, Pages 34-35
Skylight Books Spotlights Author Joe Sacco Reading From Footnotes in Gaza
By Pat and Samir Twair
HAD HARPER’S Magazine not deleted paragraphs describing the 1956 murders of 275 unarmed Palestinian men at Khan Younis in a piece he collaborated on with journalist Chris Hedges, Joe Sacco might not have created his illustrated book, Footnotes in Gaza (available from the AET Book Club). Sacco chose the title because the massacre barely appears as a footnote in historical texts dealing with that year’s Suez Canal crisis.
During a Jan. 19 appearance at Skylight Books in Los Angeles, Sacco said he became aware of the largest mass murder of Palestinians when he read a reference to the Nov. 3, 1956 incident in Noam Chomsky’s The Fateful Triangle. Israel dismissed the charges of a massacre by claiming its IDF troops had retaliated against armed Palestinian resistance, but elderly witnesses told Sacco a far different story.
The award-winning graphic journalist said he couldn’t forget the words of Hamas official Abed El-Aziz Rantisi, who was 9 years old when his uncle was executed in the massacre. “This sort of action can never be forgotten...[T]hey planted hatred in our hearts,” stated Rantisi, who, after his 2003 conversation with Sacco, was assassinated by an Israeli missile.
When Sacco launched his research in 2002, Gazans voiced their impatience by asking why he was digging into the past when much more terrible atrocities were taking place, as Israelis bulldozed entire neighborhoods in Rafah, carried out targeted assassinations and “disappeared” men in nightly raids of homes.
It was during these interviews that Sacco uncovered a second massacre, on Nov. 12, 1956, in Rafah, in which Israeli troops shot or beat to death 111 Palestinian men. Over the course of several months, Sacco interviewed dozens of elderly people who were in the towns during the mass murders. His drawings of individuals and use of close-ups and aerial sketches make his comic book narratives more vivid than any news story.
The Israeli response to United Nations complaints was no different in 1956 than it is today: total denial. While the Zionists claimed Palestinians shot at them, in all the separate interviews Sacco conducted, he heard the same recollection of unarmed men being dragged from their homes or peaceably following directions to assemble at a given spot—where they were systematically shot.
Central Asian Exhibit Opens
Eurasian herders’ exotic robes and domestic ornaments make for breathtaking eye candy in an exhibition running through May 9 at Los Angeles’ Craft and Fine Art Museum (CAFAM), located at 5814 Wilshire Blvd. Entitled “Bold Abstractions: Textiles from Central Asia and Iran,” the collection features costumes and fabrics from the mid-19th to mid-20th centuries.
Aesthetically appealing felt tent accessories, embroidered Turkmen mantles and a wide variety of headgear vie with Uzbek ikat-dyed robes and silk gowns from Samarkand to capture viewers’ admiration.
Silver-gilt, gem-inlaid ornaments signifying gender, age and clan identities are on display, along with wall hangings of stylized animal and vegetal motifs. Best of all, contemporary handmade robes and jewelry are available in the museum gift shop.
For information on museum hours and related lectures and programs, visit <www.cafam.org>.
Palestine Water Crisis
Joshua Rubenstein, northwest regional director of Amnesty International, described Israel’s unfair system of water distribution to settlers and Palestinians in a depressing, bare facts presentation Jan. 10 at Loyola Law School. The event was sponsored by the Boycott, Divest, Sanctions-L.A. Coalition.
In addition to demolishing Palestinian cisterns, the Israeli army destroys water pipes and wells, Rubenstein said, leaving villagers with no choice but to import water from tanker trucks at prohibitive costs.
Furthermore, Dr. Lloyd announced, a campaign is being launched in March to protest the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power’s (DWP) memorandum of agreement with Israel’s Kinrot water program on the grounds that the DWP is sharing information with a firm whose country practices apartheid.
Shoeless Activist Feted
In late December, Mary Hughes-Thompson joined 1,361 international peace activists in Cairo to participate in the Gaza Freedom March, intended to take needed supplies to Gaza via the Rafah border crossing with Egypt. Instead, the Egyptian government told the foreigners they would not be allowed to pass through the Rafah crossing, and forbade them to congregate.
Not used to receiving such dictates, the internationals decided to protest Dec. 31 in Cairo’s Tahrir Square opposite the Nile Hilton. Egyptian police, unaccustomed to the concept of freedom of assembly, treated the foreigners roughly, beating and herding them into a constricted area.
In the melee, Hughes-Johnson, 76, was knocked to the ground and, as police dragged her, lost her cane and shoes. After members of Veterans for Peace, who had been volunteering as bodyguards for elderly activists, negotiated a safe exit for the seniors, Mary walked in her socks throughout Cairo until she found some black plastic slippers, which she wore for several days.
Upon returning home to Los Angeles on Jan. 10, the septuagenarian’s friends from Women In Black/LA surprised her with a welcome home party—and many, many pairs of old shoes.
UCLA Lecture on Forced Migration
How refugees cope with assimilating in a new land is the subject of a study conducted in 2005 to 2007 by Dr. Dawn Chatty of Oxford University. She presented ideas from her forthcoming book, Forced Migration: Dispossession and Displacement in the Modern Middle East, at a Jan. 12 talk sponsored by UCLA’s Near East Studies Center.
Dr. Chatty explained that she focused on groups displaced during the breakup of the Ottoman Empire: Circassians, Armenians and Kurds, as well as Palestinians who were forcibly removed from their land after 1947. Stories of elderly survivors came as a surprise to young people who had never heard their grandparents discuss the hardships of upheaval.
The nationalist aspirations of the Armenians and Kurds failed to materialize, Chatty said, because they were spread throughout the Middle East and didn’t form a majority anywhere. Although they no longer were tied to a piece of geography, she added, the Armenians regrouped by retaining their language, and organized horizontal networks of Armenians through their institutions, publications and churches.
The fourth generation of displaced Palestinians focus on the right of return, Chatty noted, and seek recognition of the wrong done to them and compensation for their confiscated property.
Pat and Samir Twair are free-lance journalists based in Los Angeles.
