As I read this, President Abbas from Palestine is requesting for Palestine to become its own nation. So I thought it would be appropriate to read Joe Sacco's graphic novel. This issue between Palestine and Israel has been going on for a long time, but it is incredible to see that not much has changed. In the first chapter we see Sacco talking to a man that says "Israel should get out of the Occupied Territories, and there ought to be a Palestinian state... and if it doesn't happen in the next 10 years, it'll be in 20 or 30." As we can still see today, that is still a problem.
I was really interested in reading further into this subject. After reading the first few pages, I was a little confused. It wasn't the wording or the speech, it just took me a few pages to understand his placement of speech bubbles/boxes. There are many pages that have a lot of word boxes right under each other. They each hold a different thought. I also noticed that there were word boxes and word bubbles. After a few pages, I realized that the boxes were his thoughts while the bubbles displayed what people said out loud. The artwork along with the words are very chaotic, which I think reflect the message being sent by his story.
After reading most of the graphic novel, I realized that for a long time Americans had misconstrued opinions on Palestinians. By Sacco telling a story where it portrayed their everyday life, it showed that the Palestinians are more than terrorists or victims, as they are often seen.
In an interview on Aljazeera, Sacco discussed his intentions on writing this graphic novel and that he was not seeking to reconcile the differences between Israel and Palestine. He said he didn't mean to show anything spectacular either. He just showed their everyday life and how they are usually treated. Sacco argued that it is easier for us to relate to the "everyman experience" rather than the harsh treatment of someone who is being humiliated.
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