Gary Groth
After the October 7 Hamas massacre and the Israeli military assault on Gaza, I turned to two cartoonists who knew far more than I did to help me make sense of it - Steve Brodner and Joe Sacco. They both took time away from their own priorities to engage with me. Steve was writing and drawing about Gaza nearly every day in his indefatigable panel of graphic political criticism The Greater Quiet (available by subscription) and provided, as always, an acute moral analysis of the conflict, which helped ground me. Joe was finishing a new book, but, importantly, had published not one but two volumes of graphic journalism and history devoted to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict - Palestine in 1993 and Footnotes in Gaza in 2010. (I was privileged to publish the first one.) He and I began discussing the unfolding events, which we viewed with growing dismay and horror, quickly recognizing it for the devastating catastrophe it has become. The media was also beginning to call us and ask questions about the publication of Palestine. It was taking up more space in our lives.
We both understood that in this context we inhabit a privileged world of heightened cultural responsibility—he as an artist, me as a publisher—that compelled us to do something, but we also felt a sense of futility and frustration. How should we best exercise this cultural responsibility? On December 26, I wrote Joe, “I decided that I cannot in good conscience watch what's unfolding in Gaza without public comment.” A few days later, in an email to me, he wrote, “When I think of what can be done, your strength lies mainly in your position as a publisher and what you publish. And mine as a cartoonist and what I draw. I've been going back and forth a lot about what, if anything, I can contribute.” The result of this conversation led us to take two courses of action: a statement from the publishers of Fantagraphics, released publicly yesterday and reproduced below, and this column, “The War on Gaza,” a series of graphic commentary and reflections by Joe Sacco that he will draw as often as time permits. It is surely not enough, but it’s what we can contribute.
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In 1993, Fantagraphics began publishing Palestine, Joe Sacco’s landmark work of graphic journalism, a first-person chronicle that gave voice to the voiceless and dispossessed people who were living and suffering in Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem - the Palestinian territories.
Considering that we have believed in the deeply humanistic perspective of this book, that we have considered it our responsibility to keep it available to the public continuously in 25 printings in 31 years, and that we have boundless respect for its author, we consider it a moral imperative to make our position on the current “Israel-Hamas/Gaza war” publicly known.
We want to state clearly and emphatically that we stand with the innocent people of Gaza. At the same time, we emphatically condemn the massacre of innocent Israeli civilians by Hamas on October 7 as a war crime and acknowledge with deep regret the grief and trauma Jewish people are enduring in its aftermath; but this barbarous act does not warrant Israel to commit its own war crime and to inflict exponentially greater grief and trauma in return.
Finally, as citizens of the United States, it is both emotionally agonizing and morally objectionable to watch our nation’s complicity in the ongoing genocide of Gaza. We respectfully submit that:
• There should be an immediate ceasefire
• Israel should immediately allow humanitarian aid into Gaza
• Israel must end its apartheid regime
• Israel must stop looking the other way as West Bank settlers murder Palestinians
• Israel’s illegal West Bank settlements must be dismantled
• Negotiations in good faith must begin toward a two- or single-state solution in which both Israelis and Palestinians share the same sovereign rights.
• Israeli and Hamas prisoners/hostages should be released
• Those who speak out on behalf of Palestinians should not be silenced, retaliated against, or smeared as antisemitic
• Slippery new terms like “humanitarian expulsion” and “voluntary migration” should be denounced for what they are - oxymoronic euphemisms for ethnic cleansing
• War crimes should be investigated and vigorously pursued by the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice
“Before the terrifying prospects now available to humanity, we see even more clearly that peace is the only goal worth struggling for. This is no longer a prayer but a demand to be made by all peoples to their governments - a demand to choose definitively between hell and reason.”
— Albert Camus, Combat, 1945
[This statement does not necessarily reflect the opinions of our staff or our authors, who are entirely free to agree or disagree and to make their own beliefs known.]
Gary Groth
Publisher, Fantagraphics Books
Eric Reynolds
Associate Publisher, Fantagraphics Books
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