Page 6 of Palestine, by Joe Sacco. Click to enlarge.
Every morning, I hear on NPR the latest, in their tortured pro-Israel way, about what’s going on in the Middle East. Today the shock was that a rocket managed to land in Gedera, a mere 20 miles from Tel Aviv. It hit a building.
Oh, but that rocket did not hit just a building. It “exploded near a house,” and a “three-month-old girl sustained minor injuries in the attack.” The news is becoming sentimental. It’s not enough that bombs and/or rockets are killing “civilians.” Now it is more important that IDF tanks are hitting “schools” (maintained by the UN) or that babies are suffering from “minor injuries.”
In other words, war is being sentimenalized as it becomes all about the children. Of course, this is an ancient tactic, villifying the enemy by emphasizing (or inventing) incidents of extreme social cruelty in a game of propaganda. And that’s fine. But it’s important to maintain a certain level of skepticism. Glenn Greenwald touches on this tactic in his intense takedown of Michael Goldfarb and others from Sunday. The cost of villifying the enemy in such a way is that you can begin to excuse mistreating the enemy yourself. If they behave “inhumanely,” then there is no reason to treat them humanely.
If Hamas is willing to run the risk of injuring a toddler, why should the IDF care about a Palestinian school?
This sort of questioning, of a kind of tribalism run amok, usually reminds me of Butler’s Precarious Life, which warns against the use of violence in mourning, but the specific way in which the media plays a role reminds me of two pages (that I’ve put on flickr: p. 6, 7) from Joe Sacco’s excellent Palestine, a collection of comics journalism from the early 1990s.
Sacco begins his narrative in Cairo, but he demonstrates an eagerness to try and approach the conflict from the Palestinian side. In talking to a young woman he’s interested in, he lays the lack of this approach precisely at the feet of the media. On the incident aboard the Achille Lauro, he writes:
You gotta understand the American media. They want human interest. Klinghoffer gets killed and we get the full profile, the bereaving widow, where he lived and what he put on his corn flakes… you see the power of that?
The US media never tells the other side. Hamas is sending rockets into Israel because they are terrorists and that is what terrorists do. Sending a rocket becomes the initial act of war, not the blockade. But then Sacco twists the knife in further. Klinghoffer, you see, not only represented Israel (as a Jew), but also America. And here Sacco demonstrates his own tribalism:
Americans won’t care about the problems of Palestinians when Americans get killed in these terrorist attacks. One American dies like that, it eclipses anything Palestinians have to say!
The woman he’s wooing is Middle Eastern, and to this whining about one dead American, she simply replies, “Well… I don’t know so much about these things…” But Sacco shows the scene fantastically. He’s pounding his fist. There are lines of adamance surrounding his head and fist, while Claudia looks away at brawling late night Berliners. This American is right, dammit. He has the answers for Palestine.
Yet Claudia demurs. The conversation is over. Sacco’s love affair is put on hold. And in the next panel he is seething, white hot, sweating, drooling, shouting, “Palestinian boyfriend! Ha! Bitch! Terrorist groupie!”
It’s not, then, just the arrogance of putting American lives ahead of Palestinian lives (though that’s bad). It’s not, then, also the arrogance of thinking that America knows best. His calumny in response to Claudia’s rejection is a sign of being terribly afraid of being wrong. The American media is so wound up in its pro-Israel bias, that it cannot afford to be even-handed, since that would involve explaining how it had messed up and gotten the story so one-sided in the past.
Sacco gives us this story as the first part of a conversion narrative. It’s sad at how unlikely it is that others would follow.
Tags: children, Glenn Greenwald, IDF, Israel, Joe Sacco, Judith Butler, Palestine, sentimentality
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