Palestine and Kashmir

It makes my blood boil at times when people treat me with polite amusement when I start sounding all passionate about graphic novels. There are an amazingly high number of people who seem to not realize that it is a medium that can say so much, so effectively, and is not only about superheroes wearing their undies over their leotards.

Not that undies over leotard type comic books are things to scoff at.

This is very similar to the life-long irritation I have had with people who consider fiction a waste of time, and utter with great pride that they read only biographies or books like the one about the monk who sold his Ferrari.

Maybe such people should read one of those graphic novels that have the ability to change your complete perception of the medium, with not many graphic novel artists probably being more effective than Joe Sacco. I have been a fan of some of his previous works like Safe Area Gorazde, Palestine and Notes from a Defeatist, all of which hold a special position of pride on my bookshelf.

But, his latest creation - Footnotes in Gaza - is quite something else even in the light of the brilliant work he has done over the years. The hardcover edition is a 400-plus page wrist-sprainer of a book, which deals with two forgotten incidents of massacre of Palestinians by Israeli forces.

These incidents occurred in the 1950s during the Suez Canal Crisis, and Sacco deserves great credit for making the effort of traveling to Gaza Strip, talking to the residents there in detail and chronicling all of it for us. Because the incidents really had been relegated to footnotes of UN reports over the years otherwise.

People have a habit of forgetting things, no matter how traumatic. Especially if the traumatic incidents keep hitting you incessantly over decades. For a community, large parts of which has not known any reasonably long period of peace, the massacres of Khan Younis and Rafah might just be a blink in their painful history, but, as Sacco says in the foreword, it goes a long way in understanding how 'hatred was planted in the hearts' of the people of Palestine.

I was in Iraq when the First Intifada was on, and the understandably pro-Palestine Iraqi media would give a lot of coverage to those young boys throwing stones and crude Molotov Cocktails at the Israeli forces. I had never seen unrest like that on TV before. And, unsure of the historical context though I was, I used to wonder what kind of dissatisfaction would make young people come out on streets like that and face armed forces fearlessly. It seemed like the last act of desperation - the final step you took after you realized that nothing else could save you. Nothing else could make others hear your side of the story.

So, over the last few months, it has been extremely spooky seeing fairly similar clips from Kashmir. Reading Footnotes in Gaza, I am forced to think if, irrespective of cross-border instigation, India has really been remotely as inhuman to Kashmiris as the Israelis were to the Palestinians. So much so that the young boys there too would come out on the streets to throw stones at our forces.

I understand that the situation is much too complicated for me to make a general comparison like that.

But, I hope people in Kashmir don't hate me as badly as the people in Rafah hate an Israeli.