Gaza Footnotes: Joe Sacco, my mom, and the 1956 Khanyounis/Rafah Massacres
Posted in Posts on 01/20/2010 10:29 pm by Laila El-HaddadI recently had the opportunity to interview cartoonist Joe Sacco about his latest work, Footnotes in Gaza, for Aljazeera English. The book is an investigation into two little-known massacres in the 1956 Gaza Strip. I say little-known because there is little record of these two tragedies outside of a short UN document and local eyewitness testimony.
Now, the subject war near and dear to my heart, as I disclose in my first question to him in the interview because my mother was a survivor and witness to those events in Khanyounis (her home town). She was eleven at the time, and I grew up with non sequitur details of what occurred that day-from the harrowing (mass executions) to the hilarious (my mother’s jokester of a cousin who-while awaiting imminent execution-asked his neighbor “what do you think they’re going to do to us??” (the reply: Make us dance-what do you think!!); My Aunt, who showed the soldiers about to execute her only son a coat she has purchased in Tel Aviv in hopes they would spare his life (it was, but only because a cease fire was declared)), never quite making sense of it all. ;Wasn’t 1948 was the really important date, I thought? And didn’t the Israelis occupy Gaza in 1967, so what were they doing there in 1956? And why haven’t I read about this anywhere?
“I can’t forget Ahmed Bitar-the newlywed they executed just outside the shelter we were staying in because he pleaded for mercy with his pregnant wife; or the bodies-all those bodies soaking in their own pools of blood along the castle wall in the town center; of my baby sister Mona, who couldn’t stop crying because she lost her pacifier,” she kept telling me.
And so when I came across Sacco’s book, I was thrilled-in whatever odd way one can be thrilled when reading about massacres…to discover that someone had finally bothered to investigate these incidents. I poured through the books pages one after another. I even showed some to my mother-she recognized many of the faces immediately.
“This is not something you can just forget or [say] ‘let’s move on’ [about]. It has to be acknowledged, it has to be talked about. History has to be written not just by the victors, but by the people being victimized” Joe said to me in the interview.
Afterward, he a request of me: that when the interview goes live, I re-link it here along with testimony from my mother. Well here it is that testimony, following by an exclusive excerpt from the book.