The Chris Hedges Report with cartoonist Joe Sacco about his iconic books Palestine and Footnotes in Gaza and how Israel's repeated slaughter of Palestinians in the past led to the current genocide.

The cartoonist Joe Sacco invented nonfiction graphic journalism, marrying rigorous and detailed reporting with illustrations that leap off the page and give his stories a texture, depth and power that is hard for most writers to match. He pioneered this work with nine issues on the Palestinians living under Israeli occupation from 1993 to 1995. The nine comics, later published as the book Palestine, educated a generation about the tragedy that has gripped the Palestinians since the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. Palestine, which gained a cult following, won an American book Award and is a staple on college syllabuses about the conflict. Edward Said in the introduction to Palestine wrote, “With the exception of one or two novelists and poets, no one has ever rendered this terrible state of affairs better than Joe Sacco.” Joe’s book, sadly, remains even more relevant today than when it was written. But Joe was not done. He invested over four years in his masterpiece, one of the finest books on the Israel/Palestine conflict, Footnotes in Gaza. He explored the little-known massacres of Palestinians by Israeli soldiers when they occupied Rafah and Khan Younis in the Gaza Strip in November 1956. He doggedly tracked down victims and eyewitnesses to combine investigative journalism and oral history from the past to explain the present. Context is key. And context in the reporting of the genocide in Gaza is largely absent in the U.S. media.  This makes Joe’s work not only timely, but vital for our understanding of this conflict.  Joining me to discuss his two seminal works, Palestine and Footnotes in Gaza, is Joe Sacco.