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A Child in Palestine
The Cartoons of
Naji al-Ali
With an introduction by JOE SACCO
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
With thanks and heartfelt gratitude to Mr Abdul Hadi Ayyad for his excellent
introductions to the chapters, and Dr Mahmoud al-Hindi for his perceptive
cartoon captions; Mr Mohammed al-Asaad and Mr Hani al-Haddad for their
invaluable assistance in all aspects of the book from its inception, including
selection of the cartoons themselves.
I am also indebted to Mr Hani Mazhar for his insights into the artistic aspects
of the book and cartoon selection; Mr Faisal Ben Khadra for editing the
introductions to the chapters; and Mr Elias Nasrallah for his thoughtful
comments on the project as a whole.
Khalid al-Ali
March2009
A CHILD IN PALESTINE
VERSO
London • New York
The images reproduced in this book were first published in the following newspapers:
as-Sa.fir, Lebanon (pp. 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 11, 14, 25, 29, 30, 36, 37, 40, 41, 45, 46, 47, 48, 53, 54, 55, 56, 62, 71, 72, 73,
74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 85, 86, 87, 99, 100, 110, 113, 116, 117); al-Watan, Kuwait (pp. 42, 49, 51, 91);
al-Qabas, Kuwait (pp. 7, 9, 10, 15, 16, 27, 28, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 38, 39, 50, 52, 58, 84, 88, 89, 92, 93, 94, 101, 103,
115}; al-Qabas International, UK (pp. 12, 13, 18, 19, 20, 57, 59, 90, 95, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 11 l, 112,
114); al-Seyassah, Kuwait (pp. 17, 21, 26, 60, 61, 64, 65, 69, 70); al-Sheraa, Lebanon (pp. 63, 83, 102}
Cover image first published in as-Sa.fir, July 1980
3579108642
Verso
UK: 6 Meard Street, London WlF 0EG
US: 388 Atlantic Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11217
www.versobooks.com
ISBN-13: 978-1-84467-365-0
Introduction vii
ONE Palestine
TWO Human Rights 23
THREE US Dominance, Oil and Arab Collusion 43
FOUR The Peace Process 67
FIVE Resistance 97
INTRODUCTION
JOE SACCO
I owe a debt to Naji al-Ali, that most renowned of Palestinian cartoonists, who was
assassinated in London a few years before I first heard of him. When I made my
initial trip to the Occupied Territories in the early 1990s to gather material for what
would become the comic-book series Palestine, I was more than a little reluctant to
tell my Palestinian hosts that I would be depicting their stories in drawings, as
cartoons. Would they think I intended to trivialize their oppression?
I needn't have worried. Upon blurting out my approach, a smile of understanding
usually creased their faces. Of course! We had our own cartoanist! Naji al-Ali! And little
by little, by such encounters, I began to recognize that my way had been well paved
by this man, al-Ali. He was talked about with deep respect bordering on reverence.
He criticized everyone, I was told, Israelis, the PLO, Arab regimes. No ane knows who killed
him. Everyone had reason. I was introduced to his iconic character Hanthala, the
obviously destitute but upright Palestinian child, always with his back to the viewer,
looking on at some scene of Israeli cruelty or Arab hypocrisy. Hanthala represents the
Palestinian people. He is us. I began to notice images of Hanthala everywhere, tacked
up on walls or worn as ladies' jewelry. And on one occasion, in a cinderblock home
of a refugee, someone pointed to a framed portrait on the wall. Hanthala's father,
the man himself, Naji al-Ali.
He was born in the Galilee in the village of al-Shajara in 1936 or 1937, and
expelled, together with hundreds of thousands of other Palestinians, in the 1948
war that created Israel. His family settled in the Ain al-Helweh refugee camp
viii A CHILD IN PALESTINE
In Lebanon in the '70s, during the civil war and under Israeli attack, al-Ali felt he
was at his zenith. 'I stood facing it all with my pen every day. I never felt fear, failure
or despair, I didn't surrender ... My work in Beirut made me once again closer to
the refugees in the camps, the poor, and the harassed.' But in 1982 Israel invaded
Lebanon, seeking to crush the PLO once and for all. Hundreds of Palestinian
refugees were massacred by Israel's Lebanese Christian allies in the Sabra and
Shatila refugee camps in Beirut while the Israeli army sealed off the area. Al-Ali was
devastated. He made his way back to Kuwait. In some of his cartoons, Hanthala lost
his cool. He raised his hands in anger. He threw stones. Al-Ali's work had ruffled the
feathers of Arab elites for a long time. He was expelled from Kuwait and moved to
London.
By now al-Ali was famous. His cartoons appeared throughout the Arab world,
and in London. He continued battering at the oppressors and the privileged of the
Middle East despite death threats. On July 22, 1987, he was shot in the head by a
lone assailant as he was walking into the London offices of the Kuwaiti newspaper
Al-Qabas. He lay in a coma for five weeks and then died. He was about fifty years old.
The identity of the killer has never been determined.
Naji al-Ali remains a hero in the Arab world, in particular to the Palestinians, who
say his name with the same tenderness with which they mention their great
poets. His iconic figure, Hanthala, remains a potent Palestinian symbol and will for
a long time to come. Unfortunately; with the Middle East's twin taps of violence and
despair still open, there is all too much for Hanthala to see.
Joe Sacco
January 2009
I
PALESTINE
'Naji al-Ali's works were like a compass which always pointed towards Truth;
and that truth will always be Palestine.'
With these words Ahmad Matar, the Iraqi poet and long-standing friend of Naji
al-Ali, described al-Ali's significance to his Arab readership. Those not aware of
what was done to the indigenous people of Palestine during the first half of the
twentieth century will perhaps find it impossible to understand not only Naji
al-Ali's cartoons, but the entire Middle East situation as it stands today. From
the end of the nineteenth century, the nascent Zionist movement sought to
establish throughout historical Palestine an exclusively Jewish state, completely
disregarding the Palestinian people's inalienable rights to their homeland. What
was to become the State of Israel established both a system of centralized eco-
nomic planning which deprived the native Palestinians of land, resources and
economic opportunity, and total cultural control of the country. This culminated
in a string of terrifying attacks on Palestinian towns, and a mass expulsion of the
indigenous Palestinian population, by a Zionist settler project that was by that
time highly militarily advanced. But the Palestinians who were forced out of their
country, becoming refugees, found no respite and no new place to call home.
Instead, the Palestinian community, which had by 1948 - the end of the British
Mandate and the beginning of Israel - established a vibrant and complex society,
were forced to pick up the pieces of their lives from refugee camps in neighbouring
countries administered by the United Nations - the selfsame body which had
provided for the establishment of Israel.
Having left Palestine as young children, Naji and his compatriots of the time re-
membered just enough of the country to make it real to their senses - recollections
2 A CHILD IN PALESTINE
of the fragrance of citrus trees, visions of stone houses and farmers' fields. Palestine
was not for them, as it would become for later generations of displaced Palestin-
ians, a homeland of collective memory. Yet for al-Ali, as for the others, having been
forced out as a child meant that his experience of the Palestinian Nakba or •disaster'
of 1948 was chiselled into his mind in the simplest, starkest way possible. As al-Ali
repeatedly emphasized, this is the very reason why Hanthala was always depicted
as an eleven-year-old boy; it is also clearly the reason for the poignant moral clarity
of al-Ali's work.
To follow al-Ali's daily cartoons was to be invited to see the world through the
eyes of a rebellious young Palestinian refugee. With their great moral clarity, his
drawings were never meant to make others comfortable. Instead, they were meant
to never be anything less than a direct, truthful chronicle of the suffering of Palestin-
ian refugees. After enduring the often draconian restrictions imposed upon them in
various Arab countries after 1948, the Palestinian refugees watched from afar as the
rest of their country was swallowed up by Israel in 1967. While the Zionist entity
continued to construct illegal colonies on occupied Palestinian lands, the regimes
of neighbouring Arab states failed either to offer the Palestinian refugees a decent
temporary shelter, or to act as sincere supporters for the Palestinian cause.
In the midst of all this, Hanthala stands as a perennially unchanging observer.
While surprisingly malleable principles of international law made progressively
fewer demands on behalf of the Palestinians, Hanthala never once forgot the child's
Palestine. As al-Ali makes clear, Hanthala was never allowed to grow old, because to
permit him to do so would be to normalize the predicament of refugees. To borrow
from a story common to Palestinian refugees of al-Ali's generation, they should not
be allowed to pick oranges from trees that are not theirs.
The cartoons in this chapter share more than just the clear, unflinching vision of
a child. In different ways, they also represent an innocent and unshakeable statement
of the Palestinians' refusal to disappear, and their insistence on chronicling and writ-
ing their own history.
PALESTINE 3
When they were expelled by Israel in 1948, the Palestinians kept the keys to their homes. Here,
Hanthala dreams of his homeland; the keys, snagged on barbed wire, signify Israel's denial of the
Palestinian right of return (January 1974)
4 A CHILD IN PALESTINE
Jesus is a Palestinian, says Naji al-Ali; like all the Palestinian people, he too dreams of returning to
his home in Bethlehem (April 1982)
PALESTINE 5
One day the barbed wire, fencing the Palestinians out of their homeland, will be transformed, and
the suffering of the Palestinian people will end (March 1981)
6 A CHILD IN PALESTINE
A mother's tears heal her child, mutilated in an Israeli raid (July 1981)
PALESTINE 7
Al-Ali parallels the suffering of Palestinians and the trials of Christ, with a modern Palestinian take
on the Madonna and Child theme. The addition of a crescent moon signifies the equal suffering of
Palestinian Christians and Muslims (December 1984)
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