456 PALESTINE
by many women, or the sometimes violent confrontations between diff erent Palestinian
political factions. However, like the ubiquitous “Palestinian room” where copious tea is
served and young men sit around sharing stories, the one set of experiences that cuts
across all diff erences is that of Israeli occupation. Every Palestinian has some connection
with death, injury, destruction of homes, displacement, imprisonment, economic depri-
vation and /or generalized humiliation that is a direct, unmediated result of the violence
of Israeli occupation. Th e psychological ramifi cations of occupation are also empha-
sized, as when one Palestinian asks, “Every home here has someone who is imprisoned,
who has died, who is wounded... this is the childhood? ” Th ere is simply no escape, and
all of Palestine (especially the Gaza Strip) is a prison—hemmed in on all sides by Israeli
military outposts and regulated completely by Israeli military bureaucracy. Even those
Palestinians who do manage to leave the occupied territories have no guarantee that
they will ever be allowed back.
Th e concept of separation is central to Palestine as narrative and Palestine as lived
experience. At one point, Sacco refers to parallel universes as in Marvel Comics : on the
one hand, a seemingly normal cityscape in Jerusalem, with people in love, traffi c, tourism,
and so on; on the other hand, hidden beneath the surface, a world of brutal torture. Th e
former world is largely for Israelis, whereas the latter is reserved exclusively for Palestin-
ians. Sacco also notes the separate standards of justice for Israeli settlers who illegally
occupy Palestinian land, and Palestinians who defend themselves against the violence
of the former — settlers are rarely caught for murder, and when tried receive mild sen-
tences; Palestinians caught for murder, however, typically receive life imprisonment and
their families face collective punishment. Reminiscent of apartheid South Africa, there
are even separate roads for the Israeli settlers and the indigenous Palestinians. In the
closing chapter, two Israeli women discussing politics with Sacco in Tel Aviv declare that
they simply do not want their normal lives (which, Sacco notes, are very Western lives)
interrupted by the occasional burst of Palestinian violence. “We don’t think about this
stuff all the time, and we get a bit tired of hearing about it!” Th e very next morning,
Sacco bumps into a friend in the Palestinian city of Nablus. Th eir seemingly normal
reunion is almost immediately interrupted by violence — stones, settlers, and soldiers
in a scene that is by now all too familiar to Sacco and to the reader. Th e contrast is
clear: Israelis live in a universe where they have the choice to become tired of discussing
violence, because violence is abnormal; Palestinians live in a universe where there is no
choice but to discuss violence because of the omnipresence of a brutal Israeli occupa-
tion; in a society where violence is never normalized but it is the norm, it is the absence
of violence that is abnormal.
Sacco’s emphasis on Palestinian views might appear to be contradictory to objective
journalism that ostensibly represents both sides of a confl ict. However, his work seeks
to deconstruct both the notions that Palestinians are a homogenous group of people
and that mainstream journalism is anywhere near balanced: “I’ve heard nothing but the
Israeli side most all my life... .” To counter the imbalance in mainstream media and
the actual imbalance of power that sees a group of Israeli soldiers with automatic rifl es
