In a nutshell, I rate this book 2 stars out of 5 = I Don't Like It --- because it is written by an author who admits he is biased and is pro-Palestine and because the story is one-sided. It is one thing to admit a bias but to try to present a work that is balanced--that is not what this book is.

The graphics are very good (the only reason I requested to receive an advance review copy of this book for the Amazon Vine program was I am interested in reading graphic format books of various genres and have enjoyed memoir and nonfiction graphic books). I really liked the artwork by Joe Sacco, but in part therein lies the problem. In reading the book I was being swayed not only by the author's carefully selected words (and things omitted) but I was also being influenced by the very good artwork and graphic storytelling format. I found myself starting to side with the Palestinians but had to stop reading and keep reminding myself of other facts I know not shared in this book to balance it out in order to prevent being brainwashed or converted to this mindset.

Lastly there is the issue of trying to blame all that has gone on in the last fifty-plus years and today's current situation with the Palestinians on this incident found in two footnotes in a United Nations document. This is a complicated issue to say the least.

I found the book oppressive and depressing to read. I dreaded reading it. As I felt it I kept feeling not that I was being provided with new information to challenge some things I already knew, but that I was being brainwashed and led to accept everything said here as the right viewpoint. I believe reading should be for education, for personal enrichment or for pleasure. I don't like reading materials that border on propaganda. I don't like handing my mind over to an author for re-programming. As I read this book I kept thinking, "Put this book down, this is not worth your time to read."

I have been interested in the trend of more books being published in graphic format that are not silly comic strips. I am intrigued by the graphic presentation of non-fiction such as science and history as well as memoir. I know for a fact that graphic books are read by children and teenagers who struggle to read regular text books. There is a market for more graphic books and for more non-comic (humor based) graphic format books. As a homeschooling parent I am always looking for anything educational presented in graphic format. Even for non-struggling readers, a graphic format book is a good change of pace. Interpreting messages from visual presentation of material is a refreshing change of pace for good readers.

I requested a pre-publication copy of this book before any information was available about it. I did not at the time, know anything about Joe Sacco. I didn't realize I was setting myself up to review what has turned out to be a controversial book. I have procrastinated about reviewing this book as I don't enjoy reviewing controversial books or dealing with the backlash that I've sometimes received from my Amazon reviews of controversial topic books.

In 1956, two bloody massacres occurred in Gaza Strip that left over a many Palestinians dead. The Palestinians claim that many of the over one hundred people killed were civilians; the Israeli soldiers claim many fewer fatalities, and that all of the men killed were soldiers. In an area constantly torn apart by war, the killings at Rafah and Khan Younis were quickly forgotten by the world at large, but fifty years later journalist Joe Sacco is determined to discover what really happened.

Sacco is a unique journalist who presents his work not in a series of newspaper or magazine articles but in the format of comic strips. In the mid-nineties his graphic novel Palestine, which focuses on the Palestinian people and their history, was highly acclaimed and won several awards. In some ways `Footnotes in Gaza' could be considered a sequel, or a companion piece to that successful novel. It zooms in on a smaller set of people while addressing many of the same issues in the Middle East. Sacco spent a lot of time in Rafah and Khan Younis, and conducted hundreds of interviews with residents of the towns who could remember the incidents of 1956, as well as scouring the official records of the U.N. and Israeli government. However, Sacco's sympathies lie with the Palestinians, and the book is very clearly biased toward their version of history. That is, almost all of the oral accounts come from Palestinians; Sacco provides dozens of accounts from Palestinian men and women who witnessed the attacks in the two towns but speaks only to two Israeli historians. No attempt to find an eyewitness from Israel is mentioned, so as a reader I assume Sacco didn't try. This seems one-sided. While it is true that the Palestinian view is not commonly reported and perhaps needs the special attention Sacco gives it, I couldn't shake the feeling as I read that the story, in spite of the reporter's never-ending rounds of interviews, was incomplete. In the footnotes of `Footnotes' there are reprints of official Israeli records and transcriptions of some of the oral interviews.

The other major problem that I had with the narrative was that there were simply too many people in the narrative. Many of the interviewees appeared once or twice and then never again; over the nearly 400 pages of this graphic novel these many faces started to blend together and became indistinguishable. One man's tale of suffering would closely resemble another man's account, and pretty soon all the details were completely jumbled together. While I can still remember the overall sequence of events, ask me to tell you any particular individual's story and all I can give you is a blank stare.

If you've never heard much about the conflicts in the Middle East, `Footnotes in Gaza' can be a real eye-opener. The book covers a lot of ground, jumping all over history and presenting the lives of people that are ravaged by conflict but retain their humanity. There's no glory here. Everything is carnage and depression. Yes. This was a depressing book. There's nothing fun about it, and after hundreds of pages it gets boring, or tedious. I mean, don't get me wrong, `Footnotes in Gaza' is very insightful. But there's no levity to break the tension, and after a while the book just wore me out.

Sacco's graphic novel allows readers to see Gaza present and past for what it really is, we're not fooled by the normal transgression of events like people celebrating the holidays or writing their application statements
that Gaza is like any other place on this planet. Gaza Is Israel's modern day Warsaw ghetto. Gaza is Israel's ant farm where the food supply is strained and in some cases like last year's war on Gaza, Israel set the
UNWRA storage facilities ablaze. Israel and its watchtowers are the maniacal child whose joy is to step on the ants and destroy their natural day to day activities. Israel's policy in the Gaza strip are set by madmen
who have lost all touch with their humanity. Where are they going with this and how far will they go is quite clear for anyone who reads Sacco's graphic novel.

I normally read fantasy graphic novels, stuff by Alan Moore or Girl Genius, so this was a new turn for me. I don't know much about the history of this novel, so I read up on it. I do think it is subjective like others have said, though I personally have no evidence of the authors dislike for Israel, since authors can have an opinion different than what is in their books and that doesn't make it propaganda.

Anyway, the artwork is beautiful and depressing at the same time. I remember reading a scene where a bull is killed and butchered and this would normally be depressing to me, but there was a certain dark beauty to the piece and its metaphor. It was a hard book to get through for me, since I read for pleasure and seldom like to get beaten over the head with war's reality. Unlike other books and films about war, this book has no hope and no dream of happy endings. I feel sort of hollow when I got done with it and not so sure what was fact or fiction, so it was hard to enjoy it because of this blend of confusion and sadness at the book's core.

I'd like to see the illustrator do a fiction, rather than this. I feel his art could motivate more if it was put in a better setting other than this.

"Footnotes In Gaza" chronicles two supposed massacres perpetrated by Israel that took place in Gaza during the Suez crisis of 1956 and theorizes that these kinds of incidents "often contain the seeds of the grief and anger that shape present-day events". Maybe. However, whatever actually happened in Khan Yunis and Rafah (Mr. Sacco does not give both sides of what may have occurred) happened quite clearly in 1956. I do not think that any reasonable individual will claim that those incidents caused the massacre of unarmed Jewish residents in Hebron in 1929 by Arab mobs.

Furthermore, I do not think that any unbiased third party would assume that these incidents of 1956 caused five surrounding Arab nations to invade Israel on the eve of her declaration of statehood in 1948. I am also fairly certain that not even Mr. Sacco will claim that these 1956 incidents caused the numerous unprovoked cross border raids by Palestinian terrorists, from Gaza, on Israeli citizens that occurred between 1948 and 1956 when Gaza was still under Egyptian control and would be for another eleven years.

The situation in the Middle East is more complex than can be explained in just one book or book review. Yet I believe that the utter lack of context in "Footnotes In Gaza" displays tremendous bias on the part of the author to the point that I would not trust his depiction of what actually occurred. We can safely assume that his version of events is distorted by his political veiws. "Footnotes In Gaza" is not a genuine contribution to understanding the current Gaza situation. Despite the comic book format, it is not worth reading.

I literally could not put this book down. It had me hooked and engaged from beggining to end.

Footnotes literally tells the story of the massacres committed by the Israeli Defense Forces in the Gaza strip during the 1957 Suez war in which Israel, France, and Britain invaded Egypt.

In classic reporting style, Joe Sacco tries to piece the puzzle of just what happened during the days of these brutal massacres.

The result is an intelligent, engaging, and pro-active book that will leave the reader breathless.

The author openly admits that he is biased against Israel. Yet this blood libel receives rave reviews from the New York Times. I think that says more about the period that we are living in than anything else. After this maybe the author can do a book about the massacre of the Jews in Gush etzion by the Palestinians or the massacre of hundreds of Christians by the Palestinians in Damoun Lebanon. Oh I forgot, that will make the Palestinians look bad so he won't do it.

I'm giving this book 4-stars because the art work and interactive detail, which are exceptionally good for a graphic novel. Politically, however, there are some problems, since Sacco clearly has an overriding intrest in promoting the grievances and claims of one side over the other side in the Mideast conflict. Hence, we see a group of hopeless, helpless and sympathetic victims brutalized by sadistic and unfeeling brutes, who are caricatured in these graphics as big, brawny and ugly. Nothing about the hurtful bigotry and exterminative philosophy of the so-called innocents.

Masquerading as history, this graphic novel is a detailed compendium of slanders against Israeli forces engaged in a counteroffensive against Palestinian terrorists in Gaza, an area used as a base for murderous terror raids into Israel since the 1949 armistice. But that fact is ignored by the reviewer, who accepts the author's single-minded obsession with placing all of the blame on the Jews for the fighting in Gaza at that time and for the entire duration of the Arab-Israeli conflict. The piece claims that it is a "bias against history" that has prevented the publication of more such accounts of Israeli brutality. Yet this book has nothing to do with a genuine search for historical truth and everything to do with anti-Israel bias. Indeed, the core accusation of Sacco's book--that these incidents in 1956 "planted hatred" in Palestinian hearts against Israelis--is absurd.

Sacco's use of crude pictures to tell a one-sided story of Jewish evil will, no doubt, remind some readers of similarly crude anti-Semitic graphics employed by the Nazis. We need not linger on this obvious comparison to dismiss Footnotes from Gaza as the nastiest sort of polemic that sheds little light on either the origins of the current conflict or the nature of war. At a time when anti-Israel invective and Jew-hatred is on the rise around the world, the publication of works like encourage hate; they do not expose it.

The following review is taken from excerpts of interviews with the author and professionals on this book.

Sacco's work has more in common with gonzo journalism than your Sunday comic strip. The American-Maltese artist's latest book, "Footnotes in Gaza," chronicles two episodes in 1956 in which a U.N. report filed Dec. 15, 1956 says a total of 386 civilians were shot dead by Israeli soldiers - events Sacco said have been "virtually airbrushed from history because they have been ignored by the mainstream media."

Sacco himself admits he takes sides.

"I don't believe in objectivity as it's practiced in American journalism. I'm not anti-Israeli ... It's just I very much believe in getting across the Palestinian point of view," he said. What I show in the book is that this massacre is just one element of Palestinian history ... and that people are confused about which event, what year they are talking about," he said.

"Palestinians never seem to have had the luxury of digesting one tragedy before the next is upon them. I'm not pretending to be the all powerful, all knowing journalist god ... I'm an individual who reacts to people who are sometimes afraid ... On a human level, of course that colors the stories I'm telling."

Israeli historians dispute these figures. "It's a big exaggeration," said Meir Pail, a leading Israeli military historian and leftist politician. "There was never a killing of such a degree. Nobody was murdered. I was there. I don't know of any massacre." Sacco's passion for the Palestinian cause has opened him up to accusations of bias.

Jose Alaniz, from the University of Washington's Department of Comparative Literature, said Sacco uses "all sorts of subtle ways" to manipulate the reader. "Very often he will pick angles in his art work that favor the perspective of the victim: He'll draw Israeli soldiers or settlers from a low perspective to make them more menacing and towering." Alaniz also said Sacco draws children "in such a way to make them seem more victimized."

A great an interesting graphic novel from a legend. His take on the Israeli/Palestine issue is well balanced.

Recommend this to anyone interested in the situation on the ground - his book on Bosnia is equally as good.

Enjoy! :)