Palestine

1.) Joe Sacco's Palestine is about his travels in Israel. He travels all over to see the oppression that is put on the Palestinians by the Jews. On his travels he interviewed many people that had been displaced by the occupation of the Jews and their experiences with the Jewish military, while making friends as well with some of the people he met. Some of the people were very reluctant to give him any information for fear of him being a Jewish spy instead of a real American Journalist. Throughout the graphic novel Sacco also experienced some of the fear that the Palestinians felt when the Jewish military would go by because he felt he may be struck by a stray rock or bullet in the cross fire.

2.) The main issue of the graphic novel is the misunderstanding of two different "cultures". Issues include, faith in ones own religion/culture, oppression by others and identity. The ideas the novel creates is that there are always two sides to a story, people will always talk about something but not many will actually follow through, and that many people will treat others how they were treated once.

3.) The visual style of the graphic novel is simple but very effective. Sacco uses enough words to tell us what is happening in the pictures, but also not enough so that we must pay attention to the visual pictures as well to get the full story. In his visuals he has many people doing many things. His pictures seem to be very complex. This helps by showing the emotions of the Jews and Palestinians and they treated each other, and because we see something we can believe it is more real than if we just read it, whether it be a drawing or a photograph. Also Sacco makes the panels of the novel more scattered and speech bubbles more confusing and harder to read in a certain order when violence seems to take place, just like how the streets would be when violence breaks out and there are people running and fighting in all different directions, chaos.