From 2008 through 2023, roughly every other year, I taught a course using comic books to explore the tensions between Israelis and Palestinians. The course was designed for writing majors at the University of Minnesota Duluth.

Students often enter the classroom with a basic background in the Holocaust story.  Among teachers of young adult literature, this is (basically) the narrative traced by Anne Frank’s diary, often taught, in middle school and by Elie Wiesel’s Night Trilogy.  In high schools where graphic novels fuel student interest in reading, Art Spiegelman’s Maus becomes the “Holocaust story.”  Students assume that the story of Israel, then, begins with the Holocaust.

But the formation of the state of Israel is not only a response to the Holocaust. The groundwork for the foundation of the state of Israel begins in the mid-19th century, while Ottomans still ruled the lands eventually called Palestine and Israel.  Jewish settlers began migrating into Israel nearly a century before World War II.

Maybe even the 19th century is not early enough. We can trace the story of Jewish people in the Levant continuously since the Roman empire.

And maybe even that’s not early enough. Maybe the story of the state of Israel begins with the temple built in the reign of King Solomon. 

To help students approach the class with the cultural humility encouraged by my work with, among others, Gayle Woodruff, I needed to structure the class with competing narratives, rather than with the single narrative that Holocaust education would encourage, creating questions instead of resolving them.

For 15 years, the central problem of the class was generating interest in students. Connections to the Middle East in a predominately white classroom in Minnesota are tenuous. If I could not ignite a personal connection between the texts and the lives of students, I needed to give them new eyes through which to see. I needed to help them feel the passion of others who had embarked on this same journey of learning about the conflict.

In my class, therefore, every narrator in every text read by students is a learner, a traveler, a visitor, to Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank.

• In Harvey Pekar’s graphic novel Not the Israel My Parents Promised Me, Pekar never actually leaves the United States to visit Israel, but it looms large in his life as an American Jew. He has lived with the promise and disappointment of Israel in the lives of American Jews, who dream of a utopian society that just never materializes. Basically through library research, Pekar struggles to understand the history of the tension between Palestinians and Israelis, beginning a thousand years before the Common Era and moving forward. In many ways, Pekar models the work the students are doing, as he learns by reading.  At the end of his book, he feels overwhelmed by conflicting feelings, which gives students license to feel overwhelmed on their journeys as well.
• Sarah Glidden, in her graphic novel How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less, is on a Birthright trip, a trip made available to young adult Jews around the world to see Israel as the Israelis want Israel to be seen. Glidden begins her journey with cynicism, presuming to see and to see through the propaganda that the Israeli government offers to Birthright youth. But she ultimately feels conflicted, in a story with no clear heroes or villains. The crescendo scenes in both Glidden and Pekar’s graphic novels are masterful uses of the visual to convey a conflicted internal life.
• Guy Delisle, in Jerusalem, is accompanying his wife, who works with Doctors without Borders.  He has followed her to Myanmar, Pyongyang, Shenzhen, and Jerusalem, writing a graphic memoir in each location. Of all the authors, he is the least engaged, because he is not in Jerusalem or Israel intentionally. He follows his wife and makes the best of the time he is there, drawing something closer to a record of his experiences than a record of the life of Palestinians and Israelis. If his readers feel disconnected, Delisle gives them license to experience that perspective — and to see the limitations. Delisle is in fact so disconnected that he has a hard time seeing his Israeli or his Palestinian neighbors in their richness.
• The last two texts we read, Joe Sacco’s Palestine and Amira Hass’ Drinking the Sea at Gaza, are the deep dives.  Sacco and Hass write like journalists, working to uncover the truth about the lives of Palestinians and the abuses of the Israeli Occupation. Their work is rich with interviews and observational accounts, bringing the lives of Palestinians into focus.

Each student in the class can share and identify with the experiences of the author whose perspective is closest to their own. Glidden is closest in age to the students; Pekar, like the students, never leaves the US. Delisle’s detached perspective sometimes resonates. And Hass and Sacco are seekers, like undergraduate liberal arts majors. I build the class around works that allow students see Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank through eyes like their own.

For fifteen years, this pedagogy worked. Students who never thought about the Palestinian Question, the Occupation, or the place of the state of Israel in American foreign policy considered the topic for the first time. Based on student projects, none of them left with an over-simple depiction of the situation. After all, the overarching response to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, through all of these books, is one of tragedy — of an intractable problem, caught up in a complicated history, and sustained by cycles of violence. That course narrative worked, with some modest updating and revision, for more than a decade.

And then, on October 7, 2023, Hamas invaded Israel.

I was very comfortable teaching a class that made my students uncomfortable, as they reflected on this intractable problem of 70, of 200, of 2000 years. I wasn’t ready for the anger, fear, and helplessness I would feel on October 8, when the intractable problem became a war.

Everything Changed

I didn’t offer the class in Spring 2024, for a variety of reasons, but most of them devolve into cowardice. My carefully curated texts were now entirely out of date; my authors had visited sites in Gaza that had now been leveled. Guy Delisle had drawn crossings between Gaza and Israel that have been crashed by rockets and closed entirely. The readings discuss work permits that Israel no longer issues to Gazans. And most of the Gazans interviewed by my authors could be dead.

It’s an understatement to say that the course materials needed updating. Beyond that, my nervousness went further.

My pedagogy depended on the students’ unfamiliarity with Israel and the Occupation. Students brought a minimal set of assumptions to the class, mostly around the formation of Israel as a response to the Holocaust. They explored from a state of innocence, through the eyes of the authors.

There is no state of innocence — or ignorance — anymore. The majority of students have developed a basic knowledge of the events before, on, and after October 7.

When I first started teaching this class, the definitions of the participants didn’t matter much, or at all. Palestinians were “occupied people living on one side of the wall” and Israelis were “citizens of Israel living on the other side of the wall.”  Since October 7, 2023, distinctions have proliferated. Israeli identity has been fractured, as media critics differentiate Ashkenazi Jewish Israeli identity, Sephardic Jewish Israeli identity, Mizrahi Jewish Israeli identity, Druze Israeli identity, Arab or Muslim Israeli Identity, and Bedouin Israeli identity. This is a positive, insofar as it enriched the occupier-occupied distinction in most of my texts, but it also shows the limitations of those texts.

Similarly, Jewish identity is now understood to be more complicated. It has always been true that to be Israeli is not necessarily to be Jewish; to be ethnically Jewish is not necessarily to practice Judaism as a religion. The term “Jewish” signifies religion, ethnicity, and culture in ways that are difficult to summarize or systematize, especially in the United States, where race is so often seen as a question of black and white. The occupier-occupied distinction in most of my texts just doesn’t explain the nuances of Israeli identity.

The Israeli terminology for historical events is also being refined and corrected in widespread American consciousness.  When I first started teaching this class, the events of 1947–1948 were always described as a civil war (between Jewish Palestinians and Arab Palestinians) or a war between Israel and the Arab League (between Israel and its neighbors). But more and more, students come to me with knowledge of these events as a Disaster (Nakba, an ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from the land). While some students still see Israel as the scrappy new nation able to defend itself against foreign invaders, to others it has become a western imperial power that ethnically cleansed Arabs from the land. 

And the goal of my class — to complicate oversimple interpretations of the conflict — now looks quaint and even morally suspect. Some of my students believe that there is no moral ambiguity in a war to eliminate Hamas; Israel must do whatever is necessary to secure its safety. Others believe there is no moral justification for a genocide. As an instructor, to design a class generated from a position of uncertainty and cultural humility in this context, then, could be evidence of ethical failure on my part.

Next Semester

As of this publication, I am relaunching the class with a modified syllabus — preserving some of the original works, and adding a few more. I am keeping Harvey Pekar and Sarah Glidden, because they are wholly American voices, overwhelmed by the conflict, and students should feel free to inhabit that perspective as well, especially early in the semester. I am adding The Message, by Ta-Nehesi Coates,  in which Coates visits the West Bank after October 7 and brings moral clarity to his vision, comparing the violence Israelis enact on Palestinians in the West Bank to the Jim Crow south.

The class needs to start with such clarity because, while the bombs are still falling on Gaza, so many people feel that clarity. We need to challenge the necessity of those bombs. We need to challenge the use of force, for whatever purposes.

In “The Iliad, or The Poem of Force” (“L’Iliade ou le poème de la force”), Simone Weil talks about the damage created by the use of force. She opens the essay with a bald, clear claim:

The true hero, the true subject, the centre of the Iliad, is force. Force employed by man, force that enslaves man, force before which man’s flesh shrinks away. In this work, at all times, the human spirit is shown as modified by its relations with force, as swept away, blinded, by the very force it imagined it could handle, as deformed by the weight of the force it submits to.

For Weil, force reduces the victim to a thing — a corpse, she calls it. For Weil, the person who uses force also suffers, is also dehumanized. The person is “swept away” by the use of force against someone else, and becomes an object, a thing, as well.

In Weil’s articulation, the use of force dehumanizes everyone. There can be no winner or anything like a just war when war dehumanizes everyone who is asked to participate.

Instead of complicating the story of how we got here, whether the story starts in Biblical times or in 1947 or on October 7, 2023, I want to complicate what comes next. I want to ask my students whether violence is inevitable, when violence exacts such a high price from the Gazans, the Israelis, and my students, who now enter the class feeling complicit in the war through American foreign policy.

I don’t know what will happen. I am wondering whether it is wise to publish my intentions, knowing how badly this could go. But I am publishing my thoughts in a book that is, in many ways, a community, and that community will be present, I think, as I revisit this course. I am grateful for that, and grateful as well for the role Gayle Woodruff had in creating that community.

References

Coates, Ta-Nehisi. (2024). The Message. One World.

Delisle, Guy. (2024).  Jerusalem. Drawn & Quarterly.

Glidden, Sarah. (2010). How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less. Vertigo/DC Comics.

Hass, Amira. (2000). Drinking the Sea at Gaza. Henry Holt and Company.

Pekar, Harvey. (2012). Not the Israel My Parents Promised Me. Hill and Wang.

Sacco, Joe. (2024). Palestine. Fantagraphics.

Weil, Simone. (1956). “The Iliad, or The Poem of Force.” Translated by Mary McCarthy. Vol. 91 of Pendle Hill Pamphlets. Pendle Hill Publications.