Graphic Occupation: Joe Sacco and the Artwork of Bearing Witness

Abstract

This article explores Joe Sacco’s graphic works Palestine (2001), Footnotes in Gaza (2009), and War on Gaza (2024) as a counter-narrative to dominant media and historical discourse on the Israel-Palestine conflict. Through a peace studies framework, particularly the concepts of positive peace and moral imagination, the study situates Sacco’s work as an intervention that exposes structural, cultural, and direct forms of violence. His blending of comics and investigative journalism creates layered narratives that challenge the illusion of journalistic neutrality and reclaim forgotten and overlooked past traumas. Sacco’s formal techniques like multilinear storytelling, self-reflexivity, and graphic testimony reconstruct marginalized histories while fostering empathetic engagement. By integrating personal testimony with historical reconstruction, he not only documents episodes of mass violence and displacement but also interrogates the ideologies that sustain them. Sacco’s visual medium resists the desensitization of the conflict by prompting ethical witnessing and complicating the binaries of victim and perpetrator. The article argues that Sacco’s comics function as peacebuilding narratives that dismantle hegemonic discourses and promote critical literacy in an era of media saturation. His works reframe the question of objectivity, insisting on accountability and relational truth. Ultimately, Sacco’s oeuvre provides a powerful model for ethically mediated storytelling, one that fosters historical awareness, transnational solidarity, and a more inclusive vision of justice.