The acts might be brutal, but there must be a context to it. I certainly didn’t want to drop the reader into those incidents without telling the story of, well: Why are there refugees? Why were the Israelis and the Palestinians battling along the border? Who were the fedayeen? What was the Israeli response to that? But more than that, I think, for me, the book ends up being—this is going to sound strange—a dead end. Because I don’t know where to go from here, except to delve into human psychology. I think I understand how history works. I understand why one people are battling another people. I understand that they both want land. But ultimately there’s a level that I haven’t really got to yet…
On the multifaceted quality of history in “An Interview with Joe Sacco” https://believermag.com/an-interview-with-joe-sacco/ in Believer Magazine (2011 Jun 1)
Joe Sacco Quotes
On what he aimed for with his book The Great War in “A Panorama Of Devastation: Drawing Of WWI Battle Spans 24 Feet” https://www.npr.org/2013/11/10/243068448/a-panorama-of-devastation-drawing-of-wwi-battle-spans-24-feet in NPR (2013 Nov 10)