May 31, 2003	Saturday	Rabi-ul-Awwal 28, 1424

BEIRUT: At the end of his graphic novel Palestine, Joe Sacco describes a scene he witnessed in Jerusalem: It is pouring with rain. A group of Israeli soldiers stop a Palestinian boy of about 12 on the otherwise deserted street.

“The soldiers take cover under an awning and made the boy remove his Keffiyeh and pointed to where he should stand — in the rain.

“Perhaps for the boy it was one of dozens of humiliations, had enough, in his personal scheme of things, but not worse than others he’d experienced...

“I’d come for the occupation and I found what I’d come to find, and here it was again, and something else too” Sacco says.

The boy answers the soldiers’ questions and Sacco finds himself wondering what the boy is thinking. Is it that one day all will be OK and he will greet the soldiers as neighbours?

“Or was it simply one day!

“And beyond the particular abuses of this time and place, beyond the really big questions ... the status of Jerusalem, the future of settlements, the return of the refugees ... is something else — a boy standing in the rain, and what is he thinking?

“And if I’d guessed before I got here, and found with little astonishment once I’d arrived, what can happen to someone who thinks he has all the power, what of this.

“What becomes of someone when he believes himself to have none?”

The question is left hanging while the harsh black-and-white cartoon strip shows the boy flinching under the rain, the dry Israeli soldier growling down. Among the mounting body of political and aesthetic work depicting life in Israel and the occupied territories few leave such a lasting, effective and honest impression on the reader as Palestine.