The misleading view of Sarah Glidden

I'd written about the would-be graphic novelist Sarah Glidden here and here on TAB, about her morally equivalent propaganda called How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less (and also about another propaganda strip she drew called The Waiting Room), but I don't think I'd ever written a post here. So now I'd like to offer one here about Ms. Glidden, based on an interview she'd given to the terrible Heeb magazine about a year ago, on this book that supposedly tries to make sense of the Israeli-palestinian conflict, but fails completely to figure out if the palestine part is contrived. The interviewer begins with this:

Glidden’s book narrates the experiences of a Birthright-Israel trip, while attempting to paint a picture of the Jewish state’s unquestionably complex conflict with neighboring Palestine, all the while attempting to avoid getting too caught up in the jingoistic discourse of either side. The result is alternately thought-provoking, entertaining, and even, on occasion, funny. We spoke to Glidden recently about Israeli bus tours, mini comics and why it sometimes pays to be an outsider.

Oops, there's a beginning mistake on Heeb's part. Because challenging question: was there ever really an Arab/Islamic people called palestinians? Let's take a look at the following from Zola Levitt ministries:

Where did the term Palestine originate from? How did the world and the church get into the habit of calling the land of Israel “Palestine”? One of the guides we use in our tours to Israel is Zvi Rivai, an Israeli Messianic believer, who has done considerable research on this subject. Zvi informs us that before 135 A.D., the Romans used the terms Judea and Galilee to refer to the Land of Israel. When Titus destroyed Jerusalem in 70 A.D., the Roman government struck a coin with the phrase “Judea Capta,” meaning Judea has been captured. The term Palestine was never used in the early Roman designations.

It was not until the Romans crushed the second Jewish revolt against Rome in 135 A.D. under Bar Kochba that Emperor Hadrian applied the term Palestine to the Land of Israel. Hadrian, like many dictators since his time realized the propaganda power of terms and symbols. He replaced the shrines of the Jewish Temple and the Sepulchre of Christ in Jerusalem with temples to pagan deities. He changed the name of Jerusalem to Aelia Capitalina, and changed the name of Israel and Judea to Palestine. Hadrian’s selection of Palestine was purposeful, not accidental. He took the name of the ancient enemies of Israel, the Philistines, Latinized it to Palestine, and applied it to the Land of Israel. He hoped to erase the name Israel from all memory. Thus, the term Palestine as applied to the Land of Israel was invented by the inveterate enemy of the Bible and the Jewish people, Emperor Hadrian.

It is interesting to note that the original Philistines were not Middle Eastern at all. They were European peoples from the Adriatic sea next to Greece. It may have pleased Hadrian to utilize this Hellenistic term for the Jewish land. In any case, the original “Palestinians” had nothing to do, whatsoever, with any Arabs.

And this provides us with some amazing insight into where the name "palestine" came from. Nothing do with Arabs or even their precursor, the Ishmaelites, at all. Here's more on the history from Esek.

Now, back to the interview here, we get:

You certainly risk coming off as a bit too one-sided, given the generally filtered nature of information on the subject that we receive in the State–but then there’s a certain degree of bias one has to anticipate on a Birthright trip. Did the trip make it more or less difficult to get at both sides of the issue?

Well, I knew going into it that I wasn’t going to get balanced portions of both sides of the issue. Part of me wanted to see just how one-sided the tour would be and I was ready to report on it in the comic, but I was surprised at how left-wing our guide was. It kind of caught me off guard, actually. We talked a lot about the Palestinian situation, the separation wall and what historical events brought the Zionists and Arabs to that point. In the end, however, we were on a tour of Israel and not a tour of the conflict, so of course it wasn’t balanced, but I didn’t feel like I was being brainwashed at all. I really want to go back and get the Palestinian side of the issue, although I could never come close to what Joe Sacco did with Palestine.

In a lot of ways, Sacco’s book is about the experience of being embedded in warfare—Sacco refers to himself as a “war junkie.” Having experienced the region the way you did certainly filters the situation through a different perspective than what’s present in Palestine. Were there benefits to that filter in terms of storytelling, if only serving to ensure that it wasn’t a carbon copy of Sacco’s book?

I haven’t been to the Occupied Territories, but from what I’ve read and heard, it is like living in a war zone in a way, so Sacco’s book must reflect what he saw there. On the Palestinian side of the wall there’s very limited access to everything from electricity to healthcare. My book is about the Israeli side where the effects of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are much more subtle. So yeah, in that way its a very different perspective. In Israel you see the conflict though the security measures that are everywhere; they check your bags when you go into a shopping center and we had an armed guard with us for the tour. It’s strange because if not for those things as reminders, you could easily forget that this country is in the middle of such an intense struggle. On the inside its a pretty quiet place.

So she a]buys into the occupied territories propaganda, b]sadly went with a leftist tour guide, and c]signals her condoning of sicko Sacco. Yet she's actually lucky she didn't go to the palestinian side, since, as Phyllis Chesler recently noted, it could have had very dire consequences, especially if she'd gone there alone (does Glidden realize that? You never know.)

Of the countless conflicts in the region—and throughout the world—why does this specific issue have such a resonance with you? How large a role has your being an American Jew played in your connection with Israel?

My family wasn’t really religious but we belonged to a Reform synagogue in our town and my brother and I went to Sunday school at Brandeis University to prep for getting Bar/Bat Mitzvah’ed. Throughout my Jewish education there was a lot of emphasis on Israel. We were encouraged to donate small amounts of money to plant a tree in Israel, to get pen-pals there and generally to feel connected to it. Birthright is part of that. So when I got a bit older and started hearing more about the conflict with the Palestinians, I figured that as a Jew, if I’m connected to Israel then I’m connected to that conflict as well. If I’m a potential citizen of Israel, I can’t pick and choose the things I like about it and ignore the problems. I feel like I have some kind of responsibility to get involved and do whatever I can to make it a better place. It’s either that or disconnect myself from it altogether and I don’t want to do that.

She adhered to Reform? That's sad, and suggests why she's got such a morally equivalent, "two-state solution" POV. The Reform movement is actually far from really respectable of Israel. In my childhood, my family usually attended the Conservative sect's synagogues (in Philadelphia, there was a movement called Beit Emeth, which we'd been with), and while not perfect, they usually were more respectable on Israel than the Reforms were. Also, even when not fully observant of religious customs, there's always been Jewish tradition in my family's past members. Later on, when we came to Israel, we leaned more with the Orthodox sect's standings, even if still not fully religiously observant.

But overall, my problem isn't whether she's actually loyal to Israel, but rather, whether she buys into the propaganda of whether there was an Arabic/Islamic Palestinian people, which the British especially propagated since Israel's independence, in order to undermine the state and its safety.

That's why, to borrow a phrase from Dubya, you're either with or against us - that is, either you accept that there is only a Jewish country in both east and west, or buy into the notion that there's two states next to each other. That's what Glidden will have to think about, and sadly, I don't think she ever will.

It's sad that people like this are whom the current comics and graphic novels industry embraces. On the plus side, I don't think How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less won any awards, so at least she hasn't scored something she doesn't deserve.