“So we’re in Israel, right?” asks Canadian cartoonist Guy Delisle in Jerusalem: Chronicles from the Holy City, in reference to the East Jerusalem neighbourhood in which he and his wife—an administrator with Médecins Sans Frontières—stayed for twelve months beginning in 2008.
“Well, it depends,” replies an MSF staffer. Israel annexed East Jerusalem in 1967, but the international community recognizes it as part of the West Bank. Oh well, Delisle muses, he has “a whole year to figure it out.” While he is only passing through, however, it is an open question in his latest graphic memoir whether Israel will figure itself out.
A former animator, the Quebec City–born Delisle is most famous for his accounts of his former career travels, namely to China and North Korea, in the comics travelogues Shenzhen and Pyongyang. His experience as a stay-at-home ex-pat dad and self-motivated cartoonist in 2008’s Burma Chronicles, in which it was he who tagged along for his wife’s work, earned him the designation of “master of the graphic novel” by The Telegraph UK in 2009; the book was also cited as one of ten “masterpieces of graphic nonfiction” in The Atlantic in 2011.
Delisle reprises the same role in Jerusalem, named the year’s best comic in its original French edition at the 2012 Angoulême International Comics Festival in France, one of the world’s most prestigious. In contrast to dogged journalist Joe Sacco’s Palestine and Footnotes in Gaza, Delisle’s perspective is still that of an ex-pat making bemused observations in travelogue form; his face is often presented without expression, save for two black dots to serve as curious eyes. His cartoonish, highly minimal style is also in marked contrast to Sacco’s laborious pen, which moves more in the direction of realism (while still maintaining a flair for stylization).
Delisle’s approach is fitting, however, rendering specific, precisely seen moments in comparison to Sacco’s wider historic, cultural and political tapestry. Yet the limitations of his perspective are made apparent when, for example, Israel’s Operation Cast Lead offensive against Gaza unfolds in late 2008, and Delisle is left well outside the action—even if by choice. By contrast, in Footnotes Sacco personally braves Israeli tracer bullet fire in Gaza in 2003.
With Jerusalem, there is nonetheless a gravitas previously missing from Delisle’s work, although both Pyongyang and Burma Chronicles had their illuminating, even cutting moments. The artist’s hand has also become more sophisticated and fine, the overall presentation snazzier. Thus both in content and in the newfound subtleties of Delisle’s deceptively simple style, Jerusalem displays his powers at a whole new level of maturity.
The artist’s introduction to Israel begins on his flight, when he notices the tattoo on a camp survivor’s forearm. It is an implicit reminder of how Israel, recognized in 1948 in the Holocaust’s immediate wake, is seen by many Jews—that is, as a safe haven. Then he lands and meets his Arab cab driver. Depending on where one goes in the country, it is in fact quite possible to get the impression that there are as many Arabs as Jews in the self-proclaimed Jewish state.
That dichotomy and its implications are a recurring theme throughout the book. In between, Delisle catalogues the more immediately apparent cultural differences, such as Jerusalem’s dead streets on Shabbat (“It reminds me of Sundays in Pyongyang”), yeast products covered by plastic sheets in the supermarkets during Passover and Muslim women covered head to toe in black in the stifling heat. The idiosyncrasies of religious Jews are a particularly rich source of humour: Delisle has special affection for the varying dress of different groups, especially the white stockings. Also amusing is how the lights displayed for Ramadan seem borrowed from other holidays, such as Christmas.
In the larger picture, we see the so-called Holy City as really a world unto itself, with neighbourhoods like the ultra-Orthodox Mea Shearim as worlds within worlds. Within this den of religiosity, Delisle skewers the absurdities of religion with often-dry understatement and whimsicality, as when he visits the vast Jewish cemetery on the Mount of Olives. If the Messiah appears over there, he explains, then this row over here will be the first to be judged. “I hope it works out for you, Schlomo,” Delisle says drolly, reading the closest tombstone.
Not that Jerusalem itself equals greater Israel. A colleague of Delisle’s in Tel Aviv, for instance, declares: “I can’t stand all those religious nuts!” For that matter, Tel Aviv itself occupies its own parallel realm. “No kippas, no veiled women, no fundamentalists,” Delisle sighs on the beach. Even secular Jewish Jerusalemites are not always patient with their (ultra-)religious fellow citizens.
And yet the entire country is itself still a kind of alternate universe, thanks to its government. Take Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who in a 2010 address to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee declared, in reference to East Jerusalem, that Jews “were building Jerusalem 3,000 years ago and … are building Jerusalem today.” East Jerusalem is, under international law, occupied territory and settlements there are indeed illegal under the Fourth Geneva Convention—affirmed by the International Court of Justice at the Hague in 2004. But never mind: Netanyahu says East Jerusalem is Israel, so it is Israel.
It is such unilateral declarations that underlie the festering ethnic and political tensions Delisle observes, exemplified by Israeli buses that go everywhere except the Arab quarters. The author also visits a Bedouin community that has been harassed by both settlers and the Israeli army.
And then there is the ongoing, 45-year occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, otherwise known as the Palestinian territories. The malevolence of the notorious—and illegal, also according to the ICJ—West Bank separation wall’s monolithic design is well conveyed by Delisle’s spare style (so too, in rather perverse contrast, is the beauty and solidity of the Western Wall in Jerusalem). For that matter, his travelogue approach emphasizes the everydayness of the separation wall. It is just … there, part of the landscape.
Delisle’s overarching subject, is in fact the larger, ominous problems facing Israel. “Greater Israel is finished,” Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert declares at one point. “We must share with those we live with.” Strong words, but the author shows how incongruent they are with continuing reality—as when he visits Hebron in the West Bank, with its settlers and various “no Arabs” streets guarded by Israeli soldiers. A West Bank tour given by former Israeli soldiers from a non-governmental organization called Breaking the Silence explains that the settlements are all illegal; a parallel tour given by settlers provides a near-comic contrast.
Yes, Delisle concedes, the national newspapers are openly critical. “Israel is a democracy for Jews, but not for the Arabs who live within its borders,” he quotes from one. Nonetheless, the country is now rapidly approaching a one-state solution—authored by Israeli policy itself.
What, then, will happen to Israel as a state that wants to be both democratic and Jewish? Throughout the book, there are any number of ominous portents, especially the ubiquitous military presence: there is always a plane overhead (one appears headed for an airstrike in Gaza, as Delisle lollygags on a Tel Aviv beach), another checkpoint and guns, guns, guns. And that last visual detail does not merely pertain to Israeli soldiers, settlers or Palestinian militants: at one point Delisle sees Arab kids with toy guns received as end-of-Ramadan gifts.
It is fitting that Delisle’s Jerusalem ends with sombre bewilderment.
Kenton Smith is a freelance writer and arts and culture critic whose writing on comics has appeared in The Globe and Mail, Quill and Quire, the Winnipeg Free Press and Canadian Art. He has also written for Broken Pencil magazine and CBC.ca.
Related Letters and Responses
In “A History of Hypocrisy” (May 2008), Regan Boychuk does a valuable service in reminding us of some very discreditable chapters in Canadian history, above all the story of Ewen Cameron’s mind-control experiments conducted at the Allen Memorial Institute in Montreal. But in bringing this and other stories back to our attention in a passionate way, he also threatens to undermine his own tale by exaggerating the Canadian contribution to torture principles and practices in a more global context.
Mr. Boychuk, for example, raises the Supreme Court decision in a case that he does not name (Suresh). The Supreme Court did issue a potentially troubling finding in adjudicating Suresh, but the wording is significant. The court said that in “exceptional” circumstances, deportation to a country that practised torture might be required in the interests of Canadian national security. These exceptional circumstances were not defined and it needs to be said that in neither the case of Suresh nor of any other individual held under security certificate proceedings have they actually been sent back to face torture. In fact, one reason why security certificate cases become stalemated in Canada and end up in a nether world of lengthy legal proceedings and detention or virtual house arrest is precisely because of the power of the United Nations convention against return to torture.
To suppose that current CIA interrogation techniques have a lineage that can be easily and directly traced back to Canadian experiments is to distort the story and to perversely over-claim our role. Instead, what we now know is that U.S. interrogation techniques, especially those conducted by intelligence agencies, have many wellsprings. To suggest that the most significant are those traced back to mind-control experiments over a half century ago in Montreal, or even to Operation Phoenix 40 years back in Vietnam, is to overlook the more powerful and more sustained desire to match and exploit the interrogation techniques known to be used (and exported) by the U.S.’s principal Cold War protagonists, the Soviet and Chinese intelligence services. Here we enter the morally relativistic world captured so well by John Le Carré in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. As Le Carré’s fictional character “Control” put it, just because your motives are benign doesn’t mean that you can afford to be less ruthless than your enemy.
Canada may seem intent on turning a blind eye to the likes of Omar Khadr in Guantanamo — a case oddly enough not mentioned by Boychuk. But as the O’Connor commission found, government agencies were not complicit with the U.S. in the rendition of Maher Arar to Syria, although their sloppy handling of bad intelligence contributed to his terrible plight. The Iacobucci inquiry will eventually pronounce on the cases of three other Canadians held and tortured in the Middle East. Let’s see what Iacobucci says. We may learn more details about other troubling cases, such as those of the Sudanese Canadian Abousfian Abdelrazik.
None of this adds up to Boychuk’s finding that “with today’s war on terror, our complicity with U.S. torture has only grown.” It’s not complicity, that old bugbear of Canadian nationalist and anti-American sentiment, but our own lack of moral bearing that may be at stake. It may be hard, from time to time, to resist the weight of a U.S. superpower intent on prosecuting the war on terror according to the lights of whatever administration is in power. But not that hard. What is really difficult is to define our own moral standards when upholding both national security and fundamental justice, and then to stick to them. It’s a made-in-Canada problem, whether we are talking about historical instances or current policy in Afghanistan, or security certificate cases, or Canadian Security Intelligence Service liaison arrangements with foreign services. Boychuk, citing John Holmes a little unfairly, may be right in suggesting a Canadian tendency to find “ways around one’s principles.” But the real issue is finding one’s principles.
Wesley Wark Ottawa, Ontario
To varying degrees, both the prominent security analysts who took issue with my look at Canada’s role in U.S. torture (“A History of Hypocrisy,” May 2008) make excuses for American torture, dismiss Canadian complicity and characterize criticism of such crimes as “anti-American.”
University of Toronto professor Wesley Wark (Letters & Responses, see above) invokes the moral authority of a French novelist in arguing the U.S. couldn’t afford not to torture. He also suggests we shouldn’t be bothered by Canada being the only western state to allow the return of an individual to face torture, because it is limited to undefined “exceptional” circumstances. The only problem is that, just as there are no exceptions to international law’s prohibition of slavery, the prohibition of torture is absolute—no matter how exceptional the circumstances.
University of Calgary professor Barry Cooper (Letters & Responses online, see above) dismisses the “sentimental softness” of international law’s definition of torture (ratified by 145 states) and claims “the meaning of torture has changed.” In light of this alleged reality, Cooper would have us debating how and when to use torture, not “smugly” condemning its every instance. But if anything has changed with regards to torture, it is simply the development of a new understanding that the brutal impact of psychological torture differs little from that of the traditional physical variety.¹
The considered opinion of these two experts notwithstanding, an overwhelming majority of Canadians agree torture should never be allowed.²
In dismissing Canadian complicity, Wark claims “we now know” that Chinese and Soviet torture techniques were more powerful influences on the CIA brand of torture than the innovations in sensory deprivation funded and coordinated by the Canadian government at McGill University throughout the 1950s. This is simply false, as shown in the second section of my essay. If Professor Wark wishes to argue otherwise, it will take more than an assertion. He might also want to explain why—if the Canadian contribution was so insignificant to CIA torture—the U.S. included reservations in its 1994 ratification of the UN Convention Against Torture designed, in part, to exempt sensory deprivation.³
As for their suggestion that criticizing torture is “anti-American,” I can’t claim to understand what they are trying to imply: is it that my essay somehow demonstrates my hatred for apple pie and baseball, or is it that torture is just as hallowed an American tradition?
Regan Boychuk Calgary, Alberta
Notes: 1. Metin Basoglu, Maria Livanou, and Cvetana Crnobaric, “Torture vs. Other Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Treatment: Is The Distinction Real or Apparent?” Archives of General Psychiatry, volume 64, number 3 (March 2007), pages 277–85. 2. “World Citizens Reject Torture, Global Poll Reveals,” BBC World Service, October 19, 2006, page 3. 3. Alfred W. McCoy, A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror (New York: Metropolitan, 2006), pages 100–02.
There are plenty of interesting theoretical and practical questions one could raise about torture. The great theoretical question is: what is it? The significant practical one is: what is it used for?
Regan Boychuk (“A History of Hypocrisy,” May 2008) accepts the sentimental definition of the United Nations, namely inflicting severe pain or suffering. The context for understanding this notion lies in the changing significance of 19th-century views on cruelty rather than in the actual, ahistorical and common human experience of pain.
In contrast, one might consider the Greeks: they inflicted severe pain on those without a sense of honour or courage because such persons could not be trusted to give evidence on their word. The problem, then as now, is that words exacted after torture were not reliable. When inquisition replaced accusation and confession replaced oath, the meaning of torture changed into an essential constituent of confession: without torture, confessions were dubious. Beginning in the 19th century and continuing into the present, the judicialization of evidence and proof made torture seem cruel as well as ineffective.
This is the context within which the interrogation of military prisoners (as well as illegal battlefield detainees), who by definition were losers of a fight, is to be understood. That is, the meaning of torture has changed again. What might seem to be a revival of a Greek sense of honour is in fact a zero-sum competition of minds. There is no negotiation over evidence. Consequently, torture is no longer understood to be the use of pain to punish or extract information but is a means both of dominating a ³victim² or, more accurately, a loser and, because the logic of torture requires that the loser can make it stop by talking, it is a way of sharing responsibility with him (or conceivably with her).
Accordingly, the condemnation of torture in the modern context of sentimental softness with respect to pain, one must also look at its questionable effectiveness and ulterior purposes, such as punishment or humiliation. In the absence of some serious discussion of, for example, judicial torture warrants, akin to (say) wiretap warrants, it is regrettable that Boychuk can provide us only with smug, and wholly predictable, anti-Americanism disguised as Canadian complicity.
Barry Cooper Calgary, Alberta
Jason BlakeCelje, Slovenia
My April issue arrived just belatedly. I had been thinking of asking whether any acknowledgement of Mavis Gallant’s birth 100 years ago would appear. I opened the magazine and saw “Imaginary Futures.” A head-shakingly bizarre coincidence.
