Hank Kennedy covers the recent ban (and subsequent retraction of said ban) of American-Israeli graphic novelist, Miriam Libicki, from the Vancouver Comic Arts Festival, using the controversy as a springboard for analyzing the contradictions implicit in the liberal Zionist politics of Libicki’s work.
Being Jewish does not automatically absolve one of guilt. Despite the fact that Jews have such a long history of being oppressed, Israeli treatment of Palestinians eats at Jewish claims of fairness. -Harvey Pekar, comics creator.1
When I lived in Israel, I thought regular Israelis were, well, regular…Americans ask me if I witnessed racism or anti-Arab sentiment in the army, but I’m hard pressed to remember any. I may have been too naive to notice it though.2
The Controversy, in Brief
In May, the Vancouver Comic Arts Festival (VanCAF) banned comic creator Miriam Libicki. The VanCAF board released an accountability statement on social media giving their reasons for the ban. It read, in part,
The concerns regarded this exhibitor’s prior role in the Israeli military and their subsequent collection of works which recount their personal position in said military and the illegal occupation of Palestine. The oversight and ignorance to allow this exhibitor in the festival, not only this year but in 2022 as well, fundamentally falls in absolute disregard to all our exhibiting artists, attendees and staff, especially those who are directly affected by the ongoing genocide in Palestine and Indigenous community members alike…Necessary actions will be made for the board to revise our current code of conduct policy as well as our submission guidelines to better represent our communities values. During this revision process we will provide full transparency to the community and furthermore will be adhering strictly to the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) guidelines.
This ban caused a great deal of stir within established Jewish media and among comics creators. Over at Commentary, Seth Mandel, husband of Bethany “We Need to Start Befriending Neo-Nazis” Mandel, was incensed. Mandel warned that “the authoritarian winds sweeping through the West are going to put liberal democracy on its back while its cultural celebrities cheer.” The Jewish Telegraph Agency, the Jewish Daily Forward, and the Canadian Jewish News picked up the story, albeit with less editorializing.
Gary Groth, publisher of Fantagraphics and the Comics Journal, felt similarly. (Here I should disclose that I have written several articles for the Comics Journal). Groth told the Comics Beat:
We condemn VanCAF’s misguided and wrong-headed decision to ban our author Miriam Libicki from its convention…The silencing, demonizing, cancelling, deplatforming—call it what you will— of Palestinian voices (such as Adania Shibli’s) since October 7 has been shameful; it is no less shameful to do exactly the same thing to an American-Israeli artist like Libicki.
Palestinian-American cartoonist Marguerite Dabaie shared that she thinks “disinviting an artist because of their work or who they are is gravely misguided. And it, honestly, doesn’t matter if I agree with the work or not, so long as both the work and the artist aren’t glorifying immediate violence.”
Within days, VanCAF apologized. The board that drafted the accountability statement had resigned. Their apology statement posted on June 2nd clarified that any threats to the safety of participants did not come from Libicki herself. Rather, the festival board said they feared that protesters who were targeting Libicki would create an unsafe atmosphere for all attendees. In 2022, it transpired that “two individuals caused a scene,” in the words of Libicki’s husband. Libicki accepted the apology although she says she no longeNr feels welcome at the festival.
As a comics fan and writer of comics criticism, what surprised me was how little Libicki’s actual politics and the politics of her art cropped up during this controversy. It’s as though the whole reason she would be invited to a comics festival had disappeared. Because of social media backlash from pro-Palestine comics fans and my lack of familiarity with Libicki’s work, I was expecting a Zionist version of Robert Edwards. Edwards, a member of the fascistic British National Party (BNP), was sentenced to prison for drawing comics in his publication the Stormer “likely to incite racial hatred.”3 With regards to Libicki, this couldn’t be further from the truth. No grinning IDF soldiers mowing down monstrous Arabs can be found, throwing around racial slurs like so much candy, but that does not mean her work is therefore pro-Palestinian.
Libicki’s Stated Politics
In a 2006 interview with the Jewish Daily Forward Libicki’s self-description was “politically neutral.” She said that when classmates would ask her about the then-ongoing Israeli war with Lebanon, her reply was “‘oh, I think it’s lousy,’ without specifying. That seems to be good enough for most people.” She admitted in a 2009 interview with Sarah Jaffe, “I definitely notice that I move to the right (although I’m still a peacenik) in Israel, and to the left outside of Israel.” Her statement to the Canadian Jewish News includes the sentence “Because of the vulnerable populations I work with, I prefer not to discuss my specific political views in public.”
This agnosticism seemingly does not apply to other political issues. In 2019, Libicki contributed the comic “She Said, He Said,” recounting a case of sexual harassment and groping in a Tel Aviv taxi cab, to Drawing Power: Women’s Stories of Sexual Violence, Harassment, and Survival. This anthology was dedicated to Clarence Thomas accuser Anita Hill, with a portion of the profits going to the Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network (RAINN). That same year, the Nib published Libicki’s “Who Gets Called an Unfit Mother,” a critic of the abuse of child protective services. Her 2021 comic, “How Soviet Jews Changed the World,” valorized Soviet “refuseniks” and condemned Soviet treatment of Jews.
The Comics Journal ran an interview with Libicki in June about the VanCAF incident. In it she discusses her politics somewhat. She says her work is “not anti-Zionist” and that she is “pro-peace, but pro-Israel.” She has said of her service in the IDF, “I was never a right winger, I never planned to be part of an occupying force.” Libicki has an odd conception of the IDF. When her hitch began in 2000, Israel had been occupying the West Bank, Golan Heights, and Gaza since 1967, to say nothing of the land Palestinians were expelled from in 1948 that those refugees cannot return to. Joining an army that is illegally occupying those territories but not planning to be part of an occupying force is analogous to someone joining the U.S. cavalry in the 1870s and not expecting to fight the Sioux.
In the Jobnik! manifesto, a short comic from 2008 that serves a mission statement for the series, Libiki says she’s a supporter of Meimad, a religious Zionist party that also supports a Palestinian state. Today, perhaps, she’d be a voter for the Democrats, the electoral alliance of Labor, who absorbed Meimad, and Meretz. It’s indicative of the marginality of Libicki’s viewpoint that this alliance holds only four seats in the Knesset, out of a possible 120. This forecast is strengthened through an announcement that she would auction off work to benefit Palestine’s Women of the Sun and Israel’s Women Wage Peace. Women Wage Peace has long been criticized by anti-occupation activists for its mealy platform. In its desire to reach as broad a mass of Israeli society as possible, the group avoids taking a stance on the illegal settlements or the occupation. The group is so broad, in fact, that right-wing politician Yehuda Glick said of them, “I say that peace includes massive sovereignty and construction in Judea and Samaria and they still applaud.”
Israeli/Palestinian Politics in Libicki’s Comics
Are these politics apparent in Libicki’s comics about Israel? Publishers Weekly thinks Jobnik! has no wider politics. As their reviewer wrote, “Miriam and her comrades are numb. The scale and the implications of what’s going on around them don’t register.” Nevertheless, contrary to Paul Buhle’s assertion that in Jobnik! “she approaches her work with no political slant, just as she experienced her life as a young woman in a short-term aliyah,”4 the book does indeed have a political viewpoint.
This is most apparent in the discussion of assassinated Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. On the final page of chapter three, a character reads from the speech that was in Rabin’s pocket when he was killed by a right-wing extremist: “Permit me to say that I am deeply moved… I was a military man for 27 years. I fought as long as there was no chance for peace. I believe that there is now a chance for peace, a great chance.” Libicki says that her mother “…loved Rabin. She was afraid for him, for what he was trying to do. She prayed for him everyday.” Libicki herself says, “I don’t belong in Israel as much as I belong to Israel. Every year on Rabin’s yahrzeit [death anniversary] I know it’s not even a choice.”5
“Rabin the Peacemaker” is one of the greatest political costume changes in history. Although after his murder by an Israeli rejectionist, he became a martyr to the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, his record paints a much different picture. During the 1948 war, Rabin helped drive out the Palestinian villagers of Lydda. He once said, “the population of Lydda did not leave willingly. There was no way of avoiding the use of force and warning shots in order to make the inhabitants march the ten or fifteen miles to the point where they met up with the Arab Legion.”6 In the lead up to the Six-Day War, Rabin’s comments reveal that it was a war of choice for Israel. “Let’s be honest with ourselves,” he admitted, “First we will attack Egypt; then we will also attack Syria and Jordan.”7 During his first stint as Prime Minister in the mid 1970s, Rabin helped burnish the reputation of apartheid South Africa.
The First Intifada occurred when Rabin was serving as Defense Minister. His orders for what to do with the Palestinians became infamous: use “force, might, and beatings” to quell the uprising. This became known as the “breaking the bones” policy. By the end of the First Intifada over 300 Palestinian children were dead, killed by Israelis. The two events that changed Rabin’s reputation, at least in the West, were his signing of the Oslo Accords and his winning the Nobel Peace Prize alongside Shimon Peres and Yasser Arafat. The second of these hardly deserves an explanation. If Henry Kissinger can win a Peace Prize, they’ll give one to anybody. It’s important, however, to explain what the Oslo Accords did, and did not, do.
For one, they did not require Israel to recognize a Palestinian state. A state for Palestinians was something Rabin did not and would never support. By contrast, Arafat and the Palestinian Liberation Organization recognized “the right of the State of Israel to exist in peace and security.” It did not end Israel’s program of illegal settlement construction in the West Bank, which has continued apace. As Edward Said correctly predicted “there is little in the document to suggest that Israel will give up its violence against Palestinians…” Despite this, Rabin continues to be a touchstone for Israeli doves, like Libicki and her mother. One critic writes that Libicki, by illustrating her mother’s prayer for Rabin, creates “a connection that ostensibly binds Miriam, too, to this Israeli political figure and all that he represents.”8
Libicki’s military service coincided with the Second Intifada and she depicts the uprising in Jobnik! The placid lives of the jobniks are juxtaposed with the violence of the Second Intifada, including the shooting of twelve year old Mohammad Aldura by the IDF, whose death was caught on video.9 When Miriam expresses panic over the violence, fellow soldier Saheer responds “you wouldn’t be freaking out if you were Israeli.”10 A theme of Jobnik! is the IDF as a place to “come of age” and prove one’s belonging to Israel.11 The Publishers Weekly review noted this. Exaltation of the military is certainly political. Imagine a critic attempting to argue that comics showing a volunteer “coming of age” in the Rhodesian Bush Wars or the military of apartheid South Africa were apolitical.
After Jobnik!, many of Libicki’s comics dealing with Israel appeared in the form of “illustrated essays.” Paul Buhle called one of these, “Ceasefire,” a “peacenik project.”12 Buhle and I have different standards for that definition. “Ceasefire” takes place in Israel after the 2006 war with Lebanon. Although both Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International concluded that most of those killed by Israel were civilians, with Human Rights Watch saying “the primary reason for the high Lebanese civilian death toll was Israel’s frequent failure to abide by a fundamental obligation of the laws of war,” the Lebanese are not the subject of “Ceasefire.” Israelis are. The last page includes this quote: “I’d like to move in polite circles without being the Israeli monster who laughs and bombs children. Or, at least, I’m bombing fewer children than before.” Libicki expresses relief for “everyone’s brothers and boyfriends,” contextually meaning Israeli soldiers, an identification heightened by the presence in the foreground of a propaganda poster for kidnapped soldier Gilad Shalit.13 As an anti-war statement, this is no “Charley’s War.”
The illustrated essay “Towards a Hot Jew,” about the fetishization of Israeli soldiers, was actually a stronger political statement. I did have to get through Libicki’s quotations on the unattractiveness of diaspora Jews versus Israeli Jews, which I found nonsensical (Paul Newman? John Garfield?), and also reminiscent of David Ben-Gurion’s comment to Isaac Deutscher that non-Zionist Jews “are rootless cosmopolitans – there can be nothing worse than that.” I don’t know how else to read a statement like “the Jew in North American consciousness is curiously unsexy, especially in Jewish eyes.”14 The final image in this comic is of two domineering IDF soldiers searching the backpack of an Arab boy with the text “we have arrived at the New Jew: an adorable oppressor for every persuasion.”15 Here we see where the hard bodies of the muscular Jew are “exercised to the extreme.”16
“Don’t Ask, Don’t Nuke,” from 2021, is Libicki’s most recent comic about Israeli politics. Due to current events, it left an awful taste in my mouth. The comic summarizes the history of Israel’s secret and illegal, as Israel has never signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, nuclear weapons program. The comic ends by quoting lyrics from Israel’s 2007 Eurovision entry, “Push the Button,” a song concerning either the Iranian nuclear program or Israel launching a nuclear first strike. In 2024, it’s difficult for me to accept it as “Israeli irony” that “didn’t translate,” when Israeli and U.S. pro-Israel politicians have both threatened to use nuclear weapons on Gaza.
Some Conclusions
Returning to Jobnik!’s manifesto, Libicki says she does not see the comic “as an answer to Joe Sacco’s Palestine.” Rather, she sees it as “an answer to everybody.” Although she said in an interview that Palestine “pissed me off a lot, but I knew my view was also too one sided to contradict him much. It was definitely in my mind when I started to draw comics,” she continues that she became “more of a fan of Sacco’s since then.”17 Not framing her work as a response to Sacco is a wise move. For one, her work does not have anywhere near the stature of Sacco’s acclaimed oeuvre. For another, it raises the question of what she thinks in Sacco needs a response. It’s as though someone saw Picasso’s Guernica, and decided they needed to craft an “answer.”
The depiction of Israel in Libicki’s work has not been universally acclaimed by Zionists. In one of her drawn essays she describes how “they can’t show my drawn essay at the local JCC because my ‘love for Israel is not evident,’ and I’d break the Holocaust survivors’ hearts.”18 At the same time, she has said she gets “it from the right” over “Towards a Hot Jew,” the same essay that I liked the best. Libicki’s work shows the limitations and weaknesses of the liberal Zionist viewpoint, even if she has realized she was wrong in imagining that “during Oslo… things were as good for them as they were for us.”19 In an illustrated essay on the racism directed at Sudanese refugees she laments, “I don’t recognize this country anymore, or the people in it.”20
Libicki’s most recent work was for the anthology But I Live: Three Stories of Child Holocaust Survivors. This book would have been the only one sold at her VanCAF table. She had decided that due to international events it would have been impolitic to have Jobnik! and Towards a Hot Jew on display. In reading But I Live, I could not help but think of Renee Lichtman. He is a child Holocaust survivor living in Michigan who has used his status to call for an end to Israel’s war. When Farmington Hills City Council was protested because of their failure to pass a ceasefire resolution, he held up the sign “Jews and Allies Say: Never Again For Anyone.” For his efforts he was removed as a speaker for the Zekelman Holocaust Center’s Survivor Talk Sundays series. So it goes. “Never again” transformed into “again and again.”
Circling back to the Comics Journal’s interview, what is indicative are the words Libicki does not use. “Ceasefire,” for example. “Genocide,” for another. There was a lively debate in the comments section from two hardened corners. One felt that a ban of Libicki was a slippery slope to banning leftist, pro-Palestine artists. Another highlighted Libicki’s evasive answers during an ongoing bloodbath that has claimed, per a Lancet study, 186,000 Palestinian lives as of writing.
It is easy to sympathize with the goals of the former VanCAF board members. In light of an ongoing genocide being funded and politically supported by their government, they sought to do something as a comics festival. Banning Libicki changed the debate from one on opposing genocide to one on freedom of speech. In that, the original goal was lost. The question of hypocrisy does come up when looking at signatories to an open letter against barring Libicki from VanCAF. Where were these signatories when the Israeli military held Palestinian cartoonist Mohammad Sabaaneh in detention for months in 2013? At the end of the day, I found it difficult to care about the “free speech” issues at stake, other than that VanCAF had obviously lost control of the narrative. Thousands of children are dead or orphaned as a result of the policies of labor, liberal, and right-wing Zionists, ranging from Libicki’s sainted Rabin to the demonized Netanyahu. What’s a table at a comic arts festival measured against all that?
- Harvey Pekar & J.T. Waldman, Not the Israel My Parents Promised Me (New York: Hill and Wang, 2012), 149.
- Miriam Libicki, Toward a Hot Jew (Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2016), 84.
- Victor S. Navasky, The Art of Controversy: Political Cartoons and Their Enduring Power (New York: Random House, 2013), 146.
- Paul Buhle, ed., Jews and American Comics: An Illustrated History of an American Art Form (New York: New Press, 2008), 129.
- Miriam Libicki, Jobnik! An American Girls Adventures in the Israeli Army (Vancouver: Real Gone Girl, 2008), 79.
- Simha Flapan, The Birth of Israel (New York, NY: Pantheon Books, 1987), 81.
- Tom Segev, 1967: Israel, the War, and the Year That Transformed the Middle East (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007), 239.
- Tahneer Oksman, “How Comes Boys Get to Keep Their Noses?”: Women and Jewish American Identity in Contemporary Graphic Memoirs (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 200.
- Libicki, Jobnik!, 37.
- Ibid, 47.
- Ibid, 198.
- Buhle, Jews and American Comics, 129.
- Miriam Libicki, Toward a Hot Jew (Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2016), 35.
- Ibid, 16.
- Ibid, 26.
- Ibid, 20.
- Samantha Biskind and Ranen Omer-Sherman, eds., The Jewish Graphic Novel: Critical Approaches (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010), 244.
- Libicki, Toward a Hot Jew, 57.
- Ibiskind and Omer-Sherman, 248-249.
- Libicki, Toward a Hot Jew, 83.