In front of our eyes, we are witnessing the genocide of the Palestinian people. This is an online archive of cartoonists responding to this ongoing violence.
The forced displacement and killing of Palestinian people, as well as the seizure of their land, has been ongoing incrementally since 1948 but now has entered a very overt phase. This horrifying violence is actively abetted or passively ignored by our governments. In the face of this, we seek to gather cartoonists together in a radically transnational space where they can reflect on this bloodshed, share our voices, and express our solidarity. While we are under no illusion that art can stop bombs from falling on children or tanks from rolling through city streets, we believe there is an urgent value to any community we can bring together in reaction to this bleak moment. In the face of calamity, artists still have a role to play and are inspired by the examples of our history — from those who used art to reckon with the death camps of the Holocaust in Europe to those who employed art to fight against Apartheid in South Africa, and more.
Their legacy to us is a message: do not stand still or stay silent.
This archive seeks to center personal responses to Gaza within the cartoonist community, regardless of nationality, ethnicity, state-identification, place of birth, or place of current existence. This archive rejects Islamophobia, antisemitism, chauvinism, and hate of any and all kinds. This anthology embraces social justice, solidarity, equality, and unity of any and all kinds.
Comics have no walls nor borders, and the youngness of our medium represents an opportunity to reject the boundaries that were assigned to us. All around the world, in newspapers, magazines and on mobile phone screens, comics speak about the most important topics of the day. We are not powerless. Through comics, we can shape the narratives told about ourselves and our world—and in that way, we hope to provoke change.
Recent events are extreme, brutal, and shocking, but they are part of a continuum–the long ideological project of settler colonialism that requires the systematic denial and destruction of indigenous peoples. Now is the time to build something new and different.
We aim to publish a print anthology of this archive in the spring of 2024, with international distribution. Artists will be paid an honorarium for work published in the anthology. All editors are working as volunteers, and all proceeds beyond payments to artists and the costs of printing will be donated to direct aid to Palestinians. {read}