Issue ID: 06

ABSTRACT
In recent years, graphic novels have staked a claim for cultural respectability, especially through their often-bold analysis of divisive social and political issues; for instance, in travelogues exploring today’s Israel and Palestine. This article analyses Joe Sacco’s Palestine (1993-6) and Footnotes in Gaza (2009), Sarah Glidden’s How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less (2010), and Guy Delisle’s Jerusalem: Chronicles from the Holy City (2012) to demonstrate how graphic artists update the long cultural tradition of travel to the Holy Land representations. I argue that graphic novels are a contemporary chapter in portrayals of what the corpus describes as a decidedly unholy land of conflict.

ABSTRACT
This article focuses on a recent turning point in the history of gazes in and of Jerusalem. For decades, the Muslim structure of the Dome of the Rock and the Jewish Western Wall served as a primary (dual) image for Jerusalem. Yet since the 1990s, there has been a transition towards framing the city as exclusively Jewish, with a focus on the Tower of David as the new icon. This transition embodies the political shifts to an ethno-national agenda combined with the neoliberal zeitgeist.