Gaza in My Phone

• Book Author(s):Mazen Kerbaj
• Published Date:2025
• Publisher:OR Books
• ISBN-13:9781682196434

It is one thing to watch the news, and another to internalise the human aspect. While world leaders debated the slightest form of temporary relief for Palestinians, making it clear to the rest of us watching the Israeli genocide in Gaza unfolding that our political opposition does not matter, Lebanese comics artist Mazen Kerbaj made the entire Palestinian narrative and support for it matter in his new forthcoming publication, Gaza in My Phone (OR Books, 2025).

Bringing together a collection of artwork in black and white, Kerbaj walks the reader through the emotions of watching the genocide unfold, and incredulity stands out. Each page connects different slivers of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and while Kerbaj’s art dissects the details of the genocidal politics, the human stands out, whether it depicts Palestinians in Gaza, the artist himself or the collective that protested, witnessed in shock or passively watched. Alienation, after all, is a companion to normalisation. But Kerbaj’s art forces us to step away and watch because the magnitude of being helpless to stop a genocide is what should motivate the entire world to act.

“I am nothing but a peeled and speechless eye,” the first illustration states, followed by, on the next page, an illustration of a plastic bag captioned: “I never thought I would see something worse than the body of a murdered child until I saw the video of a father carrying the remains of his son in a plastic trash bag.”

Interspersed between depictions of the stark, macabre scenes in Gaza are messages directed at the international community. The divide is palpable, and so is the dissociation which enabled the world to sustain its acceptance of Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Some illustrations point towards the possible ramifications of a spillover resulting from forced displacement. Others depict the divide between the leaders and the people. And in the midst of these scenarios that are related to Gaza, Gaza remains at the helm of Kerbaj’s consciousness, which questions the depravity of bombing bakeries, for example. Upon reading the caption, one realises the absurdity of our questions, and yet, knowing there is actually an answer to that question – genocide – removes the notion of the absurd.

The illustrations master a simple eloquence that hovers between the abrupt and the abnormal, normalised routine: children playing alongside trenches dug for mass graves, the cycle of finding bodies buried underneath the rubble and digging them out to bury them again. Should a father be asking where his dead son’s head is? And why should his son be dead, let alone decapitated?

“There is just enough free speech to say there is no more free speech,” Kerbaj notes. Indeed, the book and what it depicts are testimony to that statement. In some countries, protests were stifled, suppressed or targeted, while in others, the protests fell on deaf ears. Not paying heed to citizens’ legitimate demand to stop Israel’s genocide in Gaza is an absence of free speech because the term itself should not lend itself to disqualification by those in power. The latter is also supported by a segment of the population that does not want an end to the genocide, which makes one wonder, while delving into Kerbaj’s art and statements, how far has democracy been mangled?

“While I am drawing Gaza is being erased.” The erasure, as portrayed in Kerbaj’s drawings, however, is not erased in the human psyche. Perhaps it is the simplicity of the artist’s style that entices the mind to imagine the horrors and feel them, which is different to the possible desensitisation due to an influx of real-time images. It takes a personal effort to reconstruct images in the mind due to the human involvement as opposed to passively watching while life goes on, away from Gaza.

In Gaza, life is extinguished. And counting, as Kerbaj illustrates, is endless, knowing that there is possibly no end to filling pages of statistical data: faceless, decapitated, burnt to death, unidentified and identified. “The death toll is becoming obsolete while you are looking at it.”

Kerbaj’s own story of his understanding of Palestine, which he shares in the afterword of this book, shows a trajectory of unlearning and relearning history. It is also against this backdrop that the artist’s work emerges as testimony not only to his own learning but also to how knowledge and awareness are necessary to combat Zionism and imperialism. The human cost in Gaza, which Kerbaj draws, is the result of a political agenda of colonial expansion, plunder and impunity.

And if that human cost, distant from other realities, is too abstract to understand, Kerbaj’s art appeals to sensitivity to the fact that the aberrations inflicted by Israel upon Palestinians in Gaza should not be normalised and not be repeated. For most of us, Kerbaj’s book will lacerate our hearts again. For those who stood by Israel and covertly or overtly called for genocide, the book catalogues the war crimes they applauded.

https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20250222-gaza-in-my-phone/