Ellen O’Grady ended up in Palestine almost by accident. It was 1989, she was a religious studies major at Hamilton College, and she wanted to study abroad in Nepal. Her parents vetoed the plan: too dangerous, they said. When she proposed Jerusalem instead, in hopes of “making Nepal look safe,” her parents were surprisingly enthusiastic, and she soon found herself at Tantur Ecumenical Institute in East Jerusalem—part of the West Bank that the Israeli military has occupied since 1967.
Before landing in Jerusalem, O’Grady only knew as much as the average American about Palestine: “very little,” as she tells me from her home in Durham, where she works as an artist. (Despite the volume of recent media coverage—or maybe because of it—American ignorance persists: a Pew Research Center survey from earlier this year found that only 52 percent of Americans correctly identified that more Palestinians than Israelis had been killed during the ongoing war in Gaza; when the survey was conducted, the numbers of deaths were about 30,000 and 1,200, respectively.)
Over the course of that semester in Jerusalem in 1989, O’Grady’s understanding of the world and her place in it changed utterly. The experience was so profound that she returned to Palestine after graduating from college—and then decided to stay for seven more years, working at a number of aid organizations and schools in Gaza and the West Bank.
O’Grady first arrived at Tantur Ecumenical Institute amid the first intifada—“uprising,” in Arabic—during which thousands of Palestinians protested the Israeli occupation. Two weeks into her time there, while she and a group of classmates were returning from a visit to a rehabilitation center in Bethlehem, Israeli security forces ordered a curfew. She watched a soldier take a knee and aim his gun at a group of Palestinian children throwing stones in defiance of the order, she says. The soldier lowered his gun only when one of her classmates yelled, “Stop!”
This story appears in illustrated, paneled form at the beginning of O’Grady’s new 40-page book, How Are We to Live? Comics for a Free Palestine, from Paper City Publishing. (The first printing is sold out, but a second is forthcoming; all proceeds have and will continue to be donated to organizations supporting those affected by the war in Gaza.)
For nearly a year now, since October 7, O’Grady has been drawing comics about Palestine almost every morning. She sits down with pen and paper “like people go to the yoga mat” and, over a series of square panels, gives form to the “horror and grief” that the war in Gaza has wrought.
In her comics, O’Grady covers a range of subjects. Sometimes she writes about history and media criticism. Other times she illustrates a poem written by a Palestinian poet. Sometimes, on the worst days, her comics are obituaries: “Hashem Ghazal, an old friend, was killed today along with his wife,” O’Grady wrote on May 14. “Seven of his children were severely injured.” Ghazal was her colleague at the Atfaluna School for the Deaf in Gaza, where she worked in the 1990s. Though these words had no accompanying illustrations, O’Grady still drew a panel around them: letters trapped inside a black box.
The grief of losing dear friends, of losing a “most beautiful place” that was once her home, has been alienating for O’Grady. She explains her perception of the world these past few months as a kind of “split screen”: “I’m seeing or hearing what’s happening here,” she says, “and then I’m seeing what’s happening in Gaza.”
It’s such a frightening image—a sunny summer day in Durham on the left, rubble and smoke and screams on the right—in part because it so accurately reflects the fractured reality of our digital lives. We wake up, tap through images of unspeakable violence, and then eat breakfast. As Susan Sontag wrote in an essay on wartime photography during the early years of the war in Iraq, “The leaching out of content is what contributes most to the deadening of feeling.”
How are we to bear witness to suffering while also preserving our capacity to feel? Or in O’Grady’s words, “How are we to live in this world?”
Perhaps through art, poetry, and even comics—all the things that deepen our humanity rather than deaden it, that allow us to remember that, as O’Grady writes, “under the anguish is love.” Even when they depict hollowed-out apartment buildings, O’Grady’s drawings have the warmth and reassurance of a human hand. Her comics are a bulwark against numbness and alienation.
“I don’t want people to feel so alone and I don’t want to feel so alone.”
“I don’t want people to feel so alone,” she told me, “and I don’t want to feel so alone.”
A longtime comics reader—she lists John Porcellino, Lauren R. Weinstein, and Joe Sacco as a few of her favorites—O’Grady began drawing her own after a friend gave her Lynda Barry’s book Syllabus. During the pandemic, she posted daily diary comics on Instagram and Patreon. “Through the practice of noticing—not just noticing, but drawing these small, beautiful moments,” she says, “my life became more beautiful.”
In 2022, O’Grady published Magic Nation #1, a watercolored memoir comic about bugs, memory, and imagination that thrums with love for the world. Since October 7, her focus has shifted almost entirely to Palestine, but the spirit of her earlier comics has remained. To begin to convey the incomprehensible scale of the tragedy in Gaza, she zooms in on a person, a story, and then extrapolates outward. Her eye will catch on something small, fragile, fleeting—the foot of a bird on a branch—before, a few panels later, zooming out and prompting her readers to wonder how many birds on branches have endured the air strikes.
O’Grady believes that a story is a “bridge” that permits us movement into the lives of others. One particularly memorable comic in How Are We to Live? relates a conversation with her 94-year-old mother. O’Grady’s mother asks for advice about how to navigate a dinner with friends who might not share her perspective on the war. “Just tell your stories,” O’Grady says to her. “They are powerful and sweet and human. You’re not claiming to know everything.”
O’Grady is not claiming to know everything, either, but she hopes that her work will find readers who “may not know anyone else who lived in Palestine, and may not know who to trust.” “If they trust me a little bit,” she says, “then I have a responsibility.”
When I ask about her sense of responsibility, O’Grady tells me a story. She speaks carefully and with her eyes closed.
A few weeks after she first arrived in Jerusalem, a young Palestinian boy that she knew from her trips between Tantur and Bethlehem was killed in a clash with Israeli soldiers. Returning one day from the rehabilitation center, she ran into a friend of the dead child. The boy was agitated and trying to show her something. He handed her a metal canister and pointed to a label that read, “Made in Saltsburg, PA”—the longtime home of Federal Laboratories, a weapons manufacturer that supplied Israel with riot guns, tear gas, and other munitions.
In that moment, the distance between Palestine and O’Grady’s life in the United States shrank considerably. That label—a tiny symbol of the global economy of war—set in motion the next seven years of her life. “I thought at that point, ‘I need to come back,’” she tells me. “And then I did.”
For all its heaviness, How Are We to Live? ends on an image of weightlessness and hope. On the back cover is one last comic, different from all the rest. The vague form of a woman with her head in her hands—a woman saying to herself, “It’s unbearable”—slowly transforms into a swarm of jellyfish. The hard lines grow soft. In the final panel, the jellyfish are floating up—“being borne”—toward the sun.
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