A Child in Palestine: The Cartoons of Naji al-Ali

(W/A) Naji Al-Ali. Naji al-Ali grew up in the Palestinian refugee camp of Ain al-Hilweh in the south Lebanese city of Sidon* where his gift for drawing was discovered by the Palestinian poet Ghassan Kanafani in the late 1950s. Early the following decade he left for Kuwait* embarking on a thirty-year career that would see his cartoons published daily in newspapers from Cairo to Beirut* London to Paris. Through his most celebrated creation* the witness-child Handala* al-Ali criticized the brutality of Israeli occupation* the venality and corruption of the regimes in the region* and the suffering of the Palestinian people* earning him many powerful enemies and the soubriquet "the Palestinian Malcolm X." For the first time in book form* A Child in Palestine presents the work of one of the Arab world's greatest cartoonists* revered throughout the region for his outspokenness* honesty and humanity.