Fables
There's a comic book series currently being published by Vertigo entitled "Fables" which my friend Colin introduced me to last year. Pretty good. Pretty good. The premise, in the broadest terms, is that all the old fables and fairy-tales and legends and such of all the cultures of earth are in some sense true; the characters are all real people who call themselves "fables", and their stories play themselves out in parallel worlds and realities. They're as resilient as their stories are, and as such, the more popular and/or well-known of them, like Snow White and the Big Bad Wolf, are all but unkillable and have been alive for many centuries. It hasn't been made explicitly clear whether they're created by these stories, or if the stories just reflect things which already happened or what. I suspect that's something we'll learn somewhere towards the end of the series.
Anyways. Some centuries ago, there was a great war which engulfed the various worlds of the fables, with some great looming "Adversary" gradually conquering these worlds and either killing or banishing anyone who dared to resist. This list comprises most of the "good guy" characters from many dozens of stories, and no small number of "bad guy" characters as well. They were driven back, ultimately, to real-world Earth, where they've been hiding in exile for centuries now, using their magic and such to keep themselves hidden and secret from the world at large.
I've quite enjoyed it, in spite of the writer. Now, I know this may sound odd, but it does happen; the personal politics and such of a given writer may be loathsome to me, but their works themselves continue to entertain. Orson Scott Card, for example, is apparently a Mormon whack-job and homophobe, but this doesn't really infect his novels and comics, and so I can enjoy them in spite of disliking the man who wrote them. So it is with Fables, too. The guy who writes it, Bill Willingham, has apparently said that the book is broadly meant to be a commentary upon the Israel/Palestinian conflict, and once this has been said, it's difficult to see the book in any other terms. I think I see how all the parallels work, and I'm going to spell them out here, but be warned: It's kind of revelatory of an ugliness of spirit and indicative of the sort of paranoid anti-Semitic Zionist-crazy nutjobbery which is a little off-putting. Naturally, I'm going to spoil quite a few major plot points in this analysis, and so if you haven't read the book but think you might like to, you may want to take a pass here.
The primary antagonist of the series is Geppetto, of Pinocchio fame. Over the course of centuries, he carved more and more living puppet people, and - having learned from Pinocchio’s rebellious nature - made sure each and every one of them were by their very nature slavishly devoted to him. He had them infiltrate the governments of his neighboring lands and replace their rulers with these expertly-crafted puppet people, brought to life by the Blue Fairy like Pinocchio before them, so as to secure his own safe little patch of earth in his enchanted forest. Geppetto appears the very stereotypical image of the sinister, malign old Jew, with his hook nose, stooped shoulders and scheming, shifty eyes. He creates puppet governments all around him, spreading out his Zionist conspiracy, murdering those who stand in his way and putting one country at war with one another in order to protect and insulate his one isolated little patch of land (Israel), having no care about the suffering he brings to the world around him as long as his personal peace is maintained. Eventually, he gains the use of vast foreign armies of goblins and ogres and such which he uses to enforce his will. These represent the American and British militaries whose support Israel needs to continue to exist, all of whom appear as slavering, nearly-mindless brutes.
Geppetto, the scheming old Jew.
The protagonists find their homes gradually taken from them, one by one, as they are driven ever back by the vast might of these foreign armies arrayed against them. They represent the Palestinian people, being driven into the West Bank and the Gaza strip. Eventually, they're pushed into the real world of Earth, a land far from their homes where they're forced, like the Palestinians, to live in what amounts to a crowded ghetto where their traditional and ancestral ways are denied them by the grim realities of their existence.
Eventually, these fables make contact with the fables of Baghdad (Aladdin, Ali-Baba, etc), with whom they find they have common cause against this "Zionist entity", and they conspire together to overthrow them. The leader of these Iraqi fables - Sinbad - who is quite distastefully used as a stand-in for Saddam Hussein, is enlisted in providing material aid in a bombing campaign against Geppetto's empire. This part of the story ultimately culminates in Prince Charming winning the jihad against Geppetto in one final "heroic" act of suicide bombing with the aid and support of the leader of the Iraqi fables, who praises him posthumously as a hero and a martyr to the cause.
Sinbad, the Iraqi Fables' leader. Is he not a dashing military figure?
Ultimately (and here, I suppose, we enter the realm of wishful thinking on the part of the author), Geppetto is brought to heel and is forced at knife-point to sign a treaty with the protagonist "Palestinian" fables which gives them their lands back, with Gepetto made a subservient subject of the "heroic" fables.
It's a compelling and exciting story, and not EVERYTHING in it is a political allegory of this conflict, but it's central enough that it can be occasionally uncomfortable reading, especially for someone like myself who does sympathize with the Palestinians and views the actions of the Israeli establishment as generally-monstrous, while at the same time viewing the Palestinian suicide bombing tactics as morally-repugnant results of a hideous religious fundamentalism; I kind of feel like saying "stop agreeing with me, you're making my side of the argument look bad!" as he employs anti-Semitic racial stereotypes, glorifies suicide bombing tactics and pushes the most extreme form of anti-Zionist hysteria in his story. It is definitely an entertaining story, but not one which I can read without some degree of inner conflict and occasional moments of embarrassment for the writer.
PS: I will note that, in the past, Willingham has publically described his stance on the topic in slightly different terms…
"Politically, I'm just rabidly pro-Israel and so that, as a metaphor, was intended from the beginning." He adds, however, "as much as politics are going to intrude in Fables, that's as far as I think I'm willing to go. It's impossible to keep them out entirely. We're all political creatures whether we cop to it or not. [...] Yeah, it's not going to be a political tract. It never will be, but at the same time, it's not going to shy away from the fact that there are characters who have real moral and ethical centers, and we're not going to apologize for it."
…but the pro-Palestinian analogy which runs throughout the book is too strong to take such claims or even outright statements of intent on his part very seriously. I suspect that this is just another manifestation of his primal dread of the Elders of Zion; so motivated by his dread of their influence in the media that he needed to construct this preposterous claim that his book was actually PRO-Israel just in order to mollify and appease them, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding
PPS: It’s also possible that I’m putting my own spin on things in direct and intentional contradiction of his own stated intentions because I think doing so is really, really funny.