Steve Bell’s drawing was compared to Shakespeare’s Shylock demanding a pound of flesh, and was deemed too offensive.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

The British daily  The Guardian has dropped its longtime cartoonist over a drawing he made of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that was deemed antisemitic.

Steve Bell, who has worked for the publication for four decades, drew a fat-lipped, long-nosed Netanyahu wearing boxing gloves, holding a scalpel over an outline of the coastal enclave on his bare stomach, and telling Gazans to leave.

He filed it two days after the October 7 Hamas invasion of Israel in which its forces murdered over 1,400 men, women and children in their homes and at a dance rave in the Gaza envelope, and kidnapped at least 200 confirmed by Israeli authorities, including infants and the elderly.

It was rejected by the editors just four hours later, he said in a series of posts on X.

“Spiked again,” he wrote. “It is getting pretty nigh impossible to draw this subject for the Guardian now without being accused of deploying ‘antisemitic tropes.'”

He added that the explanation accompanying the rejection were the words “pound of flesh,” referring to the infamous payment demanded by Shakespeare’s Jewish financier, Shylock, of a Christian debtor, in the play “Merchant of Venice.”

The name became a term defined in the dictionary as “a hardhearted moneylender,” and is equated with Jewish greed in one of the epitomes of anti-Jewish stereotypes.

Bell said his drawing had nothing to do with the British bard.

Speaking to The Jewish Chronicle, he explained, “The cartoon is specifically about Benjamin Netanyahu’s disastrous policy failure which has led directly to the hideous recent atrocities around Gaza, and about his proposed response that he had announced, using his actual words addressing the citizens of Gaza.”

“The Guardian has every right not to publish my cartoon if it so chooses, but it should not do so using entirely contrived and false reasons. All that does is inhibit discussion of a dreadful but important subject,” he added.

Bell said his idea was a modified version of a 1960s cartoon of U.S. President Lyndon Johnson with a Pinocchio-like nose pointing to a scar in the shape of Vietnam on his torso. At the bottom of his picture are the words “After David Levine,” referring to the late caricaturist who drew that cartoon.

The paper’s parent company, Guardian News and Media, put out a statement simply saying that “The decision has been made not to renew Steve Bell’s contract,” and thanking him for his cartoons “that have been an important part of the Guardian over the past 40 years.”

Dave Rich, policy director of Community Security Trust, a British NPO that provides security to the British Jewish community said in response, “The Guardian should be applauded for refusing to publish this appalling cartoon. It’s good to see that lessons have been learned.”

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British columnist accuses pro-Israel voices of suppressing Palestinian identity.

By Adam Levick, CAMERA UK

Guardian columnist Arwa Mahdawi recently penned a piece celebrating a new Netflix special featuring Palestinian-American comic Mo Amer, a show she praises as both funny and “groundbreaking” for its inclusion of a Palestinian Arab.

Mahdawi, however, ignores the fact that last year, Netflix announced a new Palestinian collection, titled “Palestinian Stories,” which consists of 32 award-winning films that are either directed by Palestinian filmmakers or tell Palestinian stories.

But Mahdawi devotes most of her column (“For anyone with Palestinian roots like me, Netflix’s sitcom Mo is groundbreaking TV”, Aug. 30) to complaining about what she characterizes as a dearth of positive depictions of Palestinians in popular culture and the media.  For instance, she writes:

“You can’t even say the P-word without it causing problems: an anchor on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation once had to apologize for using the word Palestine (instead of ‘Palestinian territories’), for God’s sake.”

The CBC of course apologized although Palestine is NOT a country.  That’s an uncontroversial fact.

Mahdawi then further complained about the “erasure” of Palestinians by certain “voices”.

“Being Palestinian means constantly being told you don’t exist or being accused by certain pro-Israel voices of being antisemitic simply because you assert that you do exist.”

This is a smear, plain and simple.  Mahdawi doesn’t provide even one example of “pro-Israel” voices accusing Palestinians of antisemitism for asserting that they exist.

A competent Guardian editor would have called her out on this baseless accusation – one she used in a previous column – which is consistent with the Corbynista narrative that accusations of antisemitism are cynically used by Jews and others in order to silence Palestinians.

In fact, the Equality and Human Rights Commission report on antisemitism in the Labour Party denounced as racist a version of that very tactic used by former London Mayor Ken Livingstone.

Finally, someone should remind the intrepid columnist that she works at a global media company called the Guardian, arguably the MSM’s English language home of pro-Palestinian commentary and news, where she has a forum to publish her views.

Mahdawi isn’t being silenced, neither by “pro-Israel’ voices nor anyone else.

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