UK paper drops longtime cartoonist over antisemitic caricature of Israeli PM

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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