This article is about a set of political cartoons from various Arab newspapers around the Middle East and this blog post includes both the Jerusalem Post’s and the Anti-Defamation League’s reaction to these images.
The cartoons carry a Holocaust theme, with images of swastikas and Jewish stereotypes and are in response to Israel’s defensive military action against Gaza. The two accompanying articles are from the ADL “the world's leading organization fighting anti-Semitism” and the Jerusalem Post.Both news sources discuss the vilification of Israel’s defensive reaction, but what I found most surprising from ADL’s reaction was the response that "We have always said that it is OK to criticize Israel. But these images clearly cross the line." ADL does not, however, respond to why this backlash occurred, which was explained a bit more through Jerusalem Posts’ article:
“Last week, Deputy Defense Minister Matan Vilna'i sparked an uproar after warning the Palestinians in a radio interview that they faced a bigger ‘shoah’ if they increased rocket attacks from Gaza. Vilna'i's spokesman later clarified that the deputy defense minister had used the Hebrew word - which is primarily used in Israel to refer to the Holocaust - only to mean ‘disaster, ruin or destruction.’ However, this did not stop Palestinians from seizing upon the original statement, which was widely reported around the world, to compare Israel's attacks in the Gaza Strip with that of Nazi Germany.”
The ADL article criticizes the cartoons for not representing both sides of the story, that they ignore “Palestinian terrorists” and only demonize the Jewish response to Gaza’s attacks.
I found it interesting that some cartons were included that didn’t fit with the Holocaust theme that was represented throughout most of the images. It is undeniable that many Jewish stereotypes were portrayed in these images, but I found the last cartoon (on the website, the first on this blog) a representation of the difference of power between the forces, but unconnected to the Holocaust. Both sides were stereotypical caricatures and I feel that political cartoons are always biased.
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Can any of our Arabic speakers translate the cartoon text?
ReplyDeleteThere are translations under the pictures in the linked cartoon page. I couldn't save them in the images I posted, but they're explained in the ADL article.
ReplyDeletegreat I'll go take a look!
ReplyDeleteI interpreted the third cartoon in your post (where Bush is saying, "The only democracy in the Middle East!") as having a strong commentary on US-Middle East relations in addition to the evident anti-Semitic and Nazi imagery that compares Israel to fascist Germany. By including Bush in the cartoon, the author insinuates that a preoccupation with promoting democracy in the Middle East has led the U.S. to overlook or even support Israeli aggression. While I believe the imagery used to represent Israel is inappropriate, it may have been used in part to illustrate the contrast between the kind of "peaceful democracy" that the U.S. wishes to establish in the Middle East and the reality (as the author perceives it) of Israel's tyrannical actions.
ReplyDeleteIn an article by Josef Joffe based on a lecture presented at Ben Gurion University in 2004, he provides an interesting take on the equation of Zionism and Israel with Nazi. While the article focuses on the place of the US and Israel in “contemporary demonology” the sections that mention the use of Nazi imagery to characterize Israel are helpful guides to start looking at cartoons like the above. Joffe says that the guilt of a post-Holocaust Europe guides the way it handles memory of the Nazi state and reaction to the Jewish state.
ReplyDeleteBecause Israel proclaims a foundational and historical Jewish identity, he believes it is not possible to distinguish between the country that counts among its population one-half of the world’s Jews. State and people are given the inherited burden of guilt that Joffe believes a complicit Europe wants to hand off. It is thusly projected onto Israel because “if Jews behave like Nazis, they no longer have a special moral claim on us.” Joffe argues that the criticism that Israel receives is exceptional, considering the attention that is (not) directed toward other brutal occupying apartheid regimes. This, he repeats, is because of an “obsessive need” for those still saddled with the guilt of appeasement and compliance to find moral denigration in the actions of the Jewish people represented by the state of Israel as a semantic stand-in.
While, as the ADL stated, I believe it is acceptable to criticize the actions of Israel I think that using the iconography of the Holocaust to be inflammatory and minimizes the crime that the Holocaust was. Swastikas and concentration camps in cartoons do cheapen the memory and lessons of those atrocities, and to a degree I think Joffe is right to think they come from an inherited guilt that needs to be shaken off by divesting from the belief in Jewish victimhood.