A cartoon At Benjamin Netanyahu caused the breakup between the designer after 40 years of relationship Steve Bell and the British newspaper The Guardian. Bell himself announced the news via tweet.
Steve Bell fired the Guardian over a cartoon
“It has become almost impossible to write about Israel in the Guardian without coming Accused of anti-SemitismBell added in a subsequent tweet.
In the offensive cartoon, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is seen with his abdomen exposed he cuts his stomach open with a scalpel.
The engraving has the Shape of the Gaza Strip. In the caption, Netanyahu declares: “Gaza residents, get out of here now!”
The reference refers to the evacuation order from the north of the Gaza Strip.
You may be interested in the families of the hostages kidnapped by Hamas against Netanyahu, the video of the protests: “Bibi resigns”
For Steve Bell, as he himself explained, his job is a Gift to the historical cartoon by the American cartoonist David Levine who represented the American president in the 1960s Lyndon Johnson with a Vietnam-shaped scar on the back.
Someone probably saw something else instead: the Gaza crisis, which arose from the belly of Bibi Netanyahu, as if to say that it was Israel’s policies that fueled Hamas’ violence.
But not only that: we may have seen some of them in the cartoon tooanti-Semitismwith a reference to the evil Jewish loan shark Shylock from Shakespeare’s comedy The Merchant of Venice.
In the work, Shylock agrees to extend a loan, but in return demands a monstrous guarantee: a pound of flesh be removed from the body of its debtor in the event of insolvency.
The Guardian adds no details
Steve Bell said he had been fired, but a statement from the newspaper limited itself to confirming that the cartoonist’s contract had not been renewed, without adding details or making any explanation.
Further allegations of anti-Semitism against Steve Bell
This is not the first time Bell has been accused of anti-Semitism.
In the 2020 Keir Starmerthe new leader of the British Labor Party, suspended his predecessor and then permanently expelled him Jeremy Corbyn.
During his years in leadership, Corbyn rejected the findings of a commission of inquiry into anti-Semitism in the Labor Party.
Bell recorded Starmer (husband of a Jewish woman) in the act offers Corbyn’s head on a silver platter.
Some saw this as a reference to the biblical story of Salomé, the daughter of King Herod, who, according to tradition, requested and received the head of John the Baptist.
In past centuries, the beheading of the Baptist at the request of the Jewish woman Salomé was one of the classic themes of anti-Semitism.
Photo source: Getty/Twitter