Guardian ‘fires’ veteran cartoonist over Netanyahu sketch

Steve Bell’s work was reportedly deemed to be perpetuating an anti-Semitic trope.

British newspaper The Guardian has ended its four-decade working relationship with cartoonist Steve Bell, who said his work criticizing the Israeli government’s stance on Gaza was rejected for using a supposedly anti-Semitic trope.

“The decision has been made not to renew Steve Bell’s contract,” a spokesman for the outlet told The Telegraph on Sunday.

The offending picture depicts Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu preparing to perform surgery on himself. He is seen wearing boxing gloves and holding a scalpel, poised to make a Gaza-shaped incision.

“Spiked again. It is getting pretty nigh impossible to draw this subject for the Guardian now without being accused of deploying ‘antisemitic tropes’,” Bell wrote on X (formerly Twitter) last week.

He claimed he received “an ominous phone call from the desk” after submitting the cartoon and was told: “Jewish bloke; pound of flesh; antisemitic trope”.

Just to explain. I filed this cartoon around 11am, possibly my earliest ever. Four hours later, on a train to Liverpool I received an ominous phone call from the desk with the strangely cryptic message “pound of flesh”… pic.twitter.com/kSfmfzlmhy

— Steve Bell (@BellBelltoons) October 9, 2023

The cartoon was apparently perceived as an allusion to Shylock, the Jewish antagonist in Shakespeare’s play ‘The Merchant of Venice’, who demanded a pound of flesh from his Christian rival if he failed to repay a debt.

Bell said the comparison made no sense to him. The image included the caption “After David Levine,” referring to the late cartoonist of The New York Review of Books.

Levine’s 1966 work ‘Johnson’s Scar’ parodies a contemporary photo, in which then-US President Lyndon Johnson demonstrated the mark left after having his gallbladder removed. The cartoonist depicts the scar shaped as Vietnam, in reference to the US invasion.

Most of us can barely scratch at a knowledge of one let alone both!

It took me ten minutes Googling before I could find David Levine’s 1966 ‘Johnson’s Scar’ cartoon that I was previously unaware of.
(Some of us are not reading Robert Caro’s LBJ biography!) pic.twitter.com/yji8bXyge7

— Lang Rabbie 🇺🇦 Justified & Ancient of Hyperlocal (@langrabbie) October 16, 2023

Bell was previously accused of anti-Semitism over a 2020 cartoon, in which Labour Party leader Keir Starmer was shown holding the decapitated head of his predecessor Jeremy Corbyn on a platter. It was a commentary on the withdrawal of Corbyn’s party whip for his refusal to accept accusations of anti-Semitism.

The cartoon was perceived as an allusion to Salome in the Bible, who when her father King Herod II offered her anything, demanded the head of John the Baptist.

The incident comes at a tense political time, with the UK government fully supporting Israel in its campaign against Hamas. The IDF is currently bombarding Gaza in retaliation for a deadly raid by the Palestinian militant group earlier this month.