A cartoon about Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu cost Steve Bell his job. The historic designer of Guardian was fired from the progressive British newspaper because the drawing was considered “anti-Semitic”. Bell himself broke the news after more than forty years of work for the Guardian. “They kicked me out,” said the well-known designer. The newspaper responded with a statement, simply confirming that his contract was not renewed.
In the cartoon Bell depicted Netanyahu wearing boxing gloves, with one of which he holds a scalpel aimed at his exposed stomach, on which he has traced a cut with the outlines of the Gaza Strip. In the caption, the Israeli prime minister stated: “Gaza residents, get out of here immediately!”. As if to say that it was Netanyahu himself who gave birth to Hamas and the brutal violence of the October 7 attack against the Jews. As soon as she saw the newspaper, she didn’t accept it, the management defined it as “unacceptable”, but, in the end, it ended up on social media anyway, sparking quite a bit of controversy.
«It has become almost impossible to draw anything on the Guardian that concerns Israel without being accused of anti-Semitism” stated the English cartoonist, commenting on the controversy over Daily Telegraphstated that the cartoonist’s expiring contract “has not been renewed,” noting that Bell’s cartoons were “an important part of the Guardian over the past forty years”, thanking him and wishing him “the best for the future”.
Bell’s critics saw in the image a reference to Shylock, the Jewish loan shark from William Shakespeare’s play “The merchant of Venice”, who demands “a pound of flesh” from the Venetian gentleman Bassanio if he is unable to return his money: a character often accused of representing an anti-Semitic stereotype. The cartoonist replied, however, that it was an allusion to a cartoon by the American cartoonist David Levine from the 1960s, in which American President Lyndon Johnson appeared with a Vietnam-shaped scar on his back. For this reason, he adds, the cartoon about Netanyahu he sent to Guardian last week it bore the words “homage to David Levine”.
For Steve Bell this situation is not new. It is not the first time that he has been accused of anti-Semitism. In 2020 he sparked a similar controversy with a cartoon depicting Keir Starmer, the new leader of the British Labor Party, offering the head of his predecessor Jeremy Corbyn on a silver platter. The image was compared to a painting by Caravaggio entitled “Salomé with the head of John the Baptist”, inspired by the Old Testament story in which Salomé, the daughter of King Herod, asks for the head of John the Baptist, the saint who baptizes Jesus, and is granted.
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