This is a guest post by Sarka
This post, which has been slightly edited, first appeared here.
Dear Steve,
I’ve always been a big fan of yours. I have nearly all your collections. You helped get me through the dismal Thatcher years. Your penguins and albatrosses and rats and goats and Monsieur L’Artiste are part of my mental world.
You are my favourite British political cartoonist by a long chalk (I wish I could see anyone of your talent coming up through the ranks – but I don’t).
But you’ve let me down, Steve. You’ve published an antisemitic cartoon. I’m not Jewish, let alone Israeli, but I think antisemitism is a vile and dangerous thing. Don’t get me wrong – I’m not accusing you of being an antisemite – someone with a hatred of Jews as standard part of their personal attitudes. What I am accusing you of, though, is of letting antisemitic ideas and images shape your vision – of accidentally channelling antisemitism – and this is all the more troubling for your evidently not noticing this.
Why was your cartoon of Netanyahu antisemitic? It’s actually not so much – as the edtor here concedes – that you portrayed a Jew – the Israeli PM – in a negative light using a puppet-master trope that has a long genre-history in Sturmerish antisemitic propaganda and is of course popular among Arab cartoonists. Obviously, puppet metaphors are part of the political cartoonists repertoire – are used for a mass of subjects not involving Israel or Jews. And equally obviously there’s nothing intrinsically antisemitic about having a negative view of a Jewish Israeli politician – it just rather depends what that negative view is!
As a political cartoonist, and an excellent one, you’ll be well aware that a good cartoon doesn’t depend primarily on arresting images and style (though it needs that). First and foremost the invented image must be “to the point”. The caricatre may be brutal – even unfair – but it has to capture something recognisable about political reality: Prescot a ball-less bulldog? Gerry Adams with his threatening independent shoes? Blair with his one messianically mad eye? All of this works not because it is a visually or gag-funny idea, but because it’s an idea in which we find a specific sort of truth. So, draw a picture of Clegg as Camerron’s glove-puppet, and people will immediately know what you mean – draw a picture of Miliband as Cameron’s glove puppet and even if it’s strikingly drawn, people will stare in puzzlement .
So let’s get back to Bibi and his puppets. His puppets are William Hague and Tony Blair. You know, Steve, that’s quite an odd idea, specifically. Antizionists do indeed complain that the West (especially the US, but also European governments including the UK) are too pro-Israel, but it’s only the fringe nutty ones (those, I’m afraid – often using clear antisemitic tropes about Jewish control) who suggest that the Israeli government actually controls specific politicians. Hague has never been known for strong Zionism or particular ties to Israel let alone Bibi. Blair (often considered Bush’s poodle), has never been identified much even by his many strong critics (including yourself), as having particularly strong ties with Bibi – and jokes at the expense of his pretensions as ME peace-maker (including yours!) have never been on much on the lines that he is a mouthpiece of Israeli, still less Likud interests.
All this means that the “joke” of your picture seems, especially by your usual excellent standards of pointfulness, peculiar, and not quite related to reality…(one could go on here – Blair and Hague have no specific relevance to the Likud election campaign – the connection is awkwardly indirect).
Which again means, that the picture must be relying on something else than a specific, known current talking point or insight for it not to fall flat. (You can criticise Bibi for plenty, but not really for controlling specifically Blair and Hague, and vice versa).
And I’m afraid that the only thing it is depending on is – simply – the trope of the Jew (here the Israeli PM) as puppet master (no explanations, no specifics needed: the audience – even though they have not actually been reading anything about Bibi’s specific relationship with Blair or Hague – have no way of making sense of the picture except by reference to the unanchored notion of the power of the Israeli PM to manipulate. Of course, the part of the audience that wish to defend the cartoon (and its author) will no doubt claim that this is about Zionists (Likud etc…) not Jews…But that defence is not good enough, precisely because of the lack of anchorage of the picture in Israeli or specific diplomatic reality – meaing that it relies on archetype and not on even a rather unfair but still illuminating comment on actuality.. It makes archetypes do the work, and Steve – the archetype (Zionists/Jews manipulate because..er…because that is their nature) is dangerous and poisoned. Keep away from it please…..
