SOMETHING strange happened to me last week. It’s my job to produce hard-hitting visual satire of current events, but anything I ever say or draw about Israel – which last week’s events in Gaza demanded of me –- automatically brings with it a specific kind of double jeopardy. I know in my bones, before I’ve drawn the first line, that I’m storing up trouble ahead. This is because of the formidable firepower, not just of the Israeli army, but the Israel lobby, too. In the past, even the tamest caricature of Ariel Sharon has elicited emails accusing me of producing the vilest anti-Semitic cartoon since the closure of Julius Streicher’s Nazi hate-sheet Der Sturmer, neatly if somewhat boldly asserting that any criticism of Israel equates me with one of the more prominent cheerleaders of the Holocaust.
This is a longstanding and largely effective tactic, even if the idea that the state of Israel is synonymous with worldwide Jewry is a false syllogism, as is the insistence that any and all criticism of Israel is automatically evidence of anti-Semitism. It’s worse if you’re actually Jewish and don’t unquestioningly support everything Israel does. Then you’re a “self-hating Jew” or, according to the Daily Mail’s Melanie Phillips, part of a repulsive movement she dubbed “Jews for Genocide”. In other words, little better – and probably worse – than a Nazi.
I suspect the people who say things like this know it’s not actually true, but understand how insults work. Two-and-a-half years ago, I did an admittedly savage cartoon about Israel’s disastrous incursion into Lebanon. Mostly thanks to the aforementioned Melanie’s website publishing my email address and fomenting her readers to give me a piece of their mind, I received a deluge of thousands of emails, most of which read, pithily enough: “Fuck off, you
anti-Semitic cunt.” Now, it must be said I’ve always worked on the basis that if I can’t take it, I shouldn’t dish it out, but this onslaught rattled me. It wasn’t the Tourettic tone of the emails, but the accusation that I’m an anti-Semite, which I’m not. But an insult isn’t an insult if it accuses you of being something you actually are, and the point of hurling such insults is pretty obvious. It’s to make people you disagree with (adopting my correspondents’ schtik) to shut the fuck up and go away, either in shame, fear or embarrassment. And thus, to all intents and purposes, you win the argument.
As I said, this is an effective tactic, even if it’s a dumb strategy, and it’s been very popular in recent years for any group, from Zionists to Islamists to atheists, to use the excuse of being “offended” as an offensive weapon to force opponents to shut the fuck up by returning the offence in spades. If you think about it, Mad Mel’s “Jews for Genocide” crack is infinitely more offensive than anything any non-Zionist Jew has ever said, but the nature of the game means that it’s unlikely, in all her sour self-righteousness, Mel’s going to shut the fuck up any time soon. (Would that she were, along with a list of other sourly self-righteous pundits almost infinitely long, including David Cameron when he talks about the state of the economy, because everybody knows his party is directly responsible for the mess we’re in, up to and including debauching the Labour Party into hurtling headlong down the same blind alley.)
Anyway, back to that strange thing that happened to me. Last Wednesday, The Guardian published a cartoon of mine called “Balance Reporting” (a dig at one of the Israel lobby’s most vociferous websites) showing the Grim Reaper holding a set of scales, one side laden with hundreds of Palestinian coffins and the other with about nine Israeli ones. In the cartoon, the latter appears to be heavier because the Reaper’s got his thumb on it. I thought it was quite a good image, but still hunkered down in expectation of another tsunami of hate emails making all the usual accusations.
However, all I got was one email, purportedly from an Israeli army officer, which praised my work but thought that maybe I’d got hold of the wrong end of the stick. Interestingly, it was a very long email – far longer than something knocked off in a fox hole outside Gaza City – and my man had neglected to delete the job title “Project Manager” after his name, which suggests that, apart from a personalised first paragraph, this was a form email being sent to any Western journalist the Israeli spin machine noticed.
Perhaps this is the beginning of a new, gentler tactic. Or maybe I’m just no longer worth the effort of being told to shut the fuck up. But either way, what I’ve been writing about is merely a side show, if hitherto an extremely ugly one, to the real story about the unrestrained flexing of power and the consequent accruing of piles of corpses. It must be said that my email correspondent insisted the Israeli army went out of its way to try to avoid civilian casualties as it pursued its entirely justified and defensive action. Which, I suppose, puts an entirely different complexion on the whole thing, and the Israelis aren’t the brutal, callous, hegemonic mighty military machine their actions would have led the world to believe. It’s just possible, if he’s right, that they’re simply completely bloody useless.
