Meet the Palestinian cartoonist Israelis accuse of incitement
He is one of the most popular Palestinian cartoonists working today. Israel’s media watchdogs say he promotes violence and demonizes Jews. He says that if his critics don’t like what they see in his mirror, they should end the military occupation and give him a state.
Mohammad Sabaaneh is a skinny, kinetic, bespectacled 36-year-old who likes to smoke cigarettes and draw. He is getting his master’s degree in conflict resolution. He spent five months in an Israeli prison.
He is also the principle cartoonist for Al-Hayat al-Jadida, the Palestinian Authority’s daily newspaper, and so his work parallels the official line of the government of President Mahmoud Abbas and his political party, Fatah.
This means that Sabaaneh’s mordant cartoons celebrate what Palestinians call “popular resistance” — rock-throwing against Israeli forces — but do not glorify knife attacks against civilians. Nor does his work suggest that stabbing Jews — even an 80-year-old woman, as happened Monday in Tel Aviv — is wrong.
“Look, we’ve tried all the alternatives. Nothing is working,” he said. “So what you call violence, we call resistance.”
Panels by cartoonist Mohammad Sabaaneh depicting a Palestinian disarming an Israeli soldier then returning the blade. The artist says the work explores questions such as: “Who is the terrorist?” Sabaaneh’s critics say his work stokes intolerance and violence. (Courtesy of Mohammad Sabaaneh)
[A Jewish doctor who saves Palestinian attackers, a Muslim doctor who saves Jewish victims]
His Israeli detractors say Sabaaneh stokes hatred.
The cartoonist says his work reflects a harsh reality.
His caricatures are not subtle.
Israeli soldiers are depicted as goons.
Palestinian kids are often shown as rebellious scamps, as if drawn from the pages of Dora the Explorer, firing their slingshots at colonialist oppressors.
Palestinian women are pure. Palestinian elders are wise. Palestinian girls who throw rocks are cool.
Jewish settlers are armed, ugly, dangerous.
It probably comes as no surprise that Jewish Israelis and Sabaaneh’s Palestinian audience can look at the same cartoon and see very different things.
The surge in knife, gun, stone and vehicular attacks by Palestinians and lethal countermeasures by Israeli forces against assailants and at violent demonstrations have left scores of dead and wounded.
Eleven Israelis have been killed. According to the Palestinian Ministry of Health, more than 70 Palestinians have been shot and killed during attacks and demonstrations.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu blames the Palestinian leadership and official media for fanning the flames, specifically with their charges that the holy site of al-Aqsa Mosque is threatened by Israel and that Israel is executing innocent Palestinians in cold blood.
Sabaaneh’s cartoons closely follow the day’s events, and they are frequently criticized by Palestinian Media Watch, which documents cases of alleged incitement and consults closely with the Israeli government, including Netanyahu.
The group’s director, Itamar Marcus, said Sabaaneh’s work encourages youths to engage in violence, celebrates martyrdom, demonizes Israelis and presents Jews as evil.
“I don’t even like the term ‘incitement’ anymore. It is becoming a meaningless word,” Marcus said. “The messages are simple. Demonization. Hatred. Evil.”
He pointed to a Sabaaneh cartoon that shows an ultra-Orthodox Jew with side curls squeezing the trigger of an Israeli soldier’s gun to kill a Palestinian.
“What kid seeing this image isn’t going to hate Israel?” Marcus said. “It’s libel.”
Sabaaneh objects. It is Israel that creates these images, he said — no Palestinian teenager needs to look at newspaper cartoons to get angry. “It’s on the news,” he said. Israeli soldiers shoot innocent Palestinians all the time, he said.
He started to list recent cases.
Sabaaneh said he doesn’t present Jews as evil — he presents the Israeli military occupation as evil.
When he draws a man with a kippah, or yarmulke, riding an Israeli soldier like a donkey, dangling a knife in front of him like a carrot and stick, to assault a Palestinian, Sabaaneh said, the Jew is not any Jew but a radical Jewish settler living in the West Bank on land the Palestinians want for a future state.
“They say this is anti-Semitism. How can you tell? This is a settler. This is anti-settler,” he said. “Palestinians understand this.”
Source: www.washingtonpost.com