Australia / Israel Review

Provocative, incisive, clever, infuriating, reductive, crude, insulting – even grotesque. 

Political cartoons have the power to pack a punch. They can make you outraged but also force you to engage.

Since Hamas’ October 7 massacre, political cartoonists have enjoyed a bumper year. In practice, newspaper cartoons largely mirrored the editorial and ideological stance of the publications where they appeared.

In general, the Nine Newspapers and the Canberra Times reflect a worldview where the UN’s inherent goodness is unquestionable, while Israel is, at best, of a piece with Hamas. At worse, Israel is guilty of genocide, ethnic cleansing, infanticide and starvation as a weapon, while Hamas isn’t even in the picture. 

By contrast, News Corp cartoonists have focused on Hamas’ moral and actual culpability for the war, while highlighting the group’s Western apologists and intended or unintended enablers – including the UN and certain politicians.

In the days after October 7, Australian Financial Review (AFR) cartoonist David Rowe was surprisingly sympathetic to Israel, although this sympathy quickly disappeared. 

On Oct. 10, he drew Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei sitting alongside the Grim Reaper watching a TV showing buildings in Gaza engulfed in flames. 

The Sydney Morning Herald’s (SMH) Alan Moir (Oct. 14) mirrored Rowe, depicting an Iranian military figure pressing the plunger on a detonation box marked “Hamas”, which sets off an explosion in Gaza. 

On Oct. 11, Rowe commented upon the vile anti-Israel protest on the steps of the Sydney Opera House, showing a Star of David projected onto the iconic building and, in the water, the blood-red lettering of the word “antisemitism”. 

On Nov. 11, Johannes Leak in the Australian satirised the angry mob of pro-Palestinian protesters who descended en masse on Caulfield where many Jews live. An angry protester sneers, “Look at them – living quietly in their own neighbourhoods, going about their business peacefully – they’re asking for trouble!!” and on Oct. 13, he drew skid marks on a book labelled “Rules of War” with a Hamas jeep speeding off in the distance.

In the SMH (Oct. 10), Cathy Wilcox’s first cartoon post-massacre drew a link between Palestinian terror and “murderous occupation”.

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The SMH’s Megan Herbert (Oct. 30), like others on her side of the ideological spectrum, focused on Gazan casualties. Herbert drew two boxes. One, labelled “Human Rights”, showed a dove flying above a home. The other box – “Human Wrongs” – showed a fighter plane dropping a bomb onto the devastated house and a pile of bodies adjacent to it.

Foreign Minister Penny Wong’s insistence from April onwards of the need to rapidly establish a Palestinian state became fodder for Mark Knight in News Corp papers on April 12, depicting her astride a unicorn.

Two days later he belled the cat, with the cartoon making it clear that Hamas had made a two-state solution “out of the question”. 

Hamas’ cynical use of human shields was skewered in a cartoon by Leak’s Australian colleague Spooner (Oct. 17) that featured a Hamas fighter promising to look after “[Israeli] hostage children the same way we care for our own.” 

In the Australian (Nov.1), Spooner tackled the notion of Hamas as freedom fighters bravely battling against Israel depicting two armchair critics, one of whom asks how Hamas can save Gaza and the other person suggesting “surrender?”. 

Two days later, Spooner depicted a little wounded boy trying to seek shelter in a Hamas tunnel only to be told, “The tunnels are for our resistance, not your existence.”

Cartoonists of all political persuasions employed figures associated with death but for different messaging.

Commenting on the al-Shifa hospital non-massacre, Rowe (Oct. 19), again employed the Grim Reaper, standing in front of a Red Cross pushing a hospital bed bearing a body and a toe tag with the word “TRUTH”. 

On Oct. 23, Glen Le Lievre in the AFR featured the Grim Reaper with his head in hands amid the ruins of a hospital, implying that even he is overwhelmed by the death toll.

By Nov. 1, Rowe had done a 180-degree turn, drawing Netanyahu ready to consume a peace dove and presumably a glass of blood. A Grim Reaper approaches offering Gaza on a serving tray.

Spooner, two days later, employed the figure of the devil ascending from a Hamas terror tunnel with his arms held aloft, telling Israeli troops he’s surrendering because “Even I have standards”.

Likewise, three weeks in, the Daily Telegraph’s Warren Brown (Oct. 30) drew a Hamas-robed skeleton standing over an active battlefield, declaring “all my own work”.

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For the most part, cartoonists critical of Israel have largely ignored Hamas, except as a means of suggesting it and Israel are morally equivalent. A textbook example of this smear was Moir’s cartoon in the Age/SMH (Oct. 26, 2024).

In the drawing, Israeli PM Binyamin Netanyahu stands alongside a Hamas terrorist. Their shadows morph into a large, shapeless monster obscuring a map of Israel, Gaza and the West Bank. 

The Palestinian and Israeli flags make a contrast to each other. 

The former is accurate, but on the latter, the Star of David has only five points and Netanyahu is also misspelled.

The cartoon’s false equivalence masks the truth that Hamas broke a ceasefire to perpetrate a heinous massacre on October 7, deliberately turned its own people into human shields and could end the war by releasing the hostages and surrendering its weapons.

This false equivalence narrative materialised shortly after October 7, as evidenced by Badiucao’s SMH and Age cartoon (Dec. 23, 2023), which featured an Israeli soldier and Hamas terrorist simultaneously affirming that killing children is “ok” but it “depends upon the context.” 

Meanwhile, commenting on Israel’s tragic, unintended killing on April 1 of Australian aid worker Zomi Frankcom and six colleagues, in the Canberra Times (April 4) Broelman drew gun sights over a child, an aid worker, an old woman and a Hamas terrorist. The legend says, “One of these things is not like the others.”

On the same topic, Mark Knight in the Herald Sun (April 6) memorialised Frankcom without attributing blame for her death.

Like many media professionals, Wilcox’s SMH cartoon (Jan. 30) misrepresented the International Court of Justice’s (ICJ) interim ruling.

Wilcox’s cartoon wrongly claimed, “The ICJ says it’s ‘plausible’ that Israel is committing genocide.” The Court never said this, only that Palestinians have a “plausible right” to protection from genocide, as the Court’s then-president has made clear. 

Similarly, Canberra Times cartoonist David Pope (Jan. 30) misrepresented the ICJ finding to infer the Albanese Government supports genocide.

Spooner’s Feb. 20 cartoon titled “The bleeding obvious” featured ICC judges pointing to Gaza saying, “Our task is to prevent genocide” and three Israeli soldiers retorting, “That’s why we are here”. 

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The UN halo effect was seen in the SMH (Nov. 6, 2024), where Wilcox drew Israel and UNRWA as apple crates. Israel’s multitude of alleged war crimes was listed against UNRWA’s sole indiscretion of employing staff with “connections” to “Hamas/October 7”. In fact, among many other problems, UNRWA staff helped carry out the October 7 massacre. 

Pope’s Sept. 20, 2024, Canberra Times cartoon showed a cowering Penny Wong before a buzzing pager (a visual reference to Israel’s attack via Hezbollah pagers) that warns her to support a UN resolution demanding Israel end its occupation of “Palestinian territories”. Ignoring Israel’s successes, Pope’s cynicism regarding the war was also reflected on Oct. 3, 2024, with the plummeting figures of Netanyahu and Khamenei blindfolded and locked in an embrace.

The Biden Administration’s ‘culpability’ for the war’s continuation was a recurring theme. In the SMH (March 6 and 27), Wilcox linked Gaza’s death toll to the Biden Administration’s role as weapons supplier to Israel. 

The fine line between critical comment about Israel and the danger of repeating antisemitic tropes hung over AFR cartoonist Rowe’s April 4 cartoon, which featured the Grim Reaper operating an old-fashioned telephone switchboard. The Reaper puts world leaders on hold but patches Israeli PM Netanyahu straight through. Concerningly, the connecting wires between the names USA, Canada, Australia and Gaza on the switchboard form a Star of David, evoking the age-old trope that Jews manipulate world politics for their own nefarious plans.

Meanwhile, Pope in the Canberra Times (May 4) implied a steel-helmeted Netanyahu uses antisemitism to deflect all criticism of Israel.

On the flipside, the Spectator Australia Oct. 14, 2023, cover featured a cartoon of police arresting a man carrying an Israeli flag who asks, “What’s my crime?” The response is that “You’re Jewish”.

There is no question Australian cartoonists play a valuable role, and are often very skilled at their craft. 

As Wilcox recently told ABC Radio, the cartoonist articulates “something [readers] were suspecting… but they weren’t sure how to put it into words.” 

That is all well and good. But cartoonists who elicit an emotional response based on misinformation, or naked partisanship, essentially use their gifts in the cause of obscuring rather than illuminating truth.