Shortly after a ceasefire was reached last week between Israel and Hezbollah, putatively ending the war which began on Oct. 8th, 2023 when the terror group started firing rockets at northern Israel a day after the Hamas massacre, the Times cartoonist Peter Brookes published the following:
First, let’s briefly unpack this:
Benjamin Netanyahu is holding a bird of prey (likely a hawk), which is holding an olive branch. In other words, Israel’s Prime Minister is simply pretending to have taken a peaceful stance and actually intends otherwise. The bloodied beak and chest of the bird, as well as Netanyahu’s bloodied glove, are of course references to bloodshed in Lebanon.
Hezbollah, the terror group which started the fighting, is absent from the cartoon. It’s as if, for Brookes, the decision of the Iranian proxy fourteen months ago to start an unprovoked war against Israel, which resulted in death and destruction in Israel and southern Lebanon, is of no significance. Further, even leaving aside the cartoonist’s mindreading of the Israeli premier’s ‘true’ intentions upon agreeing to a ceasefire, it’s notable that Hezbollah’s ‘true intentions’ aren’t explored.
For the Times cartoonist, the story mandates that only the choices of Israeli leaders – and not those of Iran and their terror proxies – matters.
Such selective assigning of moral agency is a pattern for Brookes.
On Sept. 26, shortly after the Hezbollah pager explosions, and shortly before the IDF began its ground invasion, Brookes published this:
The Times cartoonist again was uninterested in the decisions made by Hezbollah, which could have avoided “full scale war in Lebanon” at any time by ceasing to fire deadly projectiles at Israeli communities and withdrawal its forces and arms to north of the Litani river, as demanded by UN Security Council Resolution 1701.
However, it isn’t only Hezbollah that’s granted a moral pass by Brookes. In October, following the killing of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, he published this:
As we commented on at the time, it was bizarre that Brookes portrayed President Biden as lecturing Netanyahu on the putative futility of killing Sinwar, as the US President not only praised his death as “a good day for Israel, for the United States, and for the world“, but added that the US had helped Israel find the terrorist leader, noting that among the 1,200 killed on Oct. 7th were 46 Americans.
But, far worse than the deceptive nature of the US President’s portrayal in the cartoon was its broader moral inversion – showing Biden asking Netanyahu if it was “worth all this” amidst the ruins in Gaza, when, of course, it was Hamas who started the war.
It was Sinwar and his deputies who planned and carried out the largest and most barbaric massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, knowing full well that it would cause a war that would result the loss of many Palestinian lives, a death count that would be especially high given the terrorist group’s cruel civilian human shield policy. It was also Sinwar who refused to surrender and return the hostages, which would have ended his people’s suffering and stopped the destruction in the territory.
Finally, this, from Oct. 13, 2023, is arguably the most disturbing example of Brookes displaying what The Telegraph’s Allister Heath referred to as the West’s increasing “ethical degeneration” in failing to morally distinguish between the democratic West and the Islamist extremists who seek their destruction.
It was published a mere five days after the Oct. 7th massacre, before Israel launched its ground invasion, while dead, burned and mutilated bodies – or, more often, parts or traces of what were once living human beings – were still being found in Israeli kibbutzim.
It’s frightening that, even at The Times – which, unlike the Guardian, is not institutionally captured by the cult of anti-Zionism – we see not only the erasure of Palestinian and Arab agency, but the failure to identify and call out even the most blatant manifestations of annihilationist antisemitism in the Middle East.
