Guardian weaponises the Holocaust against the Jews

For at least the fourth time since Oct. 7th, 2023, the Guardian has published content weaponising the Holocaust against the Jews.

The latest iteration is in the form of a long cartoon co-created by Joe Sacco and Art Spiegelman (“Two artists, one catastrophic war … Joe Sacco and Art Spiegelman on Israel-Gaza and the ceasefire – cartoon”, Feb. 14).  Sacco is a anti-Israel artist best known for his journalistic graphic narrative called Footnotes in Gaza, while Spiegelman is a Jewish cartoonist who wrote Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, a graphic novel published in 1991 depicting Spiegelman interviewing his father about his experiences as a Holocaust survivor.

In the novel, Jews are mice, and the Nazis are cats.

Despite growing up in the shadow of the Holocaust, Spiegelman shares Sacco’s animosity towards the Jewish state, having once described Israel as a “sad, failed idea“.

Turning now to the Guardian cartoon: the words in bold and red at the top, as you can see below, “Never Again!…And Again…And Again…And, Again”, make it clear that the Holocaust is being evoked.  It shows both Sacco and Spiegelman drawn into Gaza, beginning in the first two frames: (Sacco is on the left, while Spiegelman is on the right and, per the character in this graphic novel, appears as a mouse).

We see how Israel’s military response to Hamas’s war of aggression is framed as “revenge”, rather than a rational state actor engaging in self-defense, as any other state would do when faced with an invasion of its territory from a terrorist group. The “eye for an eye“ trope, which is often used by anti-Semites to indict Judaism as an unforgiving religion, is employed, alongside the bloodstained hands of the Israeli prime minister.

Here’s the next few frames:

As you can see, in the first frame, Spiegelman accuses Israel of ethnic cleansing and genocide (“genocidish”), which he justifies by citing “starving babies” in Gaza, which is a way of dishonestly suggesting that Israel intentionally starved Palestinian children, ignoring a plethora of evidence contradicting the propagandistic ‘starvation’ narrative.

In the third frame, Spiegelman evokes the Israel-Nazi analogy (despite expressing his displeasure with the word “Holocaust”), when he writes that he didn’t write ‘Maus’ to be used as “Auschwitz for beginners”.

The cartoonists chose not to mention or allude in any way to the three starved Israeli hostages – Or Levy, Ohad Ben Ami, Eli Sharabi – whose emaciated appearance upon release was redolent of Holocaust survivors.

Here are the next few frames from the cartoon, which concludes with Spiegelman repeating his quip about Zionism being a “failed experiment”:

Spiegelman depicts a living, breathing, thriving state where nearly half of the world’s Jews live as akin to a 75 year-long investigation into the practicality of Jewish sovereignty.  The imagery of what appears to be an explosion at the characters’ table may be an allusion to either terrorism in general, or, quite possibly, the Oct. 7th attacks – which they seem to present as evidence that the Zionist “experiment” has failed.

While most Jews contextualize the annihilationist antisemitism of the terrorists on Israel’s borders as evidence attesting to the moral necessity of Zionism, Spiegelman, failing to impute any agency to those who repeatedly choose to attack Jews, effectively blames the victims themselves – as if the mere presence of Jews in their historic homeland is, itself, an act of incitement.

Here are the next frames, which posits that the entire Zionist premise was flawed:

The frames on the left represent an entirely ahistorical account of Zionism, one which erases the fact that Jews, who are depicted by the cartoonists as wealthy, arrogant Western interlopers, fled persecution in Europe and the Middle East to return to their ancestral birthplace, that Jews had a continual presence in the land for thousands of years prior to 1948 – and that Palestinian leaders turned down a plan to partition the land into Jewish and Palestinian Arab states.

Here are the next frames, which peddles the idea that Israel’s war against Hamas is ‘radicalising’ the Palestinian population, both against Israel and the US:

Sacco’s comment that “If you bomb people into rubble and kill their loved ones, what do you expect” perfectly encapsulates the Guardian view: that Hamas and its supporters ultimately aren’t responsible for the terrorism they unleash, framing a profoundly destructive Palestinian pathology as a legitimate grievance.

Now, here’s the final frame:

In addition to repeating the ‘Never Again for Anyone’ message, the last caption mentioning the “final solution” again appears to suggest that, in the eyes of the cartoonists, Israel’s war against Hamas is redolent of the Holocaust.

Perhaps most tellingly, however, Hamas isn’t visually evoked even once in the lengthy cartoon. While the Oct. 7th atrocities are briefly condemned by the co-creators, the perpetrators of that bloody pogrom are practically erased.

In contrast, the artists do mention Israel in decrying their “horror” at the state’s response to the Oct. 7th massacre.  Indeed, the fact that the images drawn throughout the cartoon depict Gaza, and not the Israeli communities ravaged by Palestinian terrorists during the unprovoked war against the Jewish state, is emblematic both of the artists’ specific narrative, and of the Guardian’s coverage of Oct. 7th and its aftermath more broadly.

The outlet’s visuals and imagery published over the last 16 months have almost entirely failed to tell the story of the war in proper sequence, which would necessitate – in order to contextualise damage in Gaza – depictions of, for instance, blood soaked children’s bedrooms, raped, mutilated and incinerated bodies, the aftermath of Hamas gang rape and the killing fields of the Nova Music Festival.

In addition to the specific cartoon’s profoundly cruel and immoral weaponisation of the Holocaust to attack Jews, it also represents another example of the broader failure of Guardian journalists and contributors to bear witness to the horrors on Oct. 7th, a soft denialism of the worst antisemitic massacre since the Nazi genocide that shames every individual associated with the wretched outlet.

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