South African cartoon ignores massacre in Israel while distorting facts on war in Gaza.

An open letter to South Africa’s celebrated cartoonist by Stephen Schulman

Dear Jonathan Shapiro,

I have long been an admirer of your artistic talents and you are undoubtedly a real virtuoso of the cartoonist’s art. This genre not only demands a discerning eye but also a work ethic that places objectivity and an adherence to moral values highly for without them the message is distorted and lost.

Unfortunately, dear Jonathan, it is in these last two categories that you fall far short for your bias and chronic hatred of Israel has warped you to the extent that your cartoons of Israel are so vitriolic and antisemitic that they pervert reality.

I am referring to the one cartoon which appears above and to which you have given pride of place in the Daily Maverick, choosing it as one your best exemplars for 2023. The picture speaks for itself: Israel intentionally targets innocent Gaza civilians by bombing their homes, schools, hospitals and shelters. The message conveyed is quite clear: here is an amoral country that in a unilateral action murders innocent people, destroys their homes and country with unprecedented brutality and justifies it with a self serving, cynical hypocrisy. Any viewer unaware of the true situation cannot but be aroused to the emotions of disgust, revulsion and fury.

Sadly, and predictably, in your cartoon you not only choose to ignore the massacre in Israel but distort the facts. Firstly, Israel has never bombed hospitals in Gaza. The Al Ahli hospital’s casualties were caused by a Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket that fell short. This fact has been independently proved. But then why miss the opportunity to slander! Secondly, there are no civilian shelters in Gaza. Hamas has built subterranean tunnels for its fighters and prefers to use civilians kept above ground as shields.

Unlike your simplistic and one-sided cartoon, the reality is more complex and the facts are clear. On October 7^th 2023, the sovereign country of Israel was invaded by an army of 3,000 well trained terrorists from Gaza whose mission was to destroy, pillage and terrorize. In calculated and premeditated acts of unprecedented cruelty, barbarism and bestiality, they tortured, maimed, gang raped, burnt alive, murdered, mutilated, dismembered and decapitated over one thousand and three hundred innocent people from babies to old pensioners.

The terrorists returned to Gaza dragging two hundred and forty hostages ranging in age from a ten-month-old baby, young children and teenagers to sick octogenarians. Many have been murdered in captivity while the rest are kept in inhumane conditions, abused and cruelly treated.

And lest we forget – the well over nine thousand rockets from Gaza aimed at homes, hospitals and schools that have rained and are still raining on Israel!

Now, dear Jonathan, for you – the self-proclaimed paragon of impartiality – with heightened sensitivity to suffering and gifted with your art as a tool to excoriate egregious acts of injustice, all these horrific facts should surely have given you a plethora of material on which to wield your pen. Most sadly, as per usual, it appears that when it pertains to Israel, the murder of its citizens and its right of self defense, any compassion and all critical principles have long been defenestrated with your chronic bile and bias taking their place.

The Jewish community in South Africa is in an unenviable position and for them the future bodes ill. Cyril Ramphosa, the head of a government both corrupt and inept that has reduced the country to the state of being 3^rd world, assiduously backs, courts and hosts the Hamas leaders – an organization designated by both the USA and European countries as terrorist. The intense official hostility directed towards the State of Israel leaves the community increasingly isolated and even facing a palpable physical threat. Nevertheless, hanging on to the coat tails of the ministers, you, Jonathan, have long been sitting on the official bandwagon and braying the official line. True to form, we can expect many more of your vitriolic anti-Israel caricatures and cartoons to appear that can only stoke the fires of hatred and further alienate and endanger the Jewish community.

Would you ever dare to show some objectivity and criticize Hamas, their atrocities, their use of hospitals, schools and civilian homes for terrorist activities? You are doubtless aware that there is absolutely no way as you cannot bite the hands that buy your books and of those who publish your work and/or employ you.  If you ever deviated from the official line and demonstrated a smidgeon of sympathy for the 7^th October victims, you would be instantly branded as yet another traitorous Zionist Jew, be shunned and out on your ear. But then after all, a man has to make a living!

For you Jonathan Shapiro, Jewish lives do matter. They matter very much when they are useful to serve you and your family.  They mattered when you sent your children to Herzliya – a Jewish school that is unabashedly Zionist – to get the best education possible. They mattered when you with peace of mind sent them off to a Jewish youth movement summer camp and they mattered very much when you applied to get your mother admitted to the Cape Town Jewish Aged Home. When do Jewish lives not matter? For you the answer is crystal clear: when they are in Israel and include the thirteen hundred innocents that were massacred on the 7^th October – a trifling matter that can be ignored.

There is a term that describes certain people as self serving hypocrites. They are callous individuals who elect to adopt a selective morality and turn a blind eye to many injustices in order to further their own selfish interests. In a rare moment of honesty, ask yourself if you fall in that category.

Stephen Schulman
Ramat Hasharon
Israel

About the writer:

Stephen Schulman is a graduate of the South African Jewish socialist youth movement Habonim, who immigrated to Israel in 1969 and retired in 2012 after over 40 years of English teaching. He was for many years a senior examiner for the English matriculation and co-authored two English textbooks for the upper grades in high school. Now happily retired, he spends his time between his family, his hobbies and reading to try to catch up on his ignorance.

While the mission of Lay of the Land (LotL) is to provide a wide and diverse perspective of affairs in Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish world, the opinions, beliefs and viewpoints expressed by its various writers are not necessarily ones of the owners and management of LOTL but of the writers themselves.  LotL endeavours to the best of its ability to credit the use of all known photographs to the photographer and/or owner of such photographs (0&EO).