... After Trump revealed his plan to ethnically cleanse the Gaza Strip, cartoonists lined up to endorse this proposed violation of international law. Dana Summers (Tribune Content Agency, 2/7/25) had a beaming Trump announcing, “Make Gaza Great Again!” Chip Bok (Creators Syndicate, 2/7/25) showed Trump’s future casino and riviera as an improvement over United Nations administered refugee camps. Cheekily, it was labeled “Two State Solutions.” Payne (GoComics, 2/6/25) advertised a “Mar-a-Gaza” that will be “Hamas-free”—as well as Palestinian-free—once construction is finished.
No mainstream American cartoonist would draw Israeli soldiers as Nazis, as Varvel, Gorrell and Payne did with Palestinians. It would be considered beyond the pale for an anti-war or pro-Palestinian cartoonist to crack a joke about assassinating a leading pro-Israel politician, as Payne did with Tlaib. Cartoon endorsements of ethnic cleansing of virtually any nationality other than Palestinian would be met with quite accurate comparisons to the oeuvre of Philipp Rupprecht (“Fips”), cartoonist for the pro-Nazi Der Stürmer.
The consequences for the two approaches to cartooning could not be more different. When Varvel lost his spot at the Toronto Sun (12/21/23), it was not for his drawings of Palestinians, but rather a take on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy (12/20/23) that Jewish groups found offensive. Payne’s cartoons still run in the National Review, and he kept his post as auto critic for the Detroit News.
One of Ramirez’s cartoons (Las Vegas Review-Journal, 11/6/23), showing a snarling hook-nosed Arab labeled “Hamas,” was removed from the Washington Post after reader backlash. Editorial page editor David Shipley said that reader reactions calling the cartoon “racist” and “dehumanizing” showed that the Post “missed something profound, and divisive” (Washington Post, 11/8/23). Ramirez continues to be published at the Post.
Because of syndication and the absorption of many newspapers into chains like Gannett, some media markets are only exposed to one side, cartoon-wise. In Detroit, for example, the Detroit Free Press and Detroit News publish under a joint operating agreement that ensures that the editorial cartoons in the News run in both newspapers. The most prominent syndicated cartoonist in the News is Ramirez, who declared Palestinians ontologically evil. This means that in the metro area with the largest Arab population in America, the political cartoons in both papers are overwhelmingly dominated by a virulently anti-Palestinian viewpoint. Benson: Yasir Ararat (Arafat depicted as a dead rat)
Tony Doris (New York Times, 3/2/25) expressed concerns that limiting the range of acceptable opinion in editorial pages is bad for democracy. “Democracy needs journalists who care about the mission and not just about page views,” he said.
Not only is it bad for democracy, it trivializes antisemitism and allows promoters of racism and ethnic cleansing off the hook. Indeed, despite acting as defenders of Jewish people, these cartoonists indulge in many of the same tropes that antisemitic caricaturists use. Editorial cartoonists may have progressed past depicting Yasser Arafat as a rodent caught in a Star of David–shaped mousetrap (Arizona Republic, 6/27/82), but there are still images of anti-Arab, anti-Palestinian racism on the editorial pages.