"Fired" for an extremely caustic cartoon of Benyamin Netanyahu after Israel's retaliation on the Palestinian Gaza Strip in response to the bloody Hamas attack on October 7. This is what happened in the United Kingdom to Steve Bell, a 72-year-old historian for the Guardian, according to what he himself denounces: accusing the British progressive newspaper of actually putting him at the door on the basis of "a false" suspicion of "anti-Semitism".
The Guardian denies this, arguing that Bell's contract has "expired" after "40 years in the work" and highly regarded publications. But the substance does not change in the interpretation of other newspapers on the island, which since the weekend have been giving considerable prominence to the incident.
The cartoon depicts the Israeli prime minister in boxing gloves while drawing a map of Gaza on his belly and ordering trapped residents of the Strip to leave "now": with a formula that recalls the "seconds out" of boxing.
The drawing has been criticized in recent days in particular by politicians of the Conservative Party, who in the past had already raised suspicions about some of Bell's cartoons, in particular about Israel, evoking alleged anti-Semitic accents; while there are those who have interpreted the features attributed to Netanyahu, starting with the features of his nose, as a subliminal reference to William Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice and the anti-Jewish prejudices of the time.
An accusation that, moreover, the cartoonist flatly rejected as "false" and completely devoid of footholds with respect to his subject. Observing that referring in any way to the Merchant of Venice would have been off topic and specifying that he was inspired instead by a famous American cartoon denouncing the war in Vietnam: in which the then president, Lyndon Johnson, was portrayed with gloves and the map of the Asian country drawn on him.
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