Why in the Middle East, a cartoon can be worth a thousands words

The Israel-Palestine conflict has never been much of a laughing matter, and particularly since October 7 last year. So you might think a cartoon history charting the four decades of the British Mandate leading up to the birth of Israel in 1948 would not be a very inviting prospect.

You couldn’t be more wrong. Dr Tim Benson, a leading authority on political cartoons, has trawled the world’s archives to come up with this superbly researched book, the latest production from Peter and Martine Halban, who have contributed so much to Jewish publishing over almost four decades. The result is an enthralling collection which provides a fascinating visual guide to the shifting public perceptions of the Arab-Israeli conflict between 1917, when the Mandate was established, to 1949, with Israel still somewhat shakily established as a sovereign state.

Take the capture of Jerusalem by General Allenby in 1917, for instance, which provoked a euphoric reaction, with several cartoonists comparing the historic victory with those of the Crusades (as indeed did Allenby).

Yet that euphoria soon morphed into a realisation that pleasing both Jewish immigrants and Arab residents would be a tricky task. The UK was often represented as a British Tommy or bobby trying to keep the peace between the two factions. In the Evening Standard, the great David Low (no relation, alas) had a policeman standing between an Arab and a Jew wailing at each other beside the Western Wall and saying, “Nah then, gents, wot abart trying some community singing?”

The judgment of Solomon was another popular theme, with Britain as Solomon and Palestine as the baby.

Into the 1930s and on to the Second World War, the cartoonists’ emphasis switched from Palestine to the plight of Germany’s Jews, the artists sympathising to a man (and they were all men) with the Jews, though their visual representations of Jews were sometimes barely distinguishable from the crude hook-nosed caricatures of the Nazi paper Der Stürmer.

Some of Britain’s finest cartoonists were themselves refugees from the Nazis, such as Victor Weisz, “Vicky”, who was to become famous in the 1950s with his depiction of Harold Macmillan as Supermac, Joseph Flatter, Stephen Roth and Walter Trier. Two others who escaped from Germany, Eric Godal and Arthur Szyk, made their names as committed anti-Nazi cartoonists in the US, and their work is included in these pages.

So too is that of some of our greatest non-Jewish cartoonists and artists, such as Bernard Partridge, E.H. Shepard, Sidney Strube, Leslie Illingworth and above all, David Low, while other less well-known figures, such as Bob Rodger, of the Daily Record, get a welcome show.

Sympathy for the Jewish cause is seen to erode after the war with the rise of underground military groups in Palestine such as the Irgun and the Stern Gang and deadly attacks like the bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem which caused the death of 91 people.

There was still, however, a strong residual sympathy for the cause of hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees in Europe, many of whom wanted to emigrate to Palestine. As the situation in Palestine deteriorated, many cartoonists depicted the British Tommy as desperate to go home and leave the feuding Jews and Arabs to fight it out among themselves.

The last word goes to David Low, with a cartoon from March 1949 showing the Israeli leaders David Ben Gurion and Moshe Sharett, looking at a group of Arab refugees fleeing from Israel, beside the stark title, “There, yesterday, were we.” It still has an uncomfortable resonance today.