Andy Singer's Observations
Editor's note: With the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising having just passed, we offer this observation by political cartoonist Andy Singer about the perverted parallels of Israel's actions and Jewish history.
I've been drawing and publishing cartoons since 1991. My clients were mostly alternative weekly newspapers, many of which are now gone. Occasionally I get something published in a larger, more mainstream venue like The New Yorker or The New York Times. 99% of my cartoons have nothing to do with Israel, but, as a person of Jewish descent, I've spent much of my life thinking about my relationship and feelings towards Israel and Judaism.
I drew this cartoon in 2003, when Israel was building the walls around Gaza and the West Bank. At this point, Gaza is the largest prison camp in the world – 2.3 million people live in a land area that's about 2/5ths the size of New York City. So it's a similar human density to the boroughs of Brooklyn or Queens. It's walled and fenced off from the rest of the world and blockaded from the sea. All food, electricity, trash, materials and human movement in or out of it are tightly controlled by the Israeli prison guards. Even before October 7, 2023, Israel regularly executed suspected rebels using raids or airstrikes that took out entire buildings full of innocent people. This has been going on to varying degrees for 58 years – since the Six Day War in 1967.
Lately, I find myself super obsessed with this issue. If we whose parents or grandparents survived a holocaust can't avoid perpetrating a holocaust on another group of people, then there's no real hope for humanity. Also, I see how Israel and its US supporters are helping to destroy the United States by supporting right-wing politicians like Donald Trump and a fascist censorship machine designed to destroy free speech in the media, on college campuses and even in city and state politics. They are also destroying Judaism itself by promoting the idea that allegiance to a monstrous right-wing nation IS Judaism. What happened to Tikkun Olam? How is murdering 60,000 people a mitzvah? It's super depressing. It's been brewing for a long time – my entire life (and I'm an old person). I'm so tired of the political, cultural and journalistic censorship, the lobbying, political maneuvering, and moral/ethical contortions...and I think very few people in the general public are aware of what's going on or why it's happening.
