A few weeks ago, Israelis across the political spectrum found rare unity in fury against a macabre cartoon posted on YouTube. The cartoon ticked all the boxes of viciously anti-Semitic propaganda, featuring a hook-nosed, avaricious Jew hungrily pocketing gold coins from a foreign paymaster and manipulating the media to besmirch his country’s patriots. The cartoon even took care to revisit that vintage supporting character of anti-Semitic tropes stretching back a millennium, Judas Iscariot. Once the Jew in the cartoon exhausts his usefulness, the paymaster advises him to “take care of himself”, upon which the Jew obligingly hangs himself—a crude but faithful echo of the fate Judas meets in Matthew 27:3–10.
What compounded the outrage, however, was that Israeli Jews made the cartoon for other Israeli Jews. The Jew depicted in the cartoon, moreover, was meant to represent other Israeli Jews.
The cartoon was commissioned by the Samaria Settler Council, a non-profit enjoying considerable public funding; the Council’s chairman, Gideon Mesika, was virtually the only public figure defending the cartoon in the face of a ferocious backlash, including from some prominent settler leaders. The targets of the cartoon were anti-occupation and human rights activists receiving funds from foreign sponsors. As the Jew of the cartoon swings in the wind, the final frame displays the logos of a mishmash of funds, political movements and human rights groups, including Peace Now, B’Tselem, Yesh Din, Yesh Gvul, Rabbis for Human Rights, Breaking the Silence and the New Israel Fund.
