21-Jul-06: Lies, larger lies and cartoons

Spooner cartoon in Friday's Melbourne Age 

It's been some decades since Israeli society right across its broad, noisy, fractious spectrum has been as united about something as this war. From our living rooms and bomb shelters, we residents of Jerusalem, Tel-Aviv, Haifa, Sderot, Nahariyah and Tsfat needed very little commentary and no political analysis to understand what Hassan Nasrallah meant when he said "We are the ones who are choosing the time and the place" for Hezbollah's attacks on Israeli towns, settlements and homes.

Nor were any of us especially surprised to hear, read and see the context-less news reportage, the total focus on Israel's actions instead of on the unprovoked series of calculated attacks against it. The painting and re-painting of familiar, old stereotypes: powerful Israel, disproportionate Israel, victim-free Israel. It's there in enormous doses, and no place seems to be free of it.

The cartoon above appears in Friday's Melbourne Age. (We're originally from Melbourne.)

To many it will be hard to see what's wrong with it. But the way it's wrong, the tremendous wrongness of it, goes to the very essence of the distorted narrative that has brought so much misery to this region over decades. Perhaps getting it right was simply too challenging for Spooner, the cartoonist. After all, how do you include 13,000 deeply entrenched missiles in your drawing? What kind of visual abstraction is needed to show Israel sitting quietly on its side of the Lebanon border for six years, watching jihadist leaders prepare for war, day in, day out? If you have never been inside an Israeli bomb-shelter, how do you communicate visually the fear that comes with 1,000+ missile firings? And how do you portray voracious military powers like Iran and Syria gleefully pulling the strings from the distance, financing and supplying the front line war?

The human price paid by Israelis in this ongoing war has always been tightly linked to distortions, half-truths and outright lies communicated by the mainstream media. It ought to be perfectly clear that you can be dishonest with your images no less than with your words.