During the long conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians, editorial cartoonists throughout the world have expressed their opinions through their art. Though much powerful visual commentary has been created about Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel and the subsequent Israeli strikes and humanitarian crisis inside Gaza, I wanted to hear from cartoonists with a direct connection to the war — and to show these points of views side by side.
So I reached out to Michel Kichka, an Israeli who did the cartoon at the top of this article, and Mohammad Sabaaneh, a Palestinian who created the cartoon below, inspired by Pablo Picasso’s painting “Guernica.”
I got to know both cartoonists several years ago at international conferences. Both are thoughtful and talented artists, and I respect them as colleagues and consider them friends. Although their perspectives on the war are different, the work they shared shows compassion and an acute respect for civil rights and justice.
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Kichka was born in Belgium and is the son of Holocaust survivors. He immigrated to Israel as a teenager and lives in Jerusalem. He is also a professor in illustration and comics and is one of the original members of Cartooning for Peace, a worldwide network of press cartoonists. Sabaaneh was born in Kuwait and lives in Ramallah, a Palestinian city in the West Bank. He is a member of Cartoon Movement and a Middle East representative of Cartoonists Rights Network International.
On the cartoon above, Kichka explains that the little boy symbolizes the innocence of all the children who suffer war crimes in the world. “Even if he gets a proper answer to his question, there’s no difference for him between a war crime or a crime against humanity,” Kichka wrote in an email to The Post.
Follow this authorAnn Telnaes's opinions“As for the Hamas gunmen pointing their Kalashnikov to his head, they don’t give a damn to this question,” added the Israeli artist. “My cartoon can express, by extension, the gap between those who worship life and those who worship death.”
Sabaaneh’s cartoons, on the other hand, often criticize dehumanization of Palestinians. Here’s one example:
“One of the Israeli leaders has said we are fighting against human animals,” Sabaaneh commented. “I find my main mission is to rehumanize the Palestinians and to reflect the human conditions by my visual art.”
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It is interesting to observe how two artists can use different lenses to approach the same issue. One example is the storming of al-Shifah Hospital, in November, which Palestinian officials called a crime against humanity. Here’s a cartoon by Sabaaneh denouncing the attack:
But Kichka took the Israeli point of view of the same subject — the challenge of fighting terrorists who use the civilians as human shields:
In another cartoon about the hospital, Kichka takes a jab at Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu:
“Netanyahu is fully responsible for the situation in which we are today," Kichka wrote. "But he is not taking responsibility.”
Both artists present sharp criticism of the indiscriminate killing of civilians. The two images by Sabaaneh below are good examples. In the first, Sabaaneh denounces the killing of children by Israeli forces:
In the second, he mourns an Israeli strike on an ambulance in November that killed at least 15 people and wounded dozens more:
Kichka also provided poignant criticism of the indiscriminate killing of Israeli civilians by Hamas in the early days after Oct. 7, below. “I just wanted to show that terror is blind, that for a Hamas terrorist everyone is an enemy,” the artist wrote.
The profession of editorial cartooning has struggled for many years, especially in this country, because of cuts in the newspaper industry and, more recently, increasing intolerance of satire. But as Sabaaneh’s and Kichka’s works show, cartoons powerfully represent the very essence of open debate and freedom of expression. And they can also reveal shared empathy and human connection, even from different sides in the most divisive of conflicts.
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