MADRID 14 Oct. (EUROPA PRESS) –
Palestinian cartoonist Mohamed Sabaaneh, who belongs to a generation that has grown up influenced by the legacy of Handala, the iconic drawing of a refugee boy who became a symbol of Palestinian resistance in the late 1970s, said this Monday that ” “There is no freedom of expression when it comes to Palestine.”
“We are facing a well-financed media mechanism, a pro-Israel machine, on the part of all these large traditional media outlets,” he indicated that in an interview with Europa Press at the Casa Arab headquarters in Madrid on the occasion of the publication of his book ’30 seconds in Gaza’.
Sabaaneh has given the example of the British cartoonist Steve Bell, fired from the newspaper ‘The Guardian’ in October 2023 after publishing a satirical cartoon about the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, in which he performs surgery on himself with boxing gloves.
The newspaper decided not to renew his contract after accusing him of anti-Semitism for referring to the phrase “pound of flesh”, which appears in the play ‘The Merchant of Venice’, by William Shakespeare, although the British cartoonist assured that the cartoon was inspired by an old drawing of US President Lyndor Johnson during the Vietnam War.
ONLY 30 SECONDS
Sabaaneh, who works for the newspaper ‘Al Hayat al Jadida’ – the newspaper of the Palestinian Authority – collects in ’30 seconds in Gaza’ fragments drawn in black and white of crimes committed by Israel in the Palestinian enclave, where more than 42,300 people have died since the beginning of the Israeli offensive in a conflict that seems to have no end and that has remained open for 76 years.
Its starting point is dozens of videos classified as “graphic or violent content” that circulate on social networks at any time of the day: mothers hugging their dead children, children wrapped in white cloth or scenes in hospitals crowded with people.
“These videos will not change the government of Israel, they will not make Saudi Arabia fight for the Palestinian people or the United Arab Emirates to break its ties with the Israelis, but they will definitely change public opinion,” he said.
Sabaaneh has explained that other artists before him have represented barbarism in their works, such as the Iraqi painter Dia Azzawi with his mural about the Sabra and Shatila massacre in the Lebanese capital, Beirut, or the Spanish artist Pablo Picasso with his ‘Guernica ‘.
“We, as the Palestinian people, have been dehumanized by the Israelis since 1948,” he said, also recalling the words of Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, who referred to Gaza residents in October 2023 as “human animals.” “.
HIS TIME IN JAIL
The Palestinian cartoonist was sentenced to five months in prison in 2013 after returning from the Jordanian capital, Amman, an experience that inspired him to publish a book about Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails, ‘Black and White: Political Cartoons from Palestine’.
“The center where they do the interrogations is very hard because they lock you in a small cell, about one meter by 150 centimeters. The walls are very rough and you have only one light. Everything is gray. They only give the prisoner 250 grams to eat. of food,” he said.
His brother is now in prison under the modality of administrative detention, a type of arrest used by the Israeli Army that can be renewed indefinitely without charges or trial, denounced by numerous Human Rights NGOs.
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