A German daily paper is ruffling feathers with a political cartoon. This Stuttgarter Zeitung cartoon features Prime Minister Netanyahu poisoning the dove of peace. Screengrab’s from the paper’s Facebook page.
YNet explains the German:
According to the drawing, the prime minister is spilling poison from a bottle marked “settlement construction” onto a peace of bread, as the dove stands next to him, holding an olive branch in its mouth.
The caption includes a reference to Georg Kreisler, an Austrian-American writer and musician, which YNet didn’t address. Do any readers care to translate it?
I’m going to head off talk of anti-Semitism right now. The Israeli public continues to debate the issue of settlements; so can German cartoonists. Earlier this year, Süddeutsche Zeitung and the Times of London apologized for more clearly anti-Semitic cartoons. This doesn’t rank up there.
However, what makes me bristle is the cartoonist’s suggestion that Israeli settlement policy is intentionally designed to kill the peace process.
That could be the basis for the protesting letter to the editor which YNet says the Israeli embassy in Berlin sent.
What do you think?
