Israel Faces No Apparent Red Line, But Pro-Palestinian Media Workers Do

Part of the Series

Struggle and Solidarity: Writing Toward Palestinian Liberation

British cartoonist Steve Bell estimates that he has drawn more than 13,000 comic strips, illustrations and cartoons since the early 1980s, most of them for The Guardian newspaper. But shortly after the Israeli military attacked Gaza in the aftermath of October 7, Bell’s drawing of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu carving a Gaza-shaped incision into his belly led to his dismissal from the paper.

“I got a call from my editor when I was on a train going to a conference,” Bell told Truthout. “I was told that they couldn’t use the cartoon because it contained an antisemitic trope — the pound of flesh demanded by Shylock, the Jewish moneylender from the ‘Merchant of Venice.’” Bell says that he was stunned by the call because the illustration had nothing to do with Shakespeare’s play. Instead, he explains, it was inspired by a David Levine cartoon, called Johnson’s Scar, that was published by the New York Review of Books in 1966. That drawing showed then-U.S. President Lyndon Baines Johnson carving a Vietnam-shaped image into his torso.

“The charge was contrived,” Bell said, “so as soon as I realized that The Guardian was not going to run the cartoon, I tweeted about the controversy and posted the image on my X page.” The next day Bell was told that because he wrote about a “confidential editorial decision,” he was being sacked. The editor added that he would be paid until the end of his contract, but made clear that the contract would not be renewed.

“It seems obvious to me that there is a lobby at work,” Bell continued, “and as a result, almost no one in the British press will come near me anymore. I’m now over the shock and am trying to do other work.” He said he’s drawing a cover for the U.K. National Union of Journalists and is working on a compilation of cartoons that will be published by Verso later this year, but said that “it is like being blacklisted. I was supposed to speak at the Queens College Politics Society in Cambridge this spring but they pulled the plug.”

Bell is not alone in feeling the sting of retaliation because of his criticism of Israel and his explicit artistic and verbalized support for the people of Gaza.

A study released in May by the U.S.-based National Writers Union (NWU) demonstrates that there is a clear pattern of reprisal against Western media workers who oppose the ongoing Israeli genocide that has killed nearly 40,000 Gazans during the last nine months. The report documents 44 cases of workplace recrimination between October 7, 2023, and February 1, 2024, in the U.S., Canada, the United Kingdom and Germany, with the majority of dismissals, suspensions, speech cancellations and censorship impacting workers of color (76 percent), Muslims (38 percent) and those from the Middle East. (This, of course, pales in comparison to what is happening in the Middle East: According to Al Jazeera, 158 journalists and media workers were killed between October 2023 and July 7, 2024 — the majority of them Palestinian; an additional 32 were injured.)

“Since Hamas’s attack on October 7 and Israel’s subsequent military operation in Gaza, leaders of Western media companies and cultural institutions have acted to suppress the speech of media workers who seek to elevate Palestinian voices or express concern over Israel’s human rights violations,” according to the report.

Among the most prominent victims are former Artforum Editor-in-Chief David Velasco, who was let go after signing an open letter calling for a ceasefire; Michael Eisen, former eLife journal editor, who shared a headline from The Onion in his X page: “Dying Gazans Criticized for Not Using Last Words to Condemn Hamas;” Yara Jamal, founder of @FreePalestineHalifax, a grassroots organization committed to elevating the voices of the Palestinian community and opposing the genocide, who was fired from CTV News Atlantic after she spoke to a reporter from Saltwire.com, a Canadian website. In the interview, she denounced the Israeli occupation and was subsequently denounced by some CTV viewers and newsroom staffers as an anti-Semite. Like Bell, Pulitzer prize-winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen was scheduled to speak at New York City’s 92nd Street Y, but his presentation was called off after his signature appeared on an open letter published in the London Review of Books that was critical of Israel.

Countless others, including writer-activist-teacher Nora Lester Murad, author of a young adult novel called Ida in the Middle, have been targets of hate mail, online smears, harassing phone calls, and death threats for their pro-Palestinian writing and speech.

Others have been censured. As the NWU report notes, 38 employees of the Los Angeles Times were barred from covering anything about Palestine or Israel for at least three months after they signed a letter condemning Israel’s murder of journalists in Gaza. The paper claimed that their signatures violated the “ethics policy” of the paper.

National Writers Union Report Confirms Magnitude of the Retaliation

Freelance reporter Khawla Nakua worked on the NWU report and told Truthout that after October 7, many NWU members began hearing about anti-Zionist artists, writers and editors being restricted or fired because of their opposition to Israeli aggression; together, the group decided to move beyond anecdotal accounts to collect evidence. “We recognized that this was not just a journalism issue,” Nakua said. “People who speak their minds are often putting their work lives in jeopardy, so this is also a union issue, a workplace justice issue.”

According to Nakua, the NWU investigated two intertwined issues that affect media workers: retaliation for what they write or say, and self-censorship. “Of course, we know that there is a long history of pushback against people who speak up for Palestine, but I was still surprised by how intense it is,” she said. “The fact that journalists are getting opposition for signing letters demanding peace or advocating for an end to the killings and are being bullied and accused of antisemitism if they criticize Israel is appalling and is having a massive impact on how reporters do their jobs.”

Equally insidious, she told Truthout, is the chilling effect of these well-publicized firings and cancellations, a reality that has left reporters wary of calling the war a genocide or labeling massacres as anything other than “regrettable accidents.”

New rules for reporters have also been imposed and in many places limit the scope of coverage or even how staff can use their personal social media accounts to comment on world events.

Zachary Lennon-Simon is a video editor at Delish Magazine, a Hearst publication, and the co-chair of the union representing Hearst employees.

“Almost immediately after October 7, there were some internal emails sent to everyone on staff pledging that Hearst — which owns 35 TV stations, 24 daily and 52 weekly newspapers, and more than 200 magazines — would donate to pro-Israel organizations. Nothing specific was said about helping the Palestinian people,” he told Truthout. “The only other message was to denounce Hamas’s violence. Then, after Samira Nasr, the editor of Harper’s Bazaar, wrote something on social media about the horror of what the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) was doing in Gaza — including cutting off access to water and electricity — there were calls for her firing. Debi Chirichella, the president of Hearst Magazines, condemned Nasr’s statement and Nasr subsequently apologized.”

Shortly after this, Lennon-Simon said, Chirichella issued the Hearst Social Media Acceptable Use Policy. It said that anyone who writes, edits, takes photos, or makes videos for Hearst Magazines is prohibited from posting political messages that run counter to the positions taken by Hearst publications on their social media pages. “It was a cartoonishly restrictive policy,” he said, “and stressed that if we’re unsure if something is allowable, we should consult a supervisor before posting it.”

Lennon-Simon further reports that staff were later asked to sign a document agreeing to abide by the new rules. “We had meetings where even our managers told us that if we were not comfortable signing it, we shouldn’t do so. HR responded by saying that even if we did not sign, we were obliged to follow company policy.”

Ramping Up Longstanding Prejudice

“The mainstream media has been dehumanizing the Palestinian people for decades,” Ibrahim Hooper, communications director at the Council on American-Islamic Relations, told Truthout. “In general, there is now a tremendous backlash against people in media who speak out in support of Palestinian humanity, but atrocities against Palestinians have been happening for years and, for the most part, the media has ignored them. Now they are finally seeing what Israeli extremists are doing and it is registering that the Israeli government is seeking the erasure of the Palestinian people.”

Young adult author Autumn Allen has been on the receiving end of this backlash.

Her first novel, All You Have to Do, was named one of the best young adult books of 2023 by Kirkus and she was slated to give multiple talks about the book to school groups during the winter and spring.

“Those of us who write for children and teens make a good portion of our income from school visits,” Allen told Truthout. “A parent reached out to me and asked me to come to a public school in Sharon, Massachusetts, on World Hijab Day, which takes place each year on February 1. The idea is to dispel stereotypes about women who, like me, wear hijab. I agreed to do presentations at the middle school and high school.”

Three days before the talks were to take place, Allen was told that some parents felt that her presentation would make the school “unsafe” for Jewish students. “These parents had gone to my website and saw that it includes a painting of a child standing in front of a wall with graffiti on it,” Allen explains. “The word ‘Allah’ appears along with the word ‘resistance’ which is written in Arabic. As a Black Muslim woman, I am offended that people see this as menacing or harmful. I was accused of being a hater of Jews, an anti-Semite, and when people defended me on social media, calling me an accomplished author, someone responded that Hitler was an accomplished author, too. It’s character assassination.”

A second incident took place in early May. This time, Allen was scheduled to speak at a secular private school in Brookline, Massachusetts.

“The weekend before I was scheduled to give my talk, the school emailed me to say that some parents were once again calling me an anti-Semite,” Allen said. “I’d been working on my presentation for months and the school eventually agreed to host me for a teacher book club meeting. They also rescheduled my student talk for June 4 but did not announce that I was coming until the day before. On the 4^th, some parents who objected to my presence kept their kids home. It was sad to see empty seats but the trustees of the school came and there was not much backlash after the fact.”

Despite this, Allen says that the experience of being called antisemitic has taken a toll. “I am anxious,” she said. “I get migraines and for a month or six weeks after the Sharon talk was canceled, they became more frequent. The situation feels explosive. I know I am not the first or only person this has happened to — a Latinx friend who was scheduled to speak at a school was canceled after parents said she was going to teach critical race theory to the kids — but all of this has made me step back a bit.”

Even so, Allen says that she continues to receive harassing messages on her website and social media feeds.

For author Nora Lester Murad — a Jewish woman married to a Palestinian — campaigns like the one directed at Allen are an attempt to delegitimize Palestinian voices and silence anti-Zionist Jews. “By conflating the nearly 4,000-year-old Jewish identity with the 75-year-old state of Israel, pro-Israel political actors disingenuously suggest that portraying Palestinians as human, as people with rights, or even just treating Palestine as a legitimate topic of inquiry, comes at the cost of Jewish safety,” she wrote in 2023.

The NWU report notes this fallacy and points out that the conflation of antisemitism and anti-Zionism has had a deleterious impact on what U.S. media makers say and report.

As the report notes: “When management at media organizations keep their employees in the West from critically covering the Israeli government, highlighting extreme violence on social media, or advocating for the protection of their colleagues, they contribute to the escalating violence that is materially affecting the most vulnerable media workers in Gaza. They also risk undermining several core journalistic imperatives — including the imperative to minimize harm.”

During the week of July 4 alone, Al Jazeera reports that five journalists, including Amjal Jahjauh and Wafa Abu Dabaun, were killed by Israeli airstrikes. May their memory be a blessing.