Cartoon of ex-chief justice Hayut stabbing IDF soldier in the back sparks outrage
Opposition Leader Yair Lapid condemns ‘sickening and dangerous incitement;’ Bar Association head calls on attorney general to investigate ‘fascist’ political cartoon
Sam Sokol is the Times of Israel's political correspondent. He was previously a reporter for the Jerusalem Post, Jewish Telegraphic Agency and Haaretz. He is the author of "Putin’s Hybrid War and the Jews"
A political cartoon portraying former chief justice Esther Hayut impaling an IDF serviceman drew intense criticism on Thursday, sparking a debate over the balance between incitement and freedom of the press.
In the illustration, which was published in the national religious weekly Shvi’i, Hayut can be seen jamming a flag bearing an image of the scales of justice into a soldier’s back, as he lays dead on the ground in Gaza.
Following the outcry and accusations that it was inciting violence, Shvi’i announced that it would reprint the magazine without the offending cartoon.
The cartoon’s message appeared to echo rhetoric on the right implying that two recent High Court rulings harmed the country’s war effort against Hamas.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government suffered two major legal defeats this week — with the High Court of Justice striking down legislation barring courts from evaluating government decisions on the basis of the judicial standard of reasonableness, and postponing the implementation of a bill meant to shield the prime minister from being ordered to recuse himself from office.
Although Hayut had stepped down in October, she was able to rule on the cases under procedures by which justices can rule on cases they have heard for three months after their retirement.
Following the rulings, Justice Minister Yariv Levin criticized the justices, saying that issuing what he called “judgments that are highly disputed even among themselves, while our soldiers are sacrificing their lives at the front, is an act that harms the unity of the people.”
After the cartoon appeared online, Courts Administration legal adviser Barak Laser contacted the magazine’s editors and urged them to remove it from their publication. This then prompted Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi, from Netanyahu’s Likud party, to accuse Laser of seeking to censor the media.
“It was brought to my attention that you contacted a media outlet with a puzzling instruction to refrain from publishing an illustration criticizing the judicial system,” Karhi wrote Laser on Thursday afternoon, calling on him to “refrain from giving instructions to citizens, and from any deviation from your authority.”
“I will not stand by your attempts to harm the freedom of expression of the citizens of Israel. You have no authority at all to censor media,” he declared.
Karhi later demanded an emergency cabinet meeting on freedom of the press. Karhi has long campaigned to shut down the Kan public broadcaster, which was seen as critical of the government.
In a communication with Shvi’i earlier in the day, Laser warned that the illustration could constitute “incitement to violence” and “contempt of court” and urged the publishers to remove it from the magazine, the Ynet news site reported.
Israel Bar Association head Amit Becher called on Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara to open a criminal investigation into the publication of the cartoon, calling it an anti-democratic, anti-Zionist, fascist and severe caricature containing sharp incitement” against Hayut and the court system “as a whole.”
“It is not for nothing that the image of a knife being stuck in the back of an IDF soldier was chosen and the clear and unmistakable goal is to create in everyone who is exposed to the image the understanding that the retired court president, and Israeli judges in general, are traitors to the country and the soldiers and are responsible for their fall in battle,” he tweeted.
Becher was joined in his condemnation by several lawmakers including Opposition Leader Yair Lapid, who called the cartoon a “moral disgrace” constituting “sickening and dangerous incitement.”
Urging Israelis to “denounce the discourse of violent hatred,” Lapid tweeted that “not only can words kill, drawings can as well.”
“To draw a figure, even of the person who hates you the most on the other side, stepping on the body of an IDF soldier, is definitely one of the lowest things seen here recently,” declared National Unity MK Matan Kahana, a sentiment echoed by Yisrael Beytenu MK Yulia Malinovsky.
“This cartoon and allowing it to be published is a national crime.
Our soldiers watch each other’s backs and really do not consider whether the soldiers who fight with them are right-wing, left-wing, secular, religious, for or against reform,” she tweeted.
The government’s controversial efforts to overhaul the judicial system, which were largely frozen at the outbreak of the war, had sparked severe civil unrest, mass protests, reserve military service refusal and the threat of nationwide strike action amid fears it would undermine Israel’s democracy.
