Radically Unlike

What an ugly cartoon reveals about educated liberal opinion in Ireland

When a new Martyn Turner cartoon on the Middle East appears in the Irish Times, the reaction of most readers is presumably something like: “Oh goody! He’s going to stick it to Israel.” Certainly, there is no chance that he will challenge their expectations, add nuance, or portray the conflict in anything but the simplest partisan terms. Turner has a long history of crude anti-Israel content, some of it bordering on the antisemitic¹. None of it is interesting except as a guide to the attitudes of the average Irish Times reader. False and offensive in ways that are perfectly invisible to these affluent educated liberals, Turner’s recent cartoon of 19 December² is a fruitful case for analysis:

A couple stands by a beach, the man holding a newspaper with the headline ‘Bondi Horror’. A shark fin protruding from the water suggests we are in Australia. “Somehow everyone feels worse about the mindless slaughter of innocents when it takes place at the seaside in the sun …” says the man. This is juxtaposed with an image of a Gazan on a beach ( we know he’s Gazan because ‘Gaza’ is written on his waistcoat). As he drags a body bag over a sand dune, he says: “Didn’t work like that for us …”

What exactly is being compared here? On Bondi Beach, Jews were massacred for being Jews. Their killers tried to murder as many Jews as possible. It was not a tit-for-tat killing. It was not an act of gang warfare. It was not an episode in a war. It was a targeted massacre of Jews celebrating a religious holiday.

In Gaza, the civilians who died were the casualties of a war. Gazans started the war. The victims were not targeted for being Muslims or Arabs. They were not killed by actors looking to maximise the death toll.

The two situations, then, are radically unlike. One can imagine psychological tests for identifying potential perpetrators of sectarian atrocities which lay out these two situations and ask people if they are alike. Such a test could also be administered to different societal groups to gauge their commitment to basic civilisational principles.

How do we feel as a society about such things? If a person is aggrieved about the actions of some members of an ethnic or religious group and enacts bloody revenge on other members of that group, based purely on their ethnic or religious identity, do we relativise the massacre by deflecting from the victims to the killer’s grievance? Does our answer to this question depend on the ethnic or religious identity of the perpetrators and the victims? If a French extremist blows up a mosque in Marseille citing the persecution of Christians in Africa, do we say: That is awful, ghastly, but where is our sympathy for the victims of the Islamist militias?

Clearly, there can be causal connections between a war here and a racist atrocity there. Violent extremists are inspired by all kinds of things. And if you zoom out far enough, any two things can be made to seem alike. In this case, there are bloody victims in Sydney and Gaza. They are certainly alike to that extent.

A fish is like a cabbage. A sewing needle is like a cyclops.

But that is not how Martyn Turner joins them. Rather, he uses the phrase “mindless slaughter of innocents”. As well as eliding the material differences between the two cases, this description is remarkably inaccurate on its own terms.

All of the casualties on Bondi Beach were innocent, except for the two shooters. In Gaza, according to the best estimates, about 40% of casualties were Hamas fighters³. The IDF achieved this percentage, under extremely challenging conditions, because it was targeting Hamas militants. The Bondi killers achieved their 100% murder rate of Jewish civilians because that is who they were targeting.

“Mindless” simply does not apply to either case. The IDF took all kinds of measures to minimise civilian deaths, while the Bondi killers planned and executed their massacre of as many Jews as they could.

Pacifists are free to deplore the civilian-to-combatant ratio in Gaza of around 1.5 to 1. They can say that not a single civilian should die in war. However, if they are sincere, they should acknowledge that the IDF has performed better in this regard than other militaries, as the average civilian-to-combatant ratio for conflicts worldwide is about 9:1⁴.

Moreover, the IDF accomplished this against an enemy that sought to maximise the civilian casualties on its own side. As such, to an extent greater than in other conflicts, both belligerents in Gaza bear responsibility for civilian casualties. (This reasoning is founded on nothing other than a belief in Gazans as moral agents.) This emphatically does not apply in Bondi, where there were no belligerents, just two psychos shooting at Jews celebrating Hanukkah.

Thus, “slaughter of innocents” is a full, honest description of the events in Bondi, but only a partial, tendentious characterisation of the war in Gaza.

So why does Turner’s cartoon not strike Irish Times readers as an affront to liberal values and common decency? Surely liberals should be concerned more than anyone with differentiating racist murders from the grievances that inspire them?

Well, if you believe that Israel more or less did what the Bondi shooters did, just on a vastly larger scale and over a period two years, then Martyn is comparing like with like. To believe this, you have to put October 7 out of your mind; airbrush Hamas and other militant groups out of the story; forget the hostages, the killing of IDF soldiers, the killing of Hamas operatives, the rockets fired into Israel from Gaza; you have to look right past the efforts of the IDF to avoid civilian casualties – all those evacuation orders, advance warnings, humanitarian pauses and aborted strikes – you have to strip Gazans of agency and picture them leading ordinary peaceful lives until Israelis suddenly ran amok and slaughtered them for being Muslims, or Gazans, or Arabs, or Palestinians.

And is this not precisely the impression that the coverage of the war in Gaza would stamp on an uncritical mind? All that downplaying and ignoring of Hamas crimes; all that trumpeting of every allegation against Israel, no matter how implausible; all that presentation of the conflict not as a war, but as an Israeli assault on civilians, nay children, nay babies; all that deployment of the ‘genocide’ narrative, which has been around since the late 1960s and was cynically rolled out just days after October 7 – all of that paints a picture of the war as something like the Bondi shootings writ large.

To the extent that this elaborate fantasy has been constructed in the minds of Irish Times readers, so they will see the Martyn Turner cartoon as just and fitting. And viewed in this light, the point Turner makes is almost moral.

Almost but not quite. For there is one big falsehood remaining. It would be only proper to divert the sympathies of Irish Times readers from the Jews killed on Bondi Beach to the Arabs killed in Gaza if the plight of Gazans had generally been overlooked.

But of course this has not been the case. No suffering people on Earth have received as much sympathy and attention as Gazans. Not Yemenis, not Sudanese, not Druze, not Ukrainians. And certainly not the Israelis murdered on October 7.

The entire framing of the cartoon is off: Look how we care about these people in Sydney, it implies, but not so much about these people in Gaza. We care about the white English-speaking people here, but not the brown Arabic-speaking people there. This is the trite conceit that is being pushed even though it obviously does not pertain.

Overwhelmingly, the cartoon’s message is false, as is its moral valence. It is not correcting an imbalance of concern, but reinforcing one. It is not balancing out a surfeit of concern for Australian Jews, but, five days after the Bondi Beach massacre, kicking sand over the few sparks of concern that exist.

When composing his cartoon, Martyn Turner, we can safely say, felt himself not only to be on firm moral ground, but backed by the crowd. He drew sympathy away from the victims of Bondi Beach by creating a resoundingly false equivalence – a falsity to which he and his readers are wholly blind. And so he led them away from an uncomfortable sympathy, a complexity of feelings, into the arms of a comforting fiction.

Sure, Bondi Beach was awful. And yes, Jew hatred is despicable. But the fire that has been burning in your breast for two years, and whose flames we have been fanning, that is a pure and righteous fire. Here is more fuel – carbon neutral, zero emissions, no additives.

1. https://x.com/RachelMoiselle/status/2002306222343827601

2. https://x.com/IrishTimesOpEd/status/2001896603209359568

3. With due acknowledgement of the difficulties of making this calculation and uncertainties around the data. The figure comes from Salo Aizenberg, whose thorough analyses throughout the war have proven reliable: https://x.com/Aizenberg55/status/1998044573860319333

4. https://press.un.org/en/2022/sc14904.doc.htm#:~:text=25%20May%202022-,Ninety%20Per%20Cent%20of%20War-Time%20Casualties%20Are%20Civilians%2C%20Speakers,during%20the%20all-day%20debate.