Another Sharp Weapon: Gender and Revolt in Arab and Jewish Editorial Cartoons, 1936–1939

72 Journal of South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies Vol. XL, No.2, WINTER 2017 Another Sharp Weapon: Gender and Revolt in Arab and Jewish Editorial Cartoons, 1936-1939 Jeff Barnes* Introduction Editorial cartoons gained a prominent position in the Arab and Jewish press in mandatory Palestine during the 1936-1939 Arab Rebellion. Cartoons in the Jewish daily Davar and Arab daily Filastin expressed Jewish and Palestinian nationalist sentiments respectively during the revolt, negotiating the complicated and emerging contours of nationalist discourse in both communities during this key historical juncture. They played a significant role in producing and reflecting public opinion,1 especially during the national strike that defined the first stage of the rebellion, and provide an excellent lens through which to view the emerging conflict in Palestine in the first half of the twentieth century. In spite of their prominent role in theArab and Jewish press in Palestine during the 1936 strike, they have received little attention from scholars.2 In his excellent monograph on the press in mandatory Palestine, Mustafa Kabha briefly considers *Jeffrey John Barnes is a Ph.D. student in the department of history at the University of Akron specializing in twentieth century Palestine. His research focuses on editorial cartoons and identity in Palestine and Israel in the twentieth century. 1 Press argues that cartoons occupy a liminal status between their production by societal elites, who dominate print media, and their reception by a (in the case of Palestine, largely illiterate) mass audience. This tension leads to cartoons, especially in low-literacy contexts like Palestine, simultaneously producing and reflecting popular opinion. See: Charles Press, The Political Cartoon (London: The Associated Press, 1981), 11. 2 Scholars have devoted considerably greater attention to Palestinian editorial cartoons in the post Naksa (1967) era. This is in part due to the towering influence of Naji al-Ali, Palestine’s most prominent cartoonist. See for example: Sune Haugbolle, “Naji al-Ali and the Iconography of Arab Secularism,” in Visual Culture in the Modern Middle East: Rhetoric of the Image, ed. Christiane Gruber and Sune Haugbolle (Bloomington, IN: Indian University Press, 2013), OraybAref Najjar, “Cartoons as a Site for the Construction of Palestinian Refugee Identity: An Exploratory Study of Cartoonist Naji al-Ali,” Journal of Communication Inquiry 31 (July 2007), and Nadia Yaqub, “Gendering the Palestinian Political Cartoon,” Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication 2 (2009). 73 cartoons in Filastin, especially as they relate to British censorship of the press, but offers no analysis of specific images.3 Khalidi, who provides a cogent discussion of the role of the Mandate-era press in the project of Palestinian identity, stating that “[o]ne of the best ways to gain an understanding of the linkage between local patriotism, anti-Zionism, and Arabism in the coalescence of Palestinian identity if via study of the burgeoning press in Palestine,”4 fails to reference cartoons at all, in spite of the fact that they demonstrate this linkage to perhaps a greater degree than the editorials he cites. LeVine’s work, which highlights the importance of images, especially advertising, in the production of Palestinian identity in the Mandate-era Jaffa press, provides a brief reference to cartoons yet offers no analysis.5 The only work entirely devoted to cartoons in both the Jewish and Arab press during the Thawra is Sandy Sufian’s well-researched and illuminating article that draws on representation theory and demonstrates that physiognomic depictions of the body of the “Other” in Jewish andArab cartoons during the period in question served to construct the opposing group as deviant, manipulative, uncivilized, and premodern.6 The present paper adds to the extant scholarship through viewing these images through the lens of gender. Editorial cartoons in theArab and Jewish press reveal how nationalists saw the emerging conflict in Palestine primarily in gendered terms. Many of Filastin and Davar’s political cartoons employed caricatures of women to signify national difference; others referenced gendered components of Jewish and Palestinian nationalist discourse respectively. The gendered content of cartoons in both papers intersected with other signifiers including race, an imagined historical past, and national figureheads, contributing to the construction of the Jewish and Palestinian national imaginary. Decoding the multilayered signs...