Political Cartoon (Patreon)

I didn't have any doodles today; regular readers know why I have been thrown off-track recently, with the death of a beloved family pet. Typically I load images into Patreon all at once, and then I schedule their release-- so most of the Doodles, "BOHICA Blues Downrange!" and Classic Comics that people see here were loaded weeks ago and timed to appear at certain days and hours. As it turns out, I had started running out of pre-loaded stuff by this day, the 14th of August, and I had not thought to load anything prior.

But I'll share a political cartoon I made years ago when I was living in Israel. It is captioned in Hebrew, "Another Middle East extremist hijacking" and in the comic I portray the then-Prime Minister of Israel, Ehud Barak, as an airline pilot trying to fly the "plane of state" (as opposed to Captaining the "ship of state") and he is being hijacked by a figure in dark robes and glasses.

The figure was Ovadia Yosef, and he was the chief Rabbi of Israel among the Sephardi, or Mizrachi, community --the Jews from the "Eastern" lands, usually Arabic but could also include the Subcontinent. He was the leader of the ultra-Orthodox "Shas" Party, a political party in Israel that held a lot of votes and represented a lot of power. Their primary concerns were squaring away benefits for the Ultra-Orthodox community in Israel.

In Israel there is a huge rift between the Ultra-Orthodox community and pretty much everyone else. Ordinary Israeli citizens go to regular schools, earn degrees, study science and economics and medicine, and are drafted into the economy. A sizeable chunk of tax revenue is eaten up by the Ultra-Orthodox community, which is made up of a lot of men who  go to religious schools and pretty much just study religious scripture all day, every day. They say they are "maintaining the Jewish nature of the nation" through prayer and philosophy while everyone else says they are just lazy leeches who don't work, don't serve in the Army, and contribute nothing in return. They are characterized by very large families as well, so the tax burden is seen as growing each generation (of course, a lot of people raised in Ultra-Orthodox families leave the religious communities and join the "regular" world, so there's that). 

Anyhow, after a particularly contentious election in which I perceived the Shas party as have secured a lion's share of resources for themselves through blocking votes in the Knesset (the Israeli Parliament) I drew this cartoon out of frustration. This was shortly after 9/11 so even if I could have found a publication gutsy enough to print it it would have been rejected for "too soon" reasons.

Israeli politics are a whole different breed, and coming back to America in 2002 was like a breath of fresh air. Still, I liked my time there and would go back again, at least to visit. There is a saying in Israel: 

"You visit Israel for a week, then go home and write an editorial. You visit for a month, then go home and write an article. You visit for a year, then go home and write a book. But you visit Israel any longer than a year, when you go home you don't bother trying to write anything at all, because there is nothing you can say that will adequately address what's going on."

I agree to that in spades.