An Iranian newspaper is under fire for a cartoon depicting Palestinian civilians as being “neutral” victims in a war between two sides, which some have interpreted the depicted conflict as being between Israel and Iran.
Iranian Reformist newspaper Arman Daily has been criticized for running a cartoon depicting the two sides in the current war in Gaza as playing with innocent people’s lives, an accusation the publication reportedly denied. In its July 26 edition, Arman’s cartoon on the back page brought attention to the civilian lives lost in Gaza since the war began in the first week of July. The war has killed over 1,000 Palestinians, mostly civilians, and over 40 Israelis, mostly soldiers.
The cartoon depicts two sides, one wearing blue and white, the other red, playing ping pong. But instead of a ping pong ball, they are lobbing a bomb with a lit fuse back and forth. Instead of a dividing net, there is a women and two children lying in terror in the middle of the table. The woman is wearing a keffiyeh as a head scarf to represent that they are a Palestinian family.
Tasnim News Agency was the first conservative outlet to bring attention to this cartoon, in an article titled, “Arman newspaper’s strange insult to the Palestinian resistance front.” Such accusations, some believe, sometimes come as warning signs before newspapers are shut down.
The Tasnim article read, “With the first interpretation, the person opposite the individual with the shirt depicting the Zionist usurper (in blue and white) could be described as a symbol of Palestinian resistance (in a red shirt), specifically Hamas. However, with another look, one could take away that the person opposite the Zionist is Iran. Because the shirt the enemy of the Zionist is wearing in this cartoon could suggest that it is Iran’s national team.” For any publication to suggest that Iran and Israel are playing with innocent Palestinian lives is a serious accusation in Iran.
The article criticized the depiction of those fighting Israel, meaning Hamas and other armed groups, as “being at fault for killing innocent people in Gaza.” It continued, “In reality, there are not more than two sides in this fight and the oppressed people of Palestine must be depicted as opposing the occupying regime of Quds.”
According to the article, “While Arman newspaper depicts the people of Palestine as being neutral, and in the fight between the Palestinian resistance and the Zionists depict both as … killing the Palestinian people, not even the Zionists make this claim.”
Interestingly, Arman’s archives no longer show the edition that carried this cartoon. It is not clear why the outlet took the entire edition of the newspaper offline.
According to Tasnim, Arman responded to its original accusation with an article titled, “Childish Noisemaking of Tasnim News Agency.” That article, which Tasnim claims ran in its July 28 edition, has since been taken down. Tasnim has a screenshot of the article, which appears to have been featured on the bottom of the front page of the newspaper. However, only the title is legible in the screenshot.
According to Tasnim, Arman had claimed that the individual standing opposite the Israeli player was in actuality the “global arrogance,” meaning world powers, particularly Western powers. Tasnim opined that no “sane person would accept this justification,” claiming that never has Israel lobbed a missile toward the “global arrogance.” The article suggested that instead of “laughable and unbelievable justifications,” they should “apologize to the Iranian nation and the oppressed Palestinian resistance.”