Part 1: They Called It Genocide Before the Word Existed
On June 26, 1936, the Jaffa-based Arabic newspaper Falastin published a cartoon titled "Danse Macabre." It showed Chaim Weizmann and Ze'ev Jabotinsky — the moderate Zionist statesman and the Revisionist firebrand, ideological opposites conscripted together for propaganda purposes — dancing gleefully with Death over a field of Arab skulls, all to establish the Jewish National Home in Palestine.
Looking at the cartoon, one would think that the Jews massacred Arabs at the gleeful behest of their leaders.
The Arab Revolt had begun roughly ten weeks earlier, on April 15, 1936, when Arab gunmen ambushed vehicles on the Tulkarm-Nablus road and killed two Jews. The following day, Jewish assailants linked to the Irgun murdered two Arab laborers near Petah Tikva in reprisal.
Those are the only two documented deaths of Arabs by Jews between the beginning of the revolt and the date of this cartoon. In fact, the number of Arabs killed by Jewish forces between World War I and 1936 is extremely low — less than one a year, far fewer than the numbers of Jews massacred by Arabs in riots to that point. Nearly all the Arabs who died were killed by British troops suppressing the revolt, not by any Jewish militia. The Haganah's formal policy in this period was havlagah, restraint, and the Irgun's broader reprisal campaign came later, in 1937–39.
In June 1936, this picture portrayed far more skulls than Arabs killed by Jews during the year.
This is an accusation of genocide by Jews before the term was even coined.
The standard contemporary defense of anti-Zionist discourse holds that it targets a political movement rather than a people — that criticizing Zionism is categorically distinct from antisemitism and should not be conflated with it. The Falastin cartoon suite from the summer of 1936 shows that they made no distinction between Jews and Zionists, using Jewish stereotypes in their "anti-Zionist" caricatures.
For example, "Jewish money speaks" with a Jew bribing a British official.
Or John Bull, symbolizing England, having married two wives - a chaste, peaceful Arab and an aggressive cigarette smoking Jewish woman showing her legs.
In one, a Queen Esther uses her sex appeal to convince the (British) King Ahasuerus to add to her long list of attacking Arabs while Mordecai (Weizmann) adds his two cents.
Jews controlling the British was a mainstay theme.
Even though Falastin was an Arabic paper, the cartoons seemed to be aimed at - and perhaps created by - the British diplomats in Palestine. See below.
The editors of Falastin were not distinguishing between antisemitism and anti-Zionism. They were running them as a single editorial project, with the genocide accusation as the headline act and the Protocols-era tropes — world control, financial manipulation, sexual corruption of gentile power — as the supporting evidence.
The Protocols, in fact, is what made the genocide accusation possible. If a shadowy secret group of Jews were controlling the world for their enrichment when they were in Europe, then when they come out in the open in Israel it is expected that their actions will continue to reflect their desire to control the region, but more openly, with utter disregard for human lives,
Part 2: A Note on What the Research Turned Up
The post above focuses on the Falastin "Danse Macabre" cartoon and the casualty record it distorted. But researching it produced a set of observations that seem significant enough to share separately. . Consider this a work in progress.
The cartoons were aimed at British readers, not Arab ones.
Falastin was an Arabic-language newspaper. Its readership was Arab. Yet this series of front-page cartoons — running from late June through mid-August 1936 — carried English captions alongside the Arabic, written in fluent idiomatic English, with Punch-style dialogue and titles like "Danse Macabre," "Another Sharp Weapon," and "A Well Deserved Honour." These are British editorial cartooning conventions, not Arabic ones. "Danse Macabre" as a title carries zero cultural resonance in Islamic tradition; it is a specifically Western European reference, invoking the medieval totentanz and the Allied WWI atrocity cartoon tradition. An Arab editor titling a cartoon for Arab readers would not reach for that phrase. Someone addressing British readers would reach for it instinctively.
British Mandate officials — administrators, political officers, military intelligence personnel — read Arabic as a professional requirement. Falastin knew they were reading it. The English captions weren't a translation service for Arab readers; they were a signal to British readers already consuming the Arabic: we know you're here, and we want to make sure you don't miss the point. The cartoon suite was aimed at the Mandate administration, using their own cultural vocabulary to tell them: your Zionist proteges are mass murderers.
The visual style points to a British contributor.
The cartoon style itself — the John Bull figure in the "Man of Two Wives" cartoon, the dinner-party composition of "Another Sharp Weapon," the slave-driver-with-whip layout of "On the Way to Palestine," the formal caricature of named British officials in "A Well Deserved Honour" — is the visual grammar of British political cartooning, specifically the Punch tradition of the 1880s-1920s. An Arab cartoonist working in the Arabic visual tradition would not compose images this way. The Esther cartoon in particular required someone who knew the book of Esther closely enough to map its specific post-Haman dialogue onto a contemporary political scene — and who expected readers to catch the reference. That is the work of someone with a British classical education.
The cartoons ran for roughly six weeks and then seemingly stopped, apparently abruptly — at least partly because Falastin was suspended by Mandate authorities during the revolt. When publication resumed, the format did not continue. This is the profile of a guest contributor with a specific agenda and a finite engagement, not a house style. Someone came, produced the series, and either left Palestine or ceased contributing.
I have not been able to identify this person. There are no visible signatures on the cartoons, though the print quality of the surviving scans makes it difficult to be certain. If any reader with access to Colonial Office or Mandate administration archives, or with knowledge of British press history in Palestine in 1936, recognizes either the style or the circumstantial profile — a British Arabist with cartooning skills, classical education, Arabic fluency, and access to Falastin's editors — I would very much like to hear from them.
The tropes traveled through British diplomatic culture.
The cartoon suite deploys what are recognizably Protocols-era antisemitic tropes: Jewish financial control of governments, Jewish women manipulating gentile rulers, Jewish world domination through hidden mechanisms. These are Russian in origin — the Protocols were fabricated by the Tsarist Okhrana in the late 19th century — but they reached the Arab world through multiple vectors, of which direct Russian-to-Arab transmission is only one.
The British diplomatic and intelligence world of the early 20th century was saturated with conspiratorial antisemitism. The first English-language edition of the Protocols was published in 1920 by Eyre and Spottiswoode, the King's printer, with a preface by a former British intelligence officer — an establishment imprimatur, not a fringe publication. The British Arabist network in Palestine was exactly the milieu where that framework would have been most actively operationalized, because it gave officials a coherent explanation for the policy they already resented: Jewish influence over Balfour, over Lloyd George, over the Colonial Office, wasn't merely inconvenient — it was the Protocols machinery producing its predicted output. High Commissioner Chancellor wrote privately to his son in 1930 that he considered the Balfour Declaration "unjust to the Arabs and detrimental to the interests of the British," and his diary recorded that British civil servants in Palestine were so resentful of Jewish press criticism that they would resign en masse if they could afford to.
Those same officials were in daily contact with the Arab political and press elite — newspaper editors, lawyers, landowners, political leaders — who were educated, cosmopolitan, and looking for frameworks to understand what was happening to Palestine. The Protocols offered a complete explanatory system. British Arabists who already thought in those terms would have transmitted the framework through professional and social contact, long before formal Arabic Protocols translations were widely circulating.
I have written elsewhere about how Christian missionary antisemitism traveled from Western missionaries to Arab Christians and then into broader Arab political culture. The Falastin cartoon suite suggests a parallel and contemporaneous transmission: Russian conspiratorial antisemitism traveling through British diplomatic culture into the Arab press, producing in a single Jaffa newspaper in the summer of 1936 the synthesis that would eventually harden into the ideological infrastructure of modern anti-Zionism.
The genocide accusation in the "Danse Macabre" cartoon was not an indigenous Arab response to Zionist violence. The kill count was two. It was, in all likelihood, a British antisemite's cartoon, drawn in the British atrocity-propaganda tradition, deploying a Russian conspiracy framework, published in an Arab paper for a British audience — and in the process handing the Arab nationalist movement a fully formed ideological weapon it has been using ever since.
Thursday, April 30, 2026
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