The Palm Beach Post fired its editorial page editor after the Florida paper ran a cartoon on the war in Gaza that local Jewish groups slammed as antisemitic.
Tony Doris, 67, who worked at the Gannet-owned broadsheet for more than 20 years, was let go last month following the backlash.
The syndicated cartoon ran in January and showed two Israeli soldiers rescuing a hostage held captive by Hamas with the caption: “Some Israeli Hostages Are Home After Over a Year of Merciless War.”
The soldiers tell the hostage “watch your step” as the three figures walk over a pile of bodies with the label “over 40 thousand Palestinians killed.”
Doris, who is Jewish, claimed the illustration was simply anti-war.
“I fully support Israel’s right to exist,” Doris told Stet News, a nonprofit news group in Palm Beach that earlier reported his firing.
“I think you can feel that way and still be open to discussion of the issue of violence that has taken place there.”
Gannett declined to comment on Doris’ ouster.
“The cartoon did not meet our standards,” Lark-Marie Anton, a Palm Beach Post spokesperson, told The Post in a statement. “We sincerely regret the error and have taken appropriate action to prevent this from happening again.”
The cartoon immediately stirred controversy in the posh community, leading the Jewish Federation of Palm Beach County to buy a full-page ad in the following week’s Sunday Palm Beach Post denouncing the decision.
In the ad, the nonprofit argued the cartoon trivialized hostages’ suffering and “spread dangerous antisemitic tropes, including the false and inflammatory accusation of bloodlust.”
Senior editors at Gannett took action after the ad ran – suspending Doris and meeting with leaders from the federation, including president and chief executive Michael Hoffman.
During the meeting, the Gannett editors apologized for running the cartoon and discussed ways to promote healthy dialogue around issues important to the area’s big Jewish community, Hoffman told The New York Times.
A week later, Doris said a senior editor fired him for violating company policy, though the editor did not specify which policy he breached.
Doris said he was not paid any severance.
“I think it speaks to a misunderstanding or failure to engage with the mission of an editorial page,” he told the Times.
Jeff Danziger, the political cartoonist behind the image that stoked uproar, has penned several anti-war drawings throughout his career.
He told the Times the cartoon was not antisemitic, but “simply a case of, ‘this war’s gone on long enough.’”
“I’m a Vietnam veteran, and I think that I know what I’m talking about – at least from the standpoint of war being bad,” said Danziger, who served as an intelligence officer in the Army and has a Jewish father.
