RAMALLAH, West Bank — As soon as US President Donald Trump recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital on Dec. 6 and announced moving the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, Palestinian cartoonist Mohammad Sabaaneh started drawing caricatures on the subject, including one depicting Trump as Santa Claus offering a bag of gifts to an Israeli soldier that contains the crescent of a mosque and a church cross — a reference to Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.
In another caricature, Sabaaneh drew a big head of Trump replacing his mouth with a toilet seat; a Palestinian child wearing the Palestinian keffiyeh is peeing inside his mouth. Another cartoon shows an Arab kissing boots that represent the United States, and offering Palestine.
Some of the works of the young Palestinian cartoonist were published by al-Haya al-Jadida, while Sabaaneh posted others on his Facebook page.
Sabaaneh is considered one of the most famous caricaturists in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Sabaaneh, whose roots go back to Jenin in the northern West Bank, was born in Kuwait in 1979. He returned to the West Bank in the 1990s and earned a bachelor’s degree in fine arts with a specialization in interior design from An-Najah University in 2002. A member of the assessment committee of the Palestinian media competition and the international Cartoon Movement, he is now working as an administrator at the Arab American University in Jenin and as a cartoonist for daily paper al-Haya al-Jadida.
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