This is how they get you in the end. Steve Bell, the Guardian cartoonist, whose job is to shock and amuse while skewering the powerful, has been fired.

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He shocked his bosses (and mildly amused the rest of us) with a cartoon showing Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, with a scalpel, about to perform surgery on himself.

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On his stomach was a dotted outline of the sort you might find on a patient in an operating theatre. It was in the shape of Gaza, where war rages between Hamas and Israel.

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Editorial executives, presumably including Editor-in-Chief Katharine Viner, deemed this to be antisemitic and pulled it. They suggested it was a reference to Shakespeare’s Jewish moneylender, Shylock.

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Bell, who later posted the offending drawing online, insists it was nothing of the sort. His signature was followed by “after David Levine”, who in 1966 drew a similar cartoon, right, only with the US President Lyndon Johnson as the surgeon and a map of Vietnam on his stomach.

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A Guardian spokesman said: “The decision has been made not to renew Steve Bell’s contract. Steve Bell’s cartoons have been an important part of the Guardian over the past 40 years and we wish him all the best.”

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You might think that damns with faint praise a man who has spent most of his working life at the paper. I can’t help thinking they were already determined to get rid of him and seized on the Netanyahu drawing as a spurious excuse.

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I detest the Guardian and episodes such as this are the reason why. Cartoonists, like columnists, exist to offend people, without fear or favour. The more the rich and powerful elite are offended, the more likely it is that they deserved to be lampooned.

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But on the unbearably woke Guardian, which is run by vile, militant liberals without a funny bone between them, you may only caricature those at whom the Editor would poke fun.

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It is sometimes a dilemma. Editors must form judgements about whether the joke goes too far; whether the readers will get the gag (or the serious point being made); and what the proprietor will think of it.

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But the good Editor shrugs and accepts that we don’t all see the world in the same way. Then he, or she, defends the right of the cartoonist to hold views the newspaper would not espouse in, say, its Leader column.

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Cartoonists are, by nature, a subversive lot – insubordinate and rebellious. Woe to the features executive on the Daily Express who carelessly sent a cartoon by Carl Giles to the inkies without first examining his offering in minute detail.

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The old troublemaker was likely to have inserted a risqué element that could pass unnoticed at a glance but which could bring down the wrath of readers, the Chairman, the Board and the Editor on the poor, unsuspecting executive.

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Even the mildest mannered of cartoonists, such as the Daily Express’s Hector Breeze, were not above a bit of mischief. Hector, a gentle soul whose diffident personality disguised a scalpel wit, died in 2018, aged 90.

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Ralph Steadman wrote in 1996 that Breeze's “clumsy, bewildered characters restore my faith in the seriously daft.”

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Somewhere in my office at home is one of my favourite examples of his work. A never-ending boardroom table extends into the distance and a graph on the wall shows the disastrous performance of the company.

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At the head of the table, the Chairman is telling his many, many directors: “Good news at last, gentlemen – we’ve made the work-force redundant!”

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Breeze sold his first cartoon in 1975 to Melody Maker and went on to work for Private Eye, Punch, the Evening Standard, the Mirror, the Daily Sketch, and the Guardian as well as the Daily Express.

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In 2004 he was voted Pocket Cartoonist of the Year in the Cartoon Art Trust awards. Six months later, in 2005, the Express sacked him.

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Now the same fate has befallen Steve Bell. That’s not funny.

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‍ If you want to know what is really happening in Israel and Gaza, then you could do worse than read the work of an Anglo-Israeli journalist called Anshel Pfeffer.

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Pfeffer, 50, is a busy man. He is a senior correspondent and columnist for Haaretz, a leading liberal, centre-Left newspaper published in Tel Aviv.

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But he is also a correspondent for The Times and the Spectator and has contributed to the New York Times and the Washington Post. In addition, he has written the definitive book on Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, Bibi: The Turbulent Life and Times of Benjamin Netanyahu.

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Pfeffer was born in Manchester and raised in the suburb of Prestwich, where I lived for a while in the Seventies. His British passport has allowed him to report from countries that would kick out anyone showing an Israeli passport.

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He is a stylish writer and extremely well connected. As a young man, he wrote lyrically of life in England and especially of a colony of Hasidic Jews on Canvey Island.

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Follow him on X and the labyrinthine politics of the Middle East will suddenly start to make sense.

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Tech experts are helping head teachers and examiners to police and manage the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in schools.

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A website launched yesterday will “publish guidance, advice, real-life case studies and commentary to help schools navigate the complex landscape of AI in education as it develops”, according to The Times.

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Sir Anthony Seldon, headmaster of Epsom College, described it as “an uprising by educators to wrest control from the tech companies in the interest of all.”

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I wonder if anything similar is happening in the newspaper world? You can be sure that management, particularly at the tech-fixated Mirror, are licking their lips at the prospect of journalism without journalists to pay.

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A few weeks back, Hollywood screenwriters sensed the same thing happening in their industry and went on strike for 146 days to try to stop it. They are now back at work after the Writers Guild of America won concessions on pay, a new deal over online streaming and additional protection over studios’ use of artificial intelligence.

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Will the National Union of Journalists go down that road? Not a chance. The once-mighty NUJ (though it did cling to the coattails of the print unions) is now a mangy, toothless tiger. The bosses would love them to go on strike and give them an excuse for mass sackings.

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So expect some bollocks written by a machine to appear soon in a newspaper dropping on a doormat near you.