In 1956, Israeli Kariel Gardosh (pen name Dosh) created the cartoon character of Srulik. Just over a decade later, the Palestinian cartoonist and journalist Naji al-Ali started publishing in Al-Siyasa the comic strip which featured the Palestinian cartoon character Handhala. Over time, the figures of Srulik and Handhala gained much popularity and turned into epitomic characters representing respectively the “psychological disposition” (Kracauer) of Israeli and Palestinian peoples. Dosh was born in Budapest and, after he lost most of his family in the Holocaust, he immigrated to Palestine/Israel and died there in 2000. Al-Naji’s biography involves a different national catastrophe and exodus—he was born in a village near Nazareth in Palestine and, after the Palestinian exodus (Nakba) of 1948, he became a refugee in Lebanon and spent most of his adult life in that country. The purpose of this comparative study is not only to point to striking similarities between the two rivalry national characters of Srulik and Handhala (both are boys marked by naiveté, innocence, and perseverance—nehishut in the Israeli-Zionist context and sumud in the Palestinian case), but to explore the dilemmas the cartoonists faced in depicting their eyewitness figures as the realities around them changed. Thereby, the paper investigates the transmutations in representation and the considerations in having the boy-like cartoon characters mature with time. Overall, Handhala is the perpetual onlooker who, with his hands behind his back, observes the injustice inflicted on the Palestinian people by Israel, the Arab world, and the superpowers. Conversely, the figure of Srulik is a testimonial to the ideological slippage at the heart of Zionism, both in terms of its ambivalence towards Jewish legacy (e.g., the need for “the new breed of Jew”) and in educing from a history of persecution the guiding principle of “never again” which resulted in aggression towards the neighboring Arab states and in the oppression of the Palestinian people. Indeed, in later depictions, Srulik occasionally can no longer stand by and he is armed with a machine gun; a figure motivated by a collective sense of victimhood but no longer a victim. Finally, The paper will relate these dilemmas to the argument that, in the arts, the Zionist epic is structured around a teleological narrative while the Palestinian narrative is marked by muteness, circularity, and the stillness of time.