The Electronic Intifada 14 April 2025
Hollywood has encountered protests over its support for Israel’s genocidal war against Gaza. (Michelle Felix)
Dozens of film and television workers picketed outside the headquarters of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences – the organization that runs the Oscars – in Los Angeles on 31 March, demanding the academy speak out in defense of Palestinian filmmaker Hamdan Ballal.
In early March, Ballal won an Oscar for co-directing the documentary No Other Land. A few weeks later, Israeli settlers stormed the West Bank village of Susiya and brutally beat Ballal, after which Israeli forces abducted and detained him.
While Ballal’s co-director Basel Adra told the Associated Press that he believed the assault and detention might have been “a revenge on us for making the movie,” the Academy refused to explicitly condemn Israeli settlers for the attack on an artist it had feted mere weeks before.
The Academy later issued an apology for not naming Ballal in its initial statement. However, the apology amounted to a vague statement of concern about “reports of violence” against Ballal and the tragedy of “violence of this kind anywhere in the world.”
The 31 March protest was organized by Entertainment Labor for Palestine (EL4P), a coalition of pro-Palestine workers in the film and television industries. One EL4P member, a television writer who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retribution from studio management, said that the Academy’s refusal to mention Israel in its statement is consistent with how Hollywood brass have operated throughout Israel’s genocide of Palestinians.
“They say they can’t make a statement [criticizing Israel] because it’s too political,” this writer explained, “but they don’t push back against all the celebrities who’ve said horrible things about Palestinians.”
The writer went on to describe a “culture of impunity” for advocates of Israel and its state ideology Zionism in Hollywood. The culture is much like the one Israel enjoys globally, where supporters of Israel’s genocide “are very emboldened to say what they want to say … with a green card for racism.”
As a result, the writer added, “there’s a lot of silence [about Palestine]” on production sets and in writers’ rooms, where “they’ve successfully made people scared of having the conversation.”
In spite of this repression, EL4P has organized a series of pro-Palestine actions over the past few months that have disrupted major industry events.
In February, EL4P members protested at the premiere of Captain America: Brave New World, disrupting the red carpet proceedings so completely that, according to multiple EL4P members, the livestream broadcast of the red carpet festivities had to be canceled. EL4P – which includes actors, writers, designers and technical workers – called for a boycott of the new Captain America installment because of its inclusion of an Israeli superhero named Sabra.
Sabra is based on a comic book agent of Mossad, the Israeli agency which undertakes spying and assassinations.
While legacy media ignored the EL4P protest, it got headlines in industry publications as influential as Variety, as well as multiple headlines in the Israeli press.
EL4P followed up the Captain America protest with a 2 March demonstration at the Oscars. The Oscars protest reportedly snarled up traffic blocks away from Hollywood’s biggest annual event.
As with the Captain America premiere, the Oscars protest garnered headlines both within and beyond the industry.
Freezing out fans
With the 15 March premiere of Disney’s Snow White approaching, media coverage of a growing pro-Palestine movement in the entertainment industry apparently alarmed Hollywood’s overwhelmingly pro-Israel executive class.
Before Snow White – co-starring former Israeli soldier Gal Gadot and vocal Palestine supporter Rachel Zegler – was even released, the studio elected to cancel its UK premiere altogether.
Then, Disney announced that the Hollywood premiere of Snow White – one of the studio’s major releases of 2025 – would be a limited event with no outside media allowed.
As the EL4P member explained, barring outside media from a film premiere – literally a publicity event – was not the only change Disney made to its traditional red carpet protocols.
“They brought in a lot more cops and security [than normal],” the EL4P member explained. “They had greenery walling off the front of the theater and put up blockades to prevent any fans from coming.”
In contrast to film premieres of the past, which offered moviegoers a chance to glimpse their favorite performers, “this wasn’t meant to be a fan event, for people to look at the stars coming in.”
The bizarre image of celebrities parading down a red carpet with no external media or cheering fans in attendance neatly captures the moment that pro-Israel entertainment executives have created. Having committed themselves to full support for Israel’s genocide, they are now willing to sacrifice both their audience and the bottom line to maintain the appearance of hegemony.
At the 31 March demonstration in support of Hamdan Ballal, which EL4P organized with anti-war group Codepink, dozens of workers in the film and entertainment industry brought a petition to the Academy demanding that the organization take a stronger stance in support of Ballal. The Academy responded by locking its doors and ignoring the protesters.
The EL4P member I spoke with said that this response typifies the contradictory approach that Hollywood executives have taken to the Palestine solidarity movement: “They’re planning their events around our protests, while at the same time trying to pretend we don’t exist.”
Executives can pretend all they want, but support for Palestine is clearly growing in the arts and entertainment industries. This same EL4P member noted that support for Palestine has grown in Hollywood even as local activist groups have taken the lead in organizing relief efforts after the Los Angeles wildfires and defending immigrants and students from ongoing ICE raids.
The EL4P member said that at wildfire relief events, “we always see a lot of people in kuffiyeh [the Palestinian checkered scarf]. There’s a lot of intersection and solidarity between these groups. Most people organizing against ICE see the connection with Palestine.”
While seeing these connections is critical for building solidarity, this EL4P member said that the group’s goal is “to keep the focus on Palestine.” The member noted that Hollywood’s pro-Israel executives “haven’t given an inch” since the genocide began, adding “that’s why we protest, to make sure that changes.”
William Johnson is an organizer with Theater Workers for a Ceasefire and a member of the New York-based Art Workers Inquiry.
