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Only a handful of American
movie stars speak up for Palestine,
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and those few are made to pay
the price for their public sport.
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Why is it so important for the
movie industry to silence those voices?
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Israeli historian Giora Goodman says.
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So I was surprised
again and again to find just
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how much effort
and care and thought
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had been put in by
Israeli government officials
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by Israeli IDF officers into
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bringing over to Israel's cause
what is the global entertainment capital
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So Hollywood matters
to Israel because it is influential
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But why does Israel matter to Hollywood?
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It is difficult to ask that question
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let alone answer it without
attracting charges of anti-Semitism
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- Mr. Cartman, you're on dangerous
freaking ground here, buddy
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> I'm sorry, why is it so offensive
to say who runs Hollywood?
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People like Hollywood
Hollywood's cute
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The Jews should be
honored to be in charge of it.
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It is true that widespread
anti-Semitism conspiracy theories about
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Jews running Hollywood exist
and fuel a dangerous mentality.
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But making the whole topic
taboo to talk about is not the answer.
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Israeli historian Giora Goodman
and British historian Tony Shaw
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co-authored a book
called Israel and Hollywood.
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The authors told
the University of Southern California that
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Hollywood bosses such
as Barney Balaban in the 1950s,
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Arthur Crim in the 1960s
and Haim Saban in the 21st century
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have also sought to use their
political influence in the White House
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and with U.S. decision
makers to promote the goals
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of Israeli diplomacy in war and peace.
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It is undeniable that Hollywood
has a very real influence on
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U.S.-Israel relations,
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and that influence is
linked to Hollywood's Jewish roots.
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For a people so small in number,
our impact is staggering
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Dozens of Emmy and Golden Globe winners
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and almost 40% of Oscar-winning directors
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are members of the tribe
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That is Israel's very own
Genesis Price Foundation
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It is a widely known fact that
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modern America first saw
light on a Hollywood screen.
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It was largely the product of 6 movie
studios established in the 1920s
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And run for over 30 years
by a group of Jewish immigrants.
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They had strikingly similar backgrounds
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These five or six Jewish
immigrants ended up
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building all the first major studios
that created Hollywood from scratch.
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All of these men who founded Hollywood
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were born within a 500
mile radius of one another
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and all of them wound up roughly within
15 miles of one another In Los Angeles
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the influence Hollywood
and its movie stars
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had in the US would soon be utilized
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to garner support from American Jews
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and Gentiles alike
for the Zionist project
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This kind of movie going was religious
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because it had to do with worship
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It had to do with the screen
being larger than you were
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and you being in awe
of what you were looking at
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The Jewish production studio heads
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organized fundraisers
with their movie stars
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and wealthy influential connections
and collected 10s of millions of dollars
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for a massive emigration of Jews
to Palestine under the British Mandate
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One of these men, Barney Belaban
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head of Paramount Pictures
from the 1930s to the 60s
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would even help found the most
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influential Israeli lobby
group in America, APEC.
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But money and political connections
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were only secondary to their main efforts
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which was to tell
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a romanticized story
about the creation of Israel.
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The first feature length Zionist film
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made by Hollywood was
secretly funded in large part
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by the controversial Jewish National Fund.
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JNF, established in 1901
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is the financial arm
of the Zionist organization.
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The film did not do well
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but the partnership
between Israel and Hollywood
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was not going to fizzle out that easily.
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They made film after film
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until they hit the jackpot
with the 1960 movie Exodus.
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Exodus was based on a racist novel
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by the same name that the
Israeli Foreign Minister Golda Meir
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at the time said was more influential than
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60 years of Zionists
and Israeli propaganda.
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As a film, Exodus went
even further than the book
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in totally erasing the Nakba
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the massive ethnic
cleansing and displacement of
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750,000 Palestinians in 1948.
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The Jewish hero of the story, Ben Canaan
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begs the Arabs to stay in their homes
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and become an equal part of the state
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but they refuse and leave.
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After the 1960s,
Hollywood moved on from completely
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ignoring the Palestinians
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To portraying Arabs and
Muslims as irrational, evil terrorists
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who often had no
real motivation beyond
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they hate our freedoms.
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Arab enemies were dehumanized
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while telling the story of
Jewish victims of the Holocaust
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helped melt American hearts
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A 1978 TV miniseries called Holocaust
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featuring Meryl Streep was
watched by nearly 100 million Americans.
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It told the story of the Holocaust
in four episodes over 9 1/2 hours
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and ended with Jewish orphans
being smuggled into Palestine illegally.
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It was not until Israel's
invasion of Lebanon in 1982,
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when Israel killed thousands of civilians
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that tides started
turning and public opinion
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that Israel was the underdog
started to change in the US
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in the 1980s with the first Lebanon war
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and then the first Zindifadan.
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The moral doubts
about Israel's use of force
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and the direction of its
government and that is the younger
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the younger liberals,
they are more ambivalent about Israel
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while the old generation,
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such as Kirk Douglas,
would support Israel.
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According to a 2004 report
by the American Jewish Committee,
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a younger Netanyahu met
with Hollywood executives in 2001.
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And challenge them to do
something about Israel's image problem.
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Netanyahu has long enjoyed close
relations with his buddies in Hollywood.
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One of the most shocking Hollywood
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stories is that of his pal,
producer Arnon Milken.
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Milken is behind massively
successful commercial films like
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Pretty Woman, Fight Club, 12 Years a Slave
Little Woman, and many more
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During his time as an
Israeli spy and arms dealer,
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one of Milken's jobs was to
acquire uranium from South Africa
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for Israel's nuclear program
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and in exchange, he ran this
massive pro apartheid campaign
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in Hollywood on behalf of South Africa.
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In the end, one of
the most important things
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Hollywood did to rally
American support for Israel
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was to tell the story of the Holocaust
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and connect it to
the establishment of Israel
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while completely
disregarding and erasing the suffering
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and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.
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Countless films, TV shows,
and fictional characters
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work to make often
white-looking Israeli heroes
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relatable to white people in the US
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and to paint Muslims
and Arabs as the violent
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and savage enemy of the unified
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peace-loving Judeo-Christian people.
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What do you think?
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Do Hollywood films and celebrities still
hold influence over what people think of
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Israel and Palestine?