How does Hollywood help whitewash Israel’s ‘image problem’?

Only a handful of American
movie stars speak up for Palestine,

and those few are made to pay
the price for their public sport.

Why is it so important for the
movie industry to silence those voices?

Israeli historian Giora Goodman says.

So I was surprised again and again to find just

how much effort and care
and thought

had been put in by
Israeli government officials

by Israeli IDF officers into bringing

over to Israel's cause what is
the global entertainment capital.

So Hollywood matters
to Israel because it is influential.

But why does Israel matter to Hollywood?

It is difficult to ask that question,

let alone answer it without
attracting charges of anti-Semitism.

Mr. Cartman, you're on dangerous freaking

ground here, buddy. I'm sorry, why is it

so offensive to say who runs Hollywood?

People like Hollywood. Hollywood's cute.

The Jews should be honored to be in

charge of it. It is true that widespread

anti-Semitism conspiracy theories about

Jews running Hollywood exist and fuel a

dangerous mentality. But making the whole

topic taboo to talk about is not the

answer. Israeli historian Giora Goodman

and British historian Tony Shaw

co-authored a book called Israel and

Hollywood. The authors told the

University of Southern California that.

Hollywood bosses such as Barney Balaban

in the 1950s, Arthur Crim in the

1960s and Haim Saban in the 21st

century have also sought to use their

political influence in the White House

and with U.S. decision makers to promote

the goals of Israeli diplomacy in war and

peace. It is undeniable that Hollywood

has a very real influence on U.S.-Israel

relations, and that influence is linked

to Hollywood's Jewish roots. For a people

so small in number, our impact is

staggering. Dozens of

Emmy and Golden Globe winners and

almost 40% of Oscar-winning directors

are members of the tribe. That is

Israel's very own Genesis Price

Foundation. It is a widely known fact

that modern America first saw light on a

Hollywood screen. It was largely the

product of 6 movie studios established in

the 1920s. And run for over 30 years

by a group of Jewish immigrants. They had

strikingly similar backgrounds. These

five or six Jewish immigrants ended up

building all the first major studios that

created Hollywood from scratch. All of

these men who founded Hollywood were

born within a 500 mile radius of one

another, and all of them wound up roughly

within 15 miles of one another. In Los

Angeles, the influence Hollywood and its

movie stars had in the US would soon be

utilized to garner support from American

Jews and Gentiles alike for the Zionist

project. This kind of movie going was

religious because it had to do with

worship. It had to do with the screen

being larger than you were and you

being in awe of what you were looking at.

The Jewish production studio heads

organized fundraisers with their movie

stars and wealthy influential connections

and collected 10s of millions of dollars

for a massive emigration of Jews to

Palestine under the British Mandate. One

of these men, Barney Belaban, head of

Paramount Pictures from the 1930s to the

60s, would even help found the most

influential Israeli lobby group in

America, APEC. But money and political

connections were only secondary to their

main efforts, which was to tell a

romanticized story about the creation of

Israel. The first feature length Zionist

film made by Hollywood was secretly

funded in large part by the controversial

Jewish National Fund. JNF, established

in 1901, is the financial arm of the

Zionist organization. The film did not do

well, but the partnership between Israel

and Hollywood was not going to fizzle out

that easily. They made film after film

until they hit the jackpot with the 1960

movie Exodus. Exodus was based on a

racist novel by the same name that the

Israeli Foreign Minister Golda Meir at

the time said was more influential than

60 years of Zionists and Israeli

propaganda. As a film, Exodus went even

further than the book in totally erasing

the Nakba, the massive ethnic cleansing

and displacement of 750,000

Palestinians in 1948. The Jewish

hero of the story, Ben Canaan, begs the

Arabs to stay in their homes and become

an equal part of the state, but they

refuse and leave. After the 1960s,

Hollywood moved on from completely

ignoring the Palestinians. To portraying

Arabs and Muslims as irrational, evil

terrorists who often had no real

motivation beyond they hate our freedoms.

Arab enemies were dehumanized while

telling the story of Jewish victims of

the Holocaust helped melt American

hearts. A 1978 TV

miniseries called Holocaust featuring

Meryl Streep was watched by nearly 100

million Americans. It told the story of

the Holocaust in four episodes over 9 1/2

hours and ended with Jewish orphans being

smuggled into Palestine illegally. It was

not until Israel's invasion of Lebanon in

1982, when Israel killed thousands of

civilians, that tides started turning and

public opinion that Israel was the

underdog started to change in the US in

the 1980s with the first Lebanon war and

then the first Zindifadan. The the

moral doubts about Israel's use of

force and the direction of its

government, and that is the younger, the

younger liberals, they are more

ambivalent about Israel, while the

old generation,

such as Kirk Douglas, would support

Israel. According to a 2004 report by the

American Jewish Committee, a younger

Netanyahu met with Hollywood executives

in 2001. And challenge them to do

something about Israel's image problem.

Netanyahu has long enjoyed close

relations with his buddies in Hollywood.

One of the most shocking Hollywood

stories is that of his pal, producer

Arnon Milken. Milken is behind massively

successful commercial films like Pretty

Woman, Fight Club, 12 Years a Slave,

Little Woman, and many more. During his

time as an Israeli spy and arms dealer,

one of Milken's jobs was to acquire

uranium from South Africa for Israel's

nuclear program, and in exchange, he ran

this massive pro apartheid campaign in

Hollywood on behalf of South Africa. In

the end, one of the most important things

Hollywood did to rally American support

for Israel was to tell the story of the

Holocaust and connect it to the

establishment of Israel. while completely

disregarding and erasing the suffering

and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.

Countless films, TV shows, and fictional

characters work to make often

white-looking Israeli heroes relatable to

white people in the US, and to paint

Muslims and Arabs as the violent and

savage enemy of the unified, peace-loving

Judeo-Christian people. What do you think?

Do Hollywood films and celebrities still

hold influence over what people think of

Israel and Palestine?