-
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?