Decades of Cinematic Organizing Change the Narrative on Palestine in the US

Part of the Series

Struggle and Solidarity: Writing Toward Palestinian Liberation

On March 10, 2024, five months into Israel’s accelerated genocidal onslaught against the Palestinian people of Gaza, English filmmaker Jonathan Glazer ascended the stage at the 96th Academy Awards ceremony in Los Angeles, California, to accept an Oscar for his film The Zone of Interest (2023). A historical drama and psychological thriller, The Zone of Interest recasts the story of the Auschwitz concentration camp in German-occupied Poland as not simply a genocidal project, but a project of settler-colonialism as well. Standing at the microphone, a sheet of paper trembled in his hand as he read a prewritten speech to a live television audience of 19.5 million U.S. viewers:

“All our choices were made to reflect and confront us in the present, not to say look what they did then, rather look at what we do now. Our film shows where dehumanization leads at its worst. It’s shaped all of our past and present. Right now we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people. Whether the victims of October are [interrupted by applause] . . . Whether the victims of October the 7th in Israel or the ongoing attack on Gaza, all the victims of this dehumanization, how do we resist? Aleksandra Bystroń-Kołodziejczyk, the girl who glows in the film, as she did in life, chose to. I dedicate this to her memory and her resistance.”

Unlike Vanessa Redgrave, who was met with boos and hisses upon delivering a speech critical of Zionism at the Oscars in 1978, Glazer was met with applause and cheers. And although Hollywood Zionists later condemned Glazer in an open letter, the supportive reception of Glazer’s speech during the 2024 Oscar ceremony is an indication of how a shift in the discourse on Palestine has taken place within Hollywood and U.S. culture more broadly over the past fifty years.

Shortly after the Academy Awards, Glazer, along with numerous other actors and filmmakers from Europe, the United States, and the Southwest Asia and North Africa (SWANA) region, donated items and experiences for an online silent auction fundraising campaign, Cinema for Gaza, which fundraised for the UK charitable organization Medical Aid for Palestinians. The silent auction featured things such as posters for The Zone of Interest signed by Glazer, producer James Wilson, and composer Mica Levi; video conference calls with Susan Sarandon, Tilda Swinton, and Ayo Edebiri; musician Annie Lennox’s handwritten lyrics to “Sweet Dreams”; a poster for the film Joker (2019) signed by Joaquin Phoenix, among various other kinds of cinephilic memorabilia and experiences. Some of those experiences also included opportunities to rub elbows with Palestinian filmmakers or own a piece of Palestinian cinephilic memorabilia, such as signed movie posters, a visit on set with Palestinian filmmaker Annemarie Jacir; a personalized masterclass on filming in Palestine with Palestinian filmmaker Najwa Najjar, and a limited edition Only Murders in the Building-themed jigsaw puzzle signed by the show’s Palestinian American director Cherien Dabis, and also signed by the show’s lead cast members Steve Martin, Martin Short, and Selena Gomez. Altogether, the Cinema for Gaza campaign raised over U.S. $315,000 for Medical Aid for Palestinians, exemplifying philanthro-spectatorship, which is one of the key facets of a theoretical and practical framework I refer to as “cinematic activism.”

Mainstreaming Palestine: Cinematic Activism and Solidarity Politics in the United States historicizes this decades-long process of “mainstreaming” a discourse on Palestinian liberation and solidarity politics within a U.S. culture dominated by hegemonic Zionism. That mainstreaming is the result of fifty years of cinematic activism, a social movement organizational strategy that takes the texts, practices, and social relations of cinema as the focal point for movement mobilization and communication. Through visual, semiotic, and discursive analysis of film, video, print news, and archival material, to participant observation and ethnographic interviews at film festivals, Mainstreaming Palestine employs an interdisciplinary methodology to explore how Palestinian cinema and Palestine solidarity cinema and their dissemination through cinematic activism have produced — literally, figuratively, cinematically, and discursively — Palestinian liberation and solidarity politics in the U.S. public sphere. Through these processes, the topic of Palestine has shifted from one of taboo and unspeakability to inclusion within liberal multiculturalism, and has ultimately begun a process of normalization within the U.S. mainstream.

In the wake of October 7, 2023, as Palestinians in Gaza were disseminating visual evidence of the genocide globally — practically in real time — through social media apps such as Instagram, TikTok, and X (formerly Twitter), the discourse on Palestinian liberation and solidarity politics consumed mainstream U.S. media, popular culture, and electoral politics in unprecedented and enduring ways. Largely driven by students, the rapid uptick in Palestinian liberation and solidarity activism that swept the United States during the 2023–2024 academic year came to be known as the “student intifada.” Palestinian liberation and solidarity activism mobilized on an unprecedented mass scale in the United States, literally bringing business as usual to a halt, whether in occupying university administrative buildings, shutting down freeways and major thoroughfares in dozens of major U.S. cities, or slashing Starbucks’s market value by $11 billion through a consumer boycott.

The surge in popular support for the Palestinian liberation struggle from fall 2023 to present and its accompanying visibility within mainstream U.S. media is evidence of a shift in U.S. public opinion that was well underway prior to October 7, 2023. This shift in public opinion and media representation is remarkable given how Palestinians and the Palestinian liberation struggle have historically been demonized and negatively portrayed in U.S. popular media such as film, television, and news reportage. Public expressions of sympathy toward Palestinians and willingness to disseminate, let alone even acknowledge, Palestinian liberation politics have, until recently, been considered taboo and even unspeakable within the U.S. public sphere. This unspeakability originates in hegemonic support for the state of Israel, which has historically permeated U.S. culture and institutions in ways that mediate or proscribe the discourse on Palestine, erase Palestinian existence, and discipline and censor Palestinian liberation and solidarity activism — a discursive process I refer to as “compulsory Zionism.”

Not so long ago, even mentioning the word “Palestine” in social interactions or within film, media, or fine art would prompt an avalanche of censure, oftentimes resulting in ostracism — a phenomenon referred to by Palestine Legal, the U.S.-based Palestine solidarity movement’s civil and constitutional rights watchdog organization, as “the Palestine exception to free speech.” Of course, these attempts at censure have persisted even during this rapid increase in Palestinian liberation and solidarity activism in the U.S. public sphere. But as shows, there has indeed been a realm in which the discourse on Palestinian liberation and solidarity has consistently been able to subvert such attacks. That realm is cinema.

Over the last fifty years, a diverse array of people, namely activists, artists, and allies from overlapping Arab American communities, LGBTQ+ communities, and Jewish anti- Zionist communities, along with scholars specializing in Palestine studies and Arab American studies, Palestinian filmmakers and Palestine solidarity filmmakers, and film and media workers alike have together organized to leverage cinema in order to produce knowledge, identify subjects, and articulate objectives of Palestinian liberation politics for U.S. audiences and media consumers. That organizing has manifested in numerous ways, from one-off film screenings to mobilizing protests and boycotts of cinema institutions that are complicit in Palestinian oppression, or through more institutionalized means such as establishing film-specific organizations for the distribution of Palestinian cultural representation and the establishment of annual Palestine-themed film festivals. These cinematic activists have periodically been met with resistance or censorship on the part of supporters of compulsory Zionism, who aim to undermine, erase, or censor Palestine-focused cinematic activism. In turn, these cinematic activists, who desire to transcend the struggle with Zionism toward a politics of Palestinian liberation, self-determination, and self-representation, respond with new forms of resistance.

Within the past few years, Netflix — one of the most mainstream sources of entertainment available in the United States — has both created a “Palestinian Stories” streaming category and produced the television series Mo, created by Palestinian American comedian Mohammed Amer. In an Instagram post about the significance of a show like Mo on a platform as big as Netflix, Palestinian American Emmy-nominated film and television writer, director, and actress Cherien Dabis, who plays Mo’s sister on the show, asserted that Mo is “making us one step closer to ‘rebranding’ Palestine!”

Dabis’s use of the nomenclature of “branding” is significant here because it speaks to the ways in which film, television, and media have been crucial to the production of solidarity with the Palestinian liberation cause. My conceptualization of the discursive process of mainstreaming is informed by scholars such as Evelyn Alsultany, Roderick Ferguson, Sarah Banet-Weiser, and Roopali Mukherjee, who have theorized and historicized the relationships between social justice activism, representation, consumerism, and the rise of what we now refer to as diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). More specifically, mainstreaming is akin to Sarah Banet-Weiser’s conceptualization of branding, wherein “a brand exceeds its materiality. More than just the object itself, a brand is the perception— the series of images, themes, morals, values, feelings, and sense of authenticity conjured by the product itself.” This begs the question: if Palestine is the brand, what then is the product?

There are also pitfalls to this project of cinematic activism. Indeed, cinematic activism has two sides: the texts and practices of cinema-based social movement organizing and political education on the one hand, and the aestheticization and commodification of activism as cinema itself, on the other hand.

Mainstreaming Palestine, therefore demonstrates how, within a media context largely dictated by global capitalism, the mainstreaming of Palestinian liberation politics has had mixed results: increased visibility, intelligibility, solidarity, but also aestheticization and commodification. The aestheticization of activism and the symbolism of Palestinian liberation (most notably the watermelon, which represents the colors of the Palestinian flag) has itself been commodified and rendered as a form of cinema. Highly stylized videos and advertising campaigns representing, romanticizing, and selling that activism and symbolism have become just another product to be consumed within the culture industry. Not unlike how the LGBTQ+ rights movement (which also historically leveraged cinematic activism to advance its cause) was aestheticized and commodified into what is now commonly referred to as “rainbow capitalism,” the Palestinian liberation and solidarity movement in the context of global capitalism is currently undergoing a similar and rapid process of aestheticization and commodification. The result is a simulation of solidarity: watermelon capitalism. This commodification is a solemn reminder not to mistake representation for liberation, nor to mistake mainstreaming for justice, but rather to strategize the uses of representation in the ongoing processes of liberation. A practice of cinematic activism, not unlike most other social movement methods, must always negotiate a number of these kinds of intellectual, political, and even ethical tensions.