And The Oscar Goes To... Zionism!
Hollywood's night of nights cannot be separated from the US' role in the genocide of Palestinians... and this year that was more blatant than ever.
This 2025 Oscars were a little chaotic, not least because every Best Picture nominee came mired in some kind of controversy. But what truly unifies Best Picture frontrunners Emilia Pérez, Dune: Part 2, A Real Pain, and The Brutalist are the films’ soft pro-Israel sentiment and anti-Arab racism.
Zionism is a historical, international, and colonial movement that seeks to establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine that privileges Jewish settlers over Palestinian people. The father of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, popularised the phrase, “a land without a people for a people without a land." It’s not dissimilar to the British legal framework of “terra nullius”, meaning “land belonging to no one” that was used to colonise so-called Australia, despite the ongoing presence of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples on the continent for thousands of years.
Backed by the British and the US, the colony of Israel was established after the 1948 Nakba, during which Palestine was “ethnically cleansed” of tens of thousands of Palestinians. Ever since, Israel, the UK, the US, and its imperial allies have subjugated Palestinians through apartheid, settler violence, militarised occupation, and, of course, media manipulation.
The events of October 7 did not mark the beginning of the struggle between occupied and occupier, but it did mark the escalation of genocidal intent by Israel and its occupying forces toward Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. Now, after 15 months (and 80 years) of Israel’s escalated US-backed ethnic cleansing operations against Palestinians, Hollywood has been busy promoting projects that manufacture the public’s consent for such war crimes, and nowhere is this clearer than on Hollywood’s night of nights: The Oscars.
Like the occupation and Palestinian resistance itself, use of the media and entertainment industry to promote ideologies and narratives in line with the US government’s foreign policy, military operations overseas, and allyship with Israel is far from new. In 2022, the LA Times revealed there have been 1000s of films since the 1940s — at the very least! — over which the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency have exercised direct editorial control. They’ve even got a department dedicated to the work.
In her 2023 thesis, Mia Hardister explored the relationship between the US military and Hollywood post-9/11, proposing that Hollywood blockbusters essentially operate as the propaganda wing of the US armed forces. Even films not directly about real-life wars, Hardister explains, like Marvel movies, the Transformers franchise and I Am Legend, received military oversight and millions of dollars in funding.
The US government continues to provide billions of dollars to Israel in military aid every year. Investing in the positive promotion of that investment is only natural. Professor Roger Stahl coined the term ‘militainment’ to describe the works produced by Hollywood’s long-standing relationship with the US military. In his documentaries, Theatres Of War and Militainment Inc, Stahl explores how films made in this military-entertainment-complex don’t just glorify war and the army, but promote ideas that align with US foreign policy and interventionism.
Awards season has always been a microcosm of Hollywood, and the Oscars have a longstanding relationship with the US military.
Hollywood is a business ecosystem of trickle-down economics, with major blockbusters’ success often influencing when and what kinds of smaller-budget projects are greenlit. If the military subsidises a studio’s superhero franchise that rakes in billions of dollars, the studio will unlikely produce a film that endangers that relationship. Awards season has always been a microcosm of Hollywood, and the Oscars have a longstanding relationship with the US military. Tributes to the armed forces have been incorporated into several ceremonies, and films like Zero Dark Thirty, The Hurt Locker, and American Sniper — which were partially funded by the military — are often recipients of Oscars.
This is why smaller anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist works are often self-funded or crowd-funded, even when they involve big stars or garner widespread critical acclaim. In 1977, Vanessa Redgrave mortgaged her house to fund The Palestinian, a now-award-winning documentary about the Tel al-Zaatar massacre. More recently, the independent, joint Palestinian-Israeli-produced documentary No Other Land has failed to acquire distribution with any major studio. The now Oscar-winning documentary shows the colonial destruction of the Masafer Yatta area in the West Bank by occupation forces, using the friendship between Palestinian activist Basel Adra and Israeli activist Yuval Abraham as a framing device. The film’s events take place before October of 2023.
In her review of No Other Land, Mary Turfah writes, “While No Other Land tells the story of one Palestinian community’s depopulation, it also stands in for the liberal’s long-sought-after Roadmap for Peace.” Turfah notes that the film goes to great lengths to document violence against Palestinians by occupation forces, but there is no footage of armed Palestinian resistance. Only Abraham's non-violent protest, his insistence that his safety is dependent on Palestinians like Adra achieving justice and that there is a future where Israelis and Palestinians live in peace. Turfah continues, “Abraham attempts a rehabilitation of an iteration of Zionism that doesn’t exist but could, a familiar settler hope (think, imagine what America could be).”
No Other Land is a documentary that presents the relationship of an Israeli settler and a disenfranchised Palestinian as one where each is equally dependent on the other for “safety”. As a joint Palestinian-Israeli production, the documentary has been criticised for promoting the normalisation of the Zionist state. The Palestinian-led Boycott Divestment and Sanctions movement (BDS) defines normalisation as any method by which the colonial relationship between Palestinians and Zionists, something that is inherently violent and abhorrent, is portrayed as “normal”, and Palestinian resistance is erased or vilified. The normalisation of the relationship between Israeli settlers and Palestinians — and other Arabs — is ultimately a normalisation of the Zionist regime and its violence, and thus, a win for the occupation.
When both Adra and Abraham took to the Oscars stage to accept their accolade, Adra spoke briefly of the occupation of his family’s lands. Abraham then spoke of his and Adra’s lives being “intertwined”, language that normalises the settler occupation of Palestine by assuming an equal entitlement to the land. Despite how Abraham and the film may attempt to separate Israelis like himself from occupational violence, the reality is they are only there because of such violence, and the very presence of settlers is used to justify the occupation.
This is still Zionism. As Palestinian author Mohammed El Kurd wrote on Palestinian-Israeli film collaborations in Perfect Victims: The Politics Of Appeal, any Palestinian-Israeli film is reduced, “to the fact that it was a collaboration between an Israeli and a Palestinian, fulfilling the viewers’ fantasy of a happy ending to an otherwise miserable ending. We turn it into a fetish.”
But No Other Land is far from the only 2025 Oscar recipient attempting to normalise the ongoing occupation of Palestine by US-backed Israeli forces. When contrasting the repression and critical reception of No Other Land with the number of films that feature pro-Israel and anti-Arab themes, a clear bias aligning with US military support of Israel emerges. A Real Pain, September 5, The Brutalist, Dune Part Two, and even Emilia Pérez all engage with narratives that align with pro-Israel and pro-Zionist talking points.
While most of these films don’t bring up Israel’s occupation of Palestine directly, many of them normalise and even lionise Israel’s existence and Israeli identity. Others, like Dune Part Two and September 5 perpetuate anti-Arab racism and “terrorist” stereotyping. All of this lays an ideological groundwork in the mind of the viewer that justifies Israel’s so-called “right to exist”, and that Palestinian and Arab resistance to genocidal Israeli expansionism is, if not evil, then futile.
A Real Pain and The Brutalist adopt themes that frame the Holocaust as a singular and unique event in history so horrific that Israel’s existence is a natural conclusion. Directed by Jesse Eisenberg, A Real Pain follows two Jewish-American cousins as they retrace their grandmother’s footsteps on a Holocaust remembrance tour of Poland. On the tour are other people with connections to the Holocaust, including a Rwandan-Jewish convert. Before they visit a Polish concentration camp, the Rwandan convert explains he felt a natural connection to Judaism after surviving the Rwandan genocide of the 1990s, espousing an almost exclusive link between genocide and Judaism.
In a similar vein, Brady Corbet’s now multi-Oscar-winning film, The Brutalist centres on fictional architect, Lazlo Toth, as he migrates to the US in 1947 after surviving the Holocaust, and is commissioned by a wealthy client to build his largest project to date. Israel’s “foundation” punctuates the film’s background before coming to the fore, with a radio announcement of Israel’s creation providing the soundtrack to a golden sunrise in the film’s beginnings. Lazlo resists moving to Israel throughout the film, despite those close to him moving there. However, this is not out of concern for the expulsion of Palestinians. Rather, he fears it is an admission of defeat to retreat in the face of all the anti-semitism he has suffered.
Ultimately, Lazlo does move to Israel, with one of his relatives commemorating his move to occupied Jerusalem as “it’s not the journey it’s the destination”. But when the destination is Israel, a land founded on ongoing ethnic cleansing and apartheid, the journey does matter. The ends do not justify the means, and questioning migration to Israel is not anti-Zionist. As one Letterboxd user pointed out, “I see little here to challenge an ardent Zionist, and plenty to affirm their perspective.” As in No Other Land, the connection between violent occupation and those who settle in so-called Israel is erased.
Eisenberg’s film does not condemn genocide as a whole but supposes that other genocides find legitimacy in what commonalities they share with the Holocaust, while Corbet’s film espouses that the existence of Israel is earned by the blight of anti-semitism and the Holocaust’s singularity. In his book, The Holocaust Industry, Jewish-American scholar Norman Finkelstein condemns emphasising the Holocaust as the singular measure of genocide and argues the aim of such ideas “is not at all an understanding of the past, but a manipulation of the present.”
Despite Israel’s colonial violence against Palestinians meeting the definition of genocide since the 1948 Nakba, A Real Pain ignores this, even as it condemns other genocides. The horrors of the Holocaust are deployed in pop culture through a Jewish-American lens, not to teach people that history should not be repeated, but to normalize the US’s militarist and economic ties with Israel without critique of the state’s genocidal policies.
And then there’s the pinkwashing of Emilia Pérez. Directed by French director Jacques Audiard, the now Oscar-winning film follows a drug cartel boss who transitions to become a woman and starts a new life away from the cartel. The film is woefully transphobic in its promotion of gender essentialism and trans-medicalism, as well as racist for how it stereotypes Mexicans, not to mention its complete butchering of Mexican Spanish. As hard as it is to believe, especially after the film’s myriad of controversies, Emilia Pérez is also a film with a healthy dash of Zionism in how it subtly pinkwashes Israel.
‘Pinkwashing’ is a term coined by the San Francisco-based activist group, Queers Undermining Israeli Terrorism (QUIT!) in 2010. Academic Jasbir Puar defines it as the tendency for institutions to weaponise queer rights advocacy to simultaneously justify and distract from their more controversial and harmful policies. But the term was created to call out the IDF’s emphasis on queer inclusivity, even as they ethnically cleanse thousands of Palestinians every year.
Last year, The Guardian reported on the occurrence of IDF soldiers raising pride flags in Gaza. In the same article, Palestinian anthropologist and activist Sa’ed Atshan says, “The Israeli state has different audiences… If it is addressing LGBTQ-friendly domestic audiences in Israel or globally, then it whips out this pink-washing discourse trying to portray Israel as a gay haven.” Despite gay marriage being illegal in Israel, the Zionist state weaponises queer rights to assert its alleged superiority to Palestinians on the world stage.
We see more subtle Israeli pinkwashing in between the now Oscar-winning musical numbers of Emilia Pérez. During the film’s now infamous gender-affirming surgery musical number, Perez’s lawyer Rita (Zoe Saldaña) struggles to find a surgeon willing to perform the number of surgeries requested by Perez. Rita is rejected by surgeons around the world, including Thailand (where most gender-affirming surgeries take place), and only an Israeli surgeon agrees to perform the surgeries requested. It is a relatively small scene, but it is no small thing that Perez’s transition — the film’s entire premise — is made possible thanks to Israel.
Despite the reality of high rates of religious transphobia in Israel and that gender-affirming care in Israel is only permitted by approval from a committee, and only available from one clinic in the entire country — Israel is represented in Emilia Pérez as a haven of LGBT inclusivity compared to the rest of the world. This is Pinkwashing 101. A narrative that only further harms Palestinians by positively normalising Israeli identity and occupation through LGBT advocacy. Now, also, an Oscar-winner.
Then, there's Dune, Denis Villeneuve’s multi-Oscar-winning Sci-Fi saga that steals everything, from its aesthetics to its fake language, from Arab and Islamic cultures. Based on Frank Herbet’s acclaimed novel of the same name, Dune has long been criticised for its Orientalism. Palestinian author and academic Edward Said defined Orientalism in his seminal 1978 book as the derogatory ways in which the West represents the Middle East, North Africa, and Asia in literature and academia as one way to maintain colonial rule. Despite so much of Dune’s story and world being lifted stereotypically from Islamic and Middle Eastern histories, cultures and languages, not a single Middle Eastern or North African actor or creative has a prominent role in the film’s creation.
Not that the casting of Middle Eastern actors would make a difference. Replete with ‘noble savage’ and ‘white saviour’ tropes, Dune is a story that erases the very people whom its story would not exist without. In 2025, the US, Israel, and its allies benefit from stories that promote the dehumanisation of Arabs to maintain Israel’s colonial narrative of superiority over Palestinians. When you watch Timothée Chalamet fruitlessly lead a rebellion of an Arab-coded Indigenous population to mass death by their oppressors, you leave with the notion that the resistance of such peoples is misguided and futile. To top things off, Dune: Part 2 was presented its special effects Oscar by none other than ex-Israeli Occupation Force soldier and proud Zionist, Gal Gadot — as Dune’s anti-Arab and Islamophobic textuality wasn’t enough. It is no wonder Dune: Part Two is so heavily acclaimed at this particular time for exactly the reasons Said warned of in his vital works: to normalise the exertion of colonial violence by the West.
Finally, there’s September 5, the most blatantly Zionist of them all. Nominated for best original screenplay, the film chronicles the live reporting of the “Munich Massacre” at the 1972 Olympics during which Israeli athletes were taken hostage and killed by the Palestinian resistance group Black September. Black September took Israelis hostage to demand the release of hundreds of Palestinians held without cause in Israeli prisons, echoing the current demands of Palestinian resistance fighters in Gaza.
The film exclusively focuses on the perspectives of the Israeli hostages and those reporting on them. At no point is the viewpoint of the Palestinian resistance given acknowledgement or compassion to the degree of the Israeli hostages are, nor the Western journalists documenting the situation. While the film went into production and post-production prior to October 7, the timing of the film's release, acclaim and subsequent awards nominations pushed themes of Israeli victimisation at the hands of Palestinian “terrorists” acting without cause — aligning with the common reasons given the US’s political allyship with Israel. The notion of the thoughtless, animalistic Arab terrorist has long been used to justify US and Western military violence in Middle Eastern countries, and subsequently, has featured as a major trope in Western media for decades.
The timing of these films’ release is a form of soft power, in which political ideas are promoted not through fear but seduction.
The prominence of narratives aligning with, and promoting the normalisation of, Israel with little to no acknowledgement of Israel’s ongoing occupation and genocide of Palestine and Palestinians is intentional. The timing of these films’ release is a form of soft power, in which political ideas are promoted not through fear but seduction. This can no longer be ignored. Hollywood, as it has done repeatedly in the past, is attempting to weaponise art to manufacture consent for its violent imperialist actions.
On the same day that the Academy celebrated its big night, the Israeli Occupation Forces cut off aid to Gaza after the Zionist Israeli government refused to honour its end of the ceasefire agreement. As the media justice advocacy group Slow Factory pointed out on Instagram, Israel has a long history of timing escalated attacks with major US cultural events — like the Oscars — to limit media coverage of their actions. The Oscars don’t just normalise and lionise Zionism, but provide cultural cover for its violence.
It is not about when, how, or why these films were made or even who they were made by, but what these films say about Zionism, and how that benefits the West’s support of Israel. Even if zero of these films had won an Oscar, it doesn’t matter. Many still saw them, internalised them, and enjoyed them. The damage is done, and the brunt of it will be bared, as it always is, by Palestinians.
Free Palestine, end the occupation, and long live the Palestinian resistance.
Merryana Salem is a Wonnarua and Lebanese–Australian critic, author, and podcaster. They’re on social media at @akajustmerry, and their writings can be found in Kill Your Darlings, Junkee, Sydney Morning Herald, and The Big Issue.
Excellent piece, I learnt a ton!!!
Such a brilliant piece @Merryana Salem, as always!