Book Review: Hollywood and Israel: A History

Like most people, it is difficult to get Americans to care much about events beyond their borders. The one remarkable exception to this indifference towards foreign affairs is the Israel-Palestine conflict, where Americans have always had passionate views and even today are willing to drop everything and pay attention. These views have been shaped less by any rational analysis of the subject, which in this case has little direct impact on their lives, and more by what you could call the “social imaginary” of images and emotional sentiments guides their worldview. The social imaginary of 20th century Americans was shaped above all by the incredibly powerful entertainment industry that emerged in their country. Hollywood shaped the American worldview on many subjects near and far. It also took particular pains to tell them what they should feel about the conflict in the Middle East that accompanied the creation of the State of Israel.

“Hollywood and Israel: A History” is an analysis by two historians, one American and one Israeli, of the origins, growth, and political influence of American popular culture depictions of Israel in film. Following the creation of Israel, Israeli government officials and those sympathetic to the new state immediately set about looking for ways that they could depict it in a manner that would resonate with Western audiences. This was a tricky subject. Israel had a tough relationship with many Western countries at the time. Most difficult were its ties with Britain, which was then still a superpower and against whom Israeli militants had recently waged a full-blown insurgency including assassinations and bombings. The United States offered a potentially receptive audience, as it had no such conflict with Israel to its memory and was home to a large and increasingly confident Jewish diaspora that could be counted on for some support. The fact that Hollywood was born there was a happy coincidence.

The first wave of pro-Israel films in the United States in the 1950s focused less on Israel as a modern state than as the realization of a Biblical idea. Israel was depicted as existing in antiquity in films like Quo Vadis and Salome. The idea behind these films was to help generate sympathy among Christian audiences for Israel as something both familiar and foreordained. Although Israeli government officials at this stage were keen to offer what support they could to filmmakers and forthrightly talked about the need to generate positive “propaganda” (this word had not yet gained its modern pejorative connotation), what most filmmakers were interested in was making films that were marketable and the political benefit was secondary. Israel offered financial incentives and access to equipment and personnel to help incentivize filmmakers to work with them, as it would continue to do so in the decades ahead.

As Israel evolved and took on a greater role in regional politics in the 1960s, the tone of the films on the country started to change. The Israeli government began soliciting actors to visit the country and make films that would tell the story of the modern state and its origins. Some Jewish-Americans involved in the entertainment industry also started playing a role at this point helping act as liaisons between American film stars and Israeli government officials. This was the beginning of a longstanding relationship that would tie Israel and Hollywood closely together for decades. Films like the 1966 movie Cast a Giant Shadow starring Kirk Douglas, and Exodus based on a novel by Leon Uris (who blankly stated that if he wasn’t writing books and films about Israel he’d prefer to be “over there shooting Arabs”) started to be produced that depicted Israel as a glorious frontier outpost populated by brave, handsome, blond-haired, blue-eyed Americans. To the extent Arabs figured at all in these movies they were as the equivalent of Native Indians in old American Westerns: Primitive and culturally incomprehensible cannon fodder, with a few noble savages here and there.

The Israeli government and its allies wisely cultivated influential figures in American life to visit Israel, do business there, and to finally act as de facto ambassadors for the state to the American public. People like Liz Taylor, Sammy Davis Junior, and Barbara Streisand were just a few of those who became vocal promoters of Israel to an American public that could otherwise expected to be indifferent. The image of Israel depicted onscreen shifted fluidly with the tastes of Americans: from Holy Land and reward for World War II, to ally against the Soviet Union and then against Arab and Islamic terrorists. I won’t go through recounting all the films created over the years centered around these angles but suffice to say there were a lot. The Israeli filmmaker Menachem Golan helped popularize the image of the Arab terrorist and the heroic Israeli intelligence officer to the American public with his 1970 film The Delta Force, and continued refining this idea across decades of blockbuster action films. In addition to movies and TV shows there were also curious spectacles like televised birthday parties held by celebrities for Israel’s various anniversaries, including The Stars Salute Israel at 30 which was a gala event broadcast at primetime to millions of Americans. This gala is still apparently still held, though viewership has dropped off.

Arnon Milchan, a former Mossad intelligence officer who went on to become a producer for Hollywood blockbusters like 12 Years a Slave, JFK, Heat, and Fight Club, is an emblematic example of someone who connected the worlds of American entertainment and Israeli officialdom. Milchan was formerly involved in arms dealing and espionage related to Israel’s nuclear program and also helped run a PR operation for Apartheid South Africa called “Operation Hollywood” in the 1970s. Milchan then used the funds from these endeavors to launch a very successful career making films in the United States. It would not be fair to say that his main goal was propaganda for Israel, and the authors of the book don’t allege this. Like most other people, he was primarily thinking of financial success. But throughout his life he used his influence to help connect Hollywood influencers to Israel, promote positive images of the country, and to suppress criticism of its actions behind the scenes. Milchan was both an entertainment mogul and a powerful political operative. Later in life he was somewhat embittered after becoming a bete noire in Israel due to his involvement in a corruption scandal involving his close friends Benjamin and Sara Netanyahu.

It would be wrong and indeed anti-Semitic to allege that there is some sort of totalizing control of entertainment media by Israel, or, even more prejudicially, by a Jewish ethnic lobby in the United States. Leave aside that this is bigoted: its simply not true. Many Jewish-Americans have been critical of Israel over the years, but also many Israelis have made poignant films depicting the Palestinian perspective on the conflict. What is the case however is that in a free market for creating entertainment products, like that which exists in the United States, there has been a great opportunity for the Israeli government and its supporters in the entertainment to create cultural products that shape the American social imaginary in a positive way towards Israel. They have done this with vigour and have achieved great success over the past decades. But this power is also on the wane.

While Americans are more aware, thanks to films and television, of Israel’s existence, this has also been a boon to the Palestinians whose plight is likewise famous today and who have increasingly begun making films telling their own side of the story. Due to the rise of decentralized media and the internet there are simply not the same gatekeeping powers and ability to impose top-down cultural trends that there once were. It’s easy to shut down a few Arab films or push to edit out negative mentions of Israel on a fictional cable television show but you can’t really censor millions of Palestinians globally on a platform like TikTok, nor can the growing independent Palestinian film industry be stopped. Israel still has a strong relationship with Hollywood and this has been a wise one to cultivate. But in the future if it is to have a positive public image it will actually require dealing with the global public directly and trying to win them over based on the facts of life in Israel and Palestine. It’s no longer possible to simply pretend Palestinians don’t exist, or to control the images that shape how others perceive them, including Americans.

The American social imaginary is shifting, and the previous hold that Hollywood had is getting perceptibly weaker. Its not clear what the future yet will hold but I suspect it will be a cultural landscape that is more equitable between Palestinians and Israelis. Until the open wound of this conflict is healed, with the leadership of wise politicians on both sides, I expect this conflict to continue to be a proxy cultural battleground fought in the United States.