Israel’s Supporters Use Slander to Silence Palestinians in Hollywood

This article was first published in Arabic in Al-Quds Al-Arabi on 7 February 2022. Translated from the Arabic.

When I arrived in Hollywood in 2009, I called my friend the Palestinian director Hany Abu-Assad, who had decided to leave Hollywood after every attempt he made to produce a film there had been thwarted, even though his film Paradise Now had won the Golden Globe and been nominated for the Oscar for best foreign-language film in 2006. When we met, Abu-Assad warned me of the obstacles and hostility awaiting me as a Palestinian and urged me to go back, insisting I would not last more than a year or two. I will never forget one of his sentences: “They will not allow a Palestinian to be here. They will destroy you in less than a year.”

That conversation only sharpened my appetite for the fight to survive in Hollywood. I realised, however, that I had to deal with Hollywood differently from him. Although he holds Israeli and Dutch citizenship, to Hollywood he embodied Palestine, and so he drew the hostility of all its executives. I, too, hold Israeli citizenship, along with a European one, British. I decided to shelter behind them until I had broken through Hollywood’s fortified walls.

In 2010 my British identity won me the support of the British members of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, who campaigned to get me a membership. It gave me the right to vote for the Golden Globes and threw Hollywood’s doors wide open. But I was soon found out, and the arrows of hostility and hatred began to target me. The first was an accusation of terrorism, meant to sink my application for an American work visa. I appealed to Beverly Hills’ Democratic congressman, Henry Waxman, who acted at once, and I had the visa within 24 hours. His intervention did not please the association, which barred me, for “security reasons”, from travelling with its members and attending its events outside Los Angeles.

Members’ attitudes towards me varied. Some warned me of a Zionist attack on me; others asked me about the Islamic training camps I had attended, and other crazy stereotypes. As the date of my confirmation as a permanent member approached, the association’s parliamentarian accused Al-Quds Al-Arabi of antisemitism and urged the board to expel me because I wrote for it. An Israeli member stepped in and investigated, and concluded that Al-Quds Al-Arabi was no different in its professional journalism from the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.

Harassment and accusations

The harassment and accusations continued, and they were as contradictory as they were absurd. On the one hand, the association rejected my proposals to redesign the Golden Globes website because it did not trust my technical abilities, although I hold a doctorate from the Technion, Israel’s institute of technology, one of the best computing institutes in the world, and have published computational research in the world’s leading scientific journals. Even a letter from my Israeli supervisor, the dean of the medical school, describing me as the best computer expert who had ever worked for him, failed to convince them. Yet when the Golden Globes website crashed during the awards ceremony, they claimed it had been attacked by hackers from Palestine and accused me of being behind it.

Two years later I appealed to another congressman, the Republican Dana Rohrabacher, after the association’s leadership claimed that American homeland security was pursuing me. Luckily the manager of his office was also Palestinian. He backed me in my battle with the association and helped me obtain a green card, which made me a permanent resident of the United States, immune to such accusations in future.

Having failed to entangle me in security trouble, they turned their attention below my belt. In the spring of 2013 a Russian member, Nellee Holmes, spread a rumour that I had swum naked in the pool of the London Hotel in New York, then got drunk with some girls, taken them to my room and photographed them naked. When I filed a complaint against her, the rumour was leaked to Sharon Waxman, editor of the Hollywood website TheWrap, who is known for publishing information without checking it and for her blind support for Israel. She studied there at a religious college for girls in the early 1980s and then worked there as a journalist until the early 1990s.

Without contacting me or asking me for comment, Waxman published an article accusing me of sexually abusing girls who existed only in her imagination. When I called her and asked how she could accuse me of such a thing with no victims, no witnesses and no swimming pool at the London Hotel in New York, she replied: “I don’t need proof. My Egyptian colleagues behave like that!”

The leadership of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association stood by her and refused to discipline Holmes, even though two Russian journalists testified that she had spread similar rumours about them in order to blackmail them. When she was caught trying to blackmail a Ukrainian journalist who was applying for membership, the leadership expelled her at once. I told Waxman, but she refused to withdraw her article, which rested on Holmes’s lies.

While the war against me raged inside the association, I was also fighting the stars’ publicists, who resented my confronting their clients with questions about the stereotyping of Arabs and Muslims and about their moral hypocrisy over the Palestinian cause. When I asked the pop star Rihanna, for example, about deleting her pro-Palestinian tweet during the 2014 Gaza war minutes after posting it, her team pounced on me, threw me out of the room and stopped me speaking to her. Many publicists cut my interviews short whenever I said the word Palestine and stopped their clients from answering my questions. For all my efforts, I could not obtain a single clear statement in support of the Palestinian cause until December 2018.

In the summer of 2018 the Israeli government passed a racist law, the nation-state law, which declares Israel the state of the Jews alone and grants them privileges denied to its Palestinian citizens. I tried to obtain statements against the law from Hollywood stars. They all refused.

Natalie Portman

Two months before the law was passed, the Israeli-born Hollywood star Natalie Portman declined to attend a ceremony in Israel to receive a prestigious million-dollar prize, in protest at her government’s racist practices towards Palestinians and Ethiopian Jews. I contacted her publicist and asked for an interview, and she refused. So I waited until the autumn release of her film Vox Lux was announced, and requested a television interview to discuss the film with her.

I first met Natalie in 2010, when she was promoting Black Swan, and since then we had spoken Hebrew to each other away from interviews, which built her trust in me. When she directed her first film, A Tale of Love and Darkness, set in Jerusalem during the 1948 war, she sent me a private copy to watch. So I decided to open my television interview with her in Hebrew, hoping her publicist would leave us alone. That is exactly what happened. When I saw that the publicist had moved away, I asked Natalie about the nation-state law. She answered at once and called it racist.

The interview set the world’s media alight and shocked Hollywood: it was the first statement against Israel in Hollywood’s history. Within hours of its publication her publicist sent me an angry letter claiming that Natalie was deeply upset and living a terrifying nightmare. She accused me of deceit and unprofessional conduct, saying the real purpose of the interview had plainly been the Israeli nation-state law, and demanded that I take the interview off the internet. I refused. As she was also the Hollywood Foreign Press Association’s publicist, she asked the association to punish me. At the time, however, I was in a strong position thanks to Donald Trump’s presidency and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, so her attempts failed. She has not stopped campaigning against me since, and has barred me from interviewing her other clients, who include some of Hollywood’s biggest stars.

Hollywood’s hostility to Donald Trump, who had backed Israel since his election in 2016, gave me the confidence to declare my Palestinian identity publicly, everywhere and on every occasion, even though Hollywood was still under the absolute control of Israel’s supporters. After the Black Lives Matter campaigns, which supported the Palestinian cause, erupted, I sensed a change in how Hollywood saw me and a marked improvement in how I was treated. So I raised my voice for the Palestinian cause without fear of devastating repercussions. It seems I moved too fast.

During the war between Israel and Gaza last summer, I made several reports on the reactions of Hollywood’s stars and executives and exposed their moral hypocrisy in tolerating the Israeli occupation while campaigning against racism in America. At first I felt the tide had turned against the Israeli government, thanks to statements from a number of stars. It soon became clear that Israel’s supporters still ruled Hollywood, when they forced some of those stars to apologise for condemning the Israeli government.

On a personal level, I began to feel the hostility of the stars’ publicists. Waxman, who at the time wrote an article accusing Palestinians of spreading fake pictures from Gaza to win the world’s sympathy, kept republishing her 2013 article of sexual accusations against me on her website, until it became the first result in a Google search for my name. Fortunately the media ignored her. She did not give up.

Last Wednesday one of her journalists contacted me to say they had found three women accusing me of sexual harassment. Two were Chinese: one a former member of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, the other a woman who had trained with me for a month in 2017. The third was a Russian I did not recognise, though it later emerged that I had met her for ten minutes in 2016, after she had chased me for more than a year. The accusations were as absurd as they were false, so much so that when they were published my colleagues in the media laughed at them, and the world’s media, and even social media, ignored them. The exception was the Hollywood Foreign Press Association’s publicist, who seized the chance to take revenge on me for the Natalie interview by demanding that the association expel me at once. Unluckily for her, the association is fighting for its survival these days and needed evidence for the allegations. They did not dare expel me, and settled for announcing an investigation.

Waxman’s racism

What upset me was the racist way Waxman presented the accusations. Her headline singled me out as a “Palestinian journalist”, and she added a photograph of me with the Palestinian actor Ali Suliman. The accusations also read like scenes from Hollywood films full of stereotyped Arab characters. One accuser says I am the only man who talks to her about sex so directly. The Russian admits that I treated her and spoke to her with respect, yet felt I wanted a romantic relationship with her, even though I never contacted her after our only meeting. Would she have felt that way if I were not an Arab?

I am the first Palestinian, and still the only one, to work as a journalist and broadcaster in Hollywood, where Israel’s narrative dominates absolutely in the absence of any Arab or Muslim presence that could offer an alternative. So it is no surprise that some are trying to silence and destroy me, just as Abu-Assad predicted more than a decade ago.

Ironically, most of the support I have received has come from liberal Jews and Israelis, and without it I could not have survived more than a year or two. That is why Hollywood needs a strong Palestinian or Arab media presence if anything is to change in the way it sees the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the way it sees Arabs and Muslims.

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