In recent months, a wave of artists throughout the entertainment industry has begun speaking out against Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
On September 8, more than 1200 film workers — including A-list stars like Olivia Colman, Tilda Swinton and Riz Ahmed — publicly pledged to refuse any work with Israeli film companies that are “implicated in genocide and apartheid against the Palestinian people”. Since September, thousands more film workers have signed onto the pledge, with the number of signatories now exceeding 5000.
“Both the language of this pledge, which echoes the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement’s emphasis on institutional complicity, and its material commitment to reject offers to work with nearly all Israeli film companies, represent a significant shift for a film world dominated by executives who have either remained silent about or vocally supported Israel’s genocide in Gaza for the past two years.
“This shift is not simply a result of growing concern about the horrific suffering Israel continues to inflict upon the Palestinian people. Rather, it is the result of two years of tireless organising led by two rank-and-file formations in the film and entertainment industry: Film Workers for Palestine and Entertainment Labor for Palestine.
“In the face of repression and retaliation, FWP and EL4P have built a movement in solidarity with Palestine in the arts that they believe will last long after the genocide in Gaza is over.”
Building solidarity, documenting repression
Film Workers for Palestine (FWP) was formed in January 2024, just months after the genocide began. According to Emre, an FWP organiser who’s been involved since the group’s formation (and who chose to remain anonymous for security reasons), FWP began as an international coalition of filmmakers determined “to call out the industry’s silence on the genocide in Gaza.” Their first move was to put out a statement of solidarity, which quickly garnered thousands of signatures, including notable artists such as Susan Sarandon, Ken Loach and Boots Riley.
From there, FWP members decided to utilise their position as artists to organise campaigns that supported Palestinian film and cultural workers. According to Emre, a key goal for FWP right from the start was countering the widespread “doxing, discrimination and harassment of artists for pro-Palestinian advocacy.”
Over the past year-and-a-half, Emre said, FWP has been involved in “several boycott campaigns, [including] one against Disney, and the Captain America and Snow White premieres.” He said they’ve coordinated with PACBI — the cultural wing of BDS — on their Disney and Marvel campaigns.
EL4P is also spearheading a fan-initiated boycott of Scream 7. The Scream boycott is itself a response to repression of pro-Palestine voices: back in November 2023, actor Melissa Barrera was fired from her role in the “Scream” franchise for sharing social media posts critical of Israel’s genocide in Gaza. FWP and other solidarity formations, including Entertainment Labor for Palestine (EL4P), have called for the boycott in response to Barrera’s firing.
FWP and EL4P are also collaborating on an ongoing “storybanking” campaign, which Emre described as an effort to “shed light on the various types of punishment that come for pro-Palestinian advocacy”. Emre said that “a big reason a lot of people don’t want to come forward (about facing repression) is that they don’t know how many other people out there are dealing with the same thing. The more people are silenced about Palestine, the easier it is to erase Palestinian voices and Palestinian stories.”
Film worker and EL4P organiser Miriam Arghandiwal agreed with Emre, arguing that the intensity of Zionist repression has contributed to a “system of fear and silence” in Hollywood. To counter this fear and silence, Arghandiwal explained that the organisers of this storybank campaign collaborated with experienced journalists to create a secure site where arts and entertainment workers who face harassment or discrimination for pro-Palestine views can safely share their stories.
Stepping in where unions fail
One reason it can be challenging for workers to break their silence about Palestine, according to Arghandiwal, is that unions in the arts and entertainment industry “have shown clearly that they’re not going to take any stance against [repression of pro-Palestine workers]”. Indeed, EL4P officially formed in February 2025 out of a coalition of rank-and-file formations from dozens of media guilds and local unions, all of whom were struggling to push their unions to show solidarity with the people of Palestine — or to at least protect their own members from harassment and repression.
EL4P organiser Amin El Gamal, a member of the screen actors’ union SAG-AFTRA and the chair of that union’s committee for Middle Eastern and North African members, said that since October 2023, Hollywood’s unions have “done nothing” to protect their members who’ve faced harassment and discrimination for pro-Palestine views. He said that while union leaders may “verbally agree that blacklisting is wrong, they haven’t taken any actions towards remedying the problem”.
These failures of union leadership, El Gamal noted, have toxic effects on solidarity within their unions. “People feel very siloed and alone,” he explained. “People feel very vulnerable.”
Arghandiwal said that the storybanking campaign is an example of EL4P “filling the gap left by the unions”. She said that this campaign has already built bonds of solidarity and community among pro-Palestine entertainment workers.
Actor and filmmaker Haley Webb, who’s been involved with EL4P since its inception, said that she “cannot stress enough how important” these bonds of solidarity and community are. Webb said that after her own experience of harassment and repression for speaking out about Palestine, “to find people that share the same moral compass is a blessing”.
Case study in repression
Webb’s case is a representative example of how repression often works in Hollywood. Webb began speaking publicly about Palestine almost immediately after the genocide began in 2023. She consistently made a point to “amplify Palestinian voices and Palestinian journalists” to her more than 60,000 Instagram followers.
Shortly after re-posting a video from Palestinian journalist Mariam Barghouti criticising the genocide, Webb became the target of a blacklisting campaign. Webb’s manager began receiving emails from major Hollywood producers pressuring the manager to drop Webb as a client and letting them know Webb would never work on any of their projects again.
Next, Webb said, she and her manager got “flooded” with emails, calling her “an antisemite, a nazi … calling me vile names.” A Broadway producer emailed her management company to inform them that they “would never work with her and would tell everyone they know never to work with her.”
Suddenly, Webb said, her auditions “screeched to a halt”. She also noticed that many of her friends in the entertainment industry “began to distance themselves”. Noting that she’s been vocal about human rights and oppression throughout her career, Webb said it was “heartbreaking” to have longtime friends freeze her out for opposing a genocide. At the same time, she said, “If this is what ends my career, that’s fine by me because I could never sit back and watch what we’ve all seen and not say something.”
Webb said that the retaliation she faced was typical for the entertainment industry in that she “can’t say for certain” that work opportunities suddenly dried up because she spoke up about the genocide. At the same time, Webb noted that she’s been a full-time working actor for more than two decades, and that there was suddenly a “marked difference” in what work she could access once she decided to speak out.
Stories like Webb’s show, as El Gamal put it, that repression is “baked into how the industry works”. Arghandiwal drew a parallel between the Palestine solidarity movement and the “Me Too” movement, saying that both movements reveal that “there’s a level of abuse and silence in the face of abuse that’s normalised” in the entertainment industry.
Solidarity with Palestine across the arts
The widespread acceptance of abuse within the arts and entertainment industries is part of what makes the September 8 pledge, made publicly by thousands of film workers, so significant. After two years of effectively silencing all but a handful of pro-Palestine voices in film and television, Zionist film executives have lost control of the narrative within their own industry. What’s more, this wave of solidarity with Palestine is not limited to film and television.
In music, more than 1000 artists and labels have signed on to the cultural boycott of Israel, joining the “No Music for Genocide” campaign. In theatre, more than 25 theatres and performing arts organisations have joined the cultural boycott since 2023, responding to the call put forward by the solidarity formation Theater Workers for a Ceasefire (TW4C). In September, TW4C (of which this article’s author is a member) also launched its Apartheid Free Zone (AFZ) campaign. Inspired by solidarity campaigns that sprang up against South African apartheid, TW4C’s AFZ campaign has already gotten three theatres to officially make the apartheid-free pledge.
With solidarity in the arts continuing to grow, FWP organiser Emre urged industry workers to get involved in the Palestine liberation movement. More than anything, he said, “we need more people to join in the fight and help us organise.”
Webb encouraged workers from every part of the industry to join the movement and speak out against repression. “If we allow the fear-mongering to win,” she said, “we’re doomed.”
[Reprinted from Mondoweiss.]