Hollywood shunned No Other Land and Hind Rajab, then left NAZA alone until the Gaza film made money. Now Neon has joined it, and the pro-Israel grip on Hollywood is slipping.
Hollywood has finally found room for NAZA. On 21 October Neon, the distributor that carried Parasite and Anora to the best picture Oscar, joined Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor’s documentary about how Israel’s army chose its targets in Gaza. A month earlier, America’s distributors would only say the film was “on their radar”. Then they watched it make money without them.
Released by its makers with a booker and a great deal of nerve, NAZA has taken $885,890 in American cinemas since 30 September and spread to 105 screens. It opened at number one in Italy and plays in 56 countries. And Neon is now paying to promote a film the Guardian will give away free online in late November. Nothing calms political nerves in Hollywood like a healthy box office.
“They will destroy you”
When I arrived in Hollywood in 2009, I called the Palestinian director Hany Abu-Assad. His Paradise Now had won the Golden Globe and an Oscar nomination, and he was preparing to leave after his attempts to make a film there had been thwarted. His advice to me was to run. “They will not allow a Palestinian to be here,” he said. “They will destroy you in less than a year.”
With the support of my Jewish friends, I lasted far longer than a year. Palestinian films have had less luck: they win prizes everywhere and still struggle to get into American cinemas.
Oscar favourites nobody would buy
No Other Land, which Abraham and Szor made with the Palestinian directors Basel Adra and Hamdan Ballal, won the Oscar for best documentary in 2025 and never found an American distributor. A streaming deal with Mubi fell apart. Its makers had to book the cinemas themselves.
Last season Kaouther Ben Hania’s The Voice of Hind Rajab, built around the phone calls of a five-year-old girl trapped in a car under fire in Gaza, was nominated for both the Golden Globe and the Oscar. Its executive producers included Brad Pitt, Joaquin Phoenix, Rooney Mara, Alfonso Cuarón and Jonathan Glazer. The most bankable names in the business still could not find it a buyer. After two months in limbo, Willa, the company of one of its own executive producers, released it, so that the film stayed, in its producers’ words, “in the family”.
Annemarie Jacir’s Palestine 36 and Cherien Dabis’s All That’s Left of You both reached the Academy’s shortlist. Both went to Watermelon Pictures, a company two Palestinian-American brothers founded in 2024. To reach American audiences, Palestinians had to build a little Hollywood of their own.
The line that cost me my vote
None of this surprises anyone who has worked inside the industry. In February 2022 I wrote in Al-Quds Al-Arabi that Hollywood was “still under the grip of the pro-Israel lobby”. I had watched stars delete their sympathy for Gaza within minutes of posting it, and publicists cut short interviews the moment I said the word Palestine. That article cost me my career in Hollywood. Investigators hired by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association concluded that it used an antisemitic trope, and in August 2022 the association, whose members voted for the Golden Globes, expelled me.
The pattern is older than my case. When Julian Schnabel’s Miral, the story of a Palestinian orphanage, premiered at the United Nations in 2011, pro-Israel groups protested to stop it, and several Hollywood organisations, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association among them, refused to attend its screening. The film sank.
The grip slips
NAZA faced everything a state could throw at a documentary. Israel’s culture minister promised to strip both directors of their citizenship. Benjamin Netanyahu demanded an inquiry into the soldiers who spoke to them. Israel’s embassies in Washington and London promoted a rival film with the same name. Protesters screened footage of the 7 October attack outside its New York premiere, while its screenings there sold out within minutes.
The Israeli government, with all its influence in Washington, could not empty a single cinema. The audience moved first, and the money followed. A self-released documentary filling 105 American screens makes an argument no boardroom can ignore. Neon’s decision is a business decision, and that is exactly why it matters. When backing a film about Gaza becomes the profitable choice, the pressure that kept Palestinian stories off American screens loses its hold.
Abu-Assad gave me a year. It took Hollywood thirteen to show me the door. In that time, the films it would not touch have won prizes in Venice and Berlin, an Oscar and now the box office. The grip that held me is slipping, and a Gaza documentary loosened it.