Free speech means the right to protest, criticize, and organize, including about Israel, including from Hollywood. It does not mean the right to be taken seriously regardless of whether the claims hold up, and it does not exempt celebrity activism from the same criticism that anyone else’s advocacy would face.
That distinction keeps disappearing. Increasingly, the exercise of that right comes without the homework it’s supposed to earn: without depth, without fact-checking, without any apparent interest in whether the underlying claim is true. An antitrust dispute becomes evidence of Zionist power. A convicted participant in terrorist murders becomes a political prisoner. The common thread isn’t conviction. It’s that Israel is the fixed villain, no matter the subject, and the people saying so rarely seem to have done the reading.
The pattern is not politically random. It runs almost entirely through Hollywood’s progressive-Left activist class — the limousine-liberal wing of the industry that treats Israel as the one government on Earth whose legitimacy is perpetually up for debate. The same voices that stay conspicuously quiet on authoritarian regimes, theocratic dictatorships, and far graver human-rights records elsewhere in the region find, without fail, the energy to single out the one Jewish state in it.
The Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery merger and the campaign to free Marwan Barghouti, both unfolding in Hollywood this month, show exactly how that hypocrisy works in practice.
The merger has nothing to do with Israel until an actor made it about Israel.
More than 1,000 entertainment professionals have signed a letter opposing the Paramount-Skydance acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, warning it would concentrate creative power and cost jobs. The Writers Guild opposes it. A coalition of 12 state attorneys general is suing to block it in federal court, with trial set for March 2027, even after regulators in nearly 70 countries, including the Department of Justice, cleared the deal. That’s a legitimate fight, arguable on its economic merits alone.
Israel has nothing to do with it. Mark Ruffalo brought it there anyway.
In an Instagram post targeting Paramount CEO David Ellison and his father, Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, Ruffalo resurfaced a 2024 clip of Oracle executive Safra Catz describing the company’s technology assistance to Israel after Oct. 7. He called Larry Ellison a “classic oligarch,” accused the Ellisons of “powering some of the most destructive and inhuman forces in the world,” and told followers to watch Catz “revel in what we now have come to see as a genocide” built on “apartheid.”
Paramount called the rhetoric antisemitic and “a bridge too far,” saying words such as genocide and apartheid, applied to a corporate transaction, cheapen the suffering those words are meant to describe. Four of the most prominent Jewish and pro-Israel advocacy organizations in the country reached the same conclusion. The Anti-Defamation League, Simon Wiesenthal Center, and Creative Community for Peace condemned the remarks within 48 hours. Jewish Federation Los Angeles CEO Rabbi Noah Farkas followed, calling it an “unhinged rant” that fused “Jewish wealth, media control, secret technology and sinister global power.” ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt told Ruffalo to oppose the merger on its actual merits instead of “introducing the Jewish state out of the blue when it’s entirely unrelated.”
This wasn’t a first offense. Ruffalo apologized in 2021 for calling Israel’s conduct “genocide,” admitting the term was “inaccurate” and “inflammatory.” He later amplified an AI-generated image during the viral “All Eyes on Rafah” campaign. As far back as September 2025, he had already called for the “boycott, divestment, sanctions, and prosecution” of Israel on a podcast. And Algemeiner reports he has told associates he ended friendships with Jewish actors who continued supporting Israel: “I can’t relate to them anymore.”
Ruffalo rejects the charge. Criticizing an Israeli military contract, he argued on X, is not the same as criticizing Jewish people. Standing alone, that’s true. It doesn’t answer the actual question: Why did a Hollywood merger require Israel as its villain at all for the second time in a year?
The Barghouti campaign shows the same mechanism running in reverse, laundering a convicted killer into a political prisoner.
More than 200 cultural figures, including Benedict Cumberbatch, Cate Blanchett, Tilda Swinton, Ian McKellen, Sting, Paul Simon, and Ruffalo again, are backing an international campaign demanding Marwan Barghouti’s release. The Nelson Mandela comparison isn’t incidental framing. It’s built into the campaign’s foundation. The Free Marwan effort was launched in 2013 from Nelson Mandela’s actual cell on Robben Island by Ahmed Kathrada, Mandela’s fellow anti-apartheid prisoner, and the campaign’s own website states outright that “Barghouti is widely recognised as a Palestinian Mandela figure.” Campaign-affiliated musician Brian Eno made the comparison explicit: “Just as global solidarity helped free Nelson Mandela, we all have the power to accelerate the day that Marwan Barghouti walks free.” This month, more than 20 additional actors connected to Marvel productions signed on.
There’s one problem with the Mandela framing: Barghouti was convicted of murder. A Tel Aviv court found him guilty in 2004 on five counts tied to three terrorist attacks that killed four Israelis and a Greek Orthodox monk, sentencing him to five life terms plus 40 years. The same court acquitted him on 21 further counts tied to 33 other attacks for insufficient evidence — proof the verdict wasn’t a blanket conviction, but a considered one.
Barghouti’s popularity among Palestinians and his frequent mention as a future leader are real political facts. They don’t rewrite what a court found he did. Yet the Free Marwan campaign describes him as “illegally held” and “unjustly imprisoned,” foregrounding his treatment in custody while the murders he was convicted of barely register. The victims disappear. The perpetrator becomes the symbol of injustice.
The same names keep appearing on both sides of the same pattern.
Ruffalo, Swinton, and others recur across the merger attack, the 2025 pledge by thousands of film professionals to boycott Israeli cultural institutions, and the Barghouti campaign. This is not an incidental affiliation, and it doesn’t stop at petition signatures. Swinton has said outright, at a Berlinale press conference, that she is “a great admirer of and has a great deal of respect for” the BDS movement — a campaign whose own founders have described its long-term goal as the reversal of Jewish statehood, not merely a policy critique. Javier Bardem, a fellow signatory of the 2025 boycott pledge, went further still, captioning IDF footage on Instagram in August 2025: “The IDF are NAZIS.” He invoked the SS commander from Schindler’s List by name, writing that Israel’s military applies “the same logic of terror and dehumanization.” Times of Israel commentary called it Holocaust trivialization outright — and comparing Israeli soldiers to Nazis sits squarely inside the IHRA working definition of antisemitism, not at its edges. None of this means these actors are forbidden from holding these views. They aren’t. It means celebrity amplification can turn a contested political claim into cultural conventional wisdom before its facts get any scrutiny at all, and Hollywood, of all industries, understands the power of repetition better than anyone.
Antisemitism has never required a speaker to announce hatred of Jews. It has historically worked by attaching hidden, outsize power to Jewish people and institutions — treating Jewish-linked wealth and media as uniquely sinister — or by inverting history, casting the one state built from the Holocaust’s survivors as the perpetrators of one. That doesn’t mean every Zionism critic is an antisemite. It means an antitrust dispute reaching for Israel, a convicted killer reframed as Mandela, and Israeli soldiers branded Nazis should all set off the same alarm, especially when the organizations built to track this exact pattern are the ones sounding it.
THE LEFTIST OMNICAUSE LIES TO US EVERY DAY
If Hollywood wants to speak the language of justice, it has to hold the line between a political prisoner and a man convicted of orchestrating murders. If it wants to fight prejudice, it can’t recycle a century-old script about Jewish control of money and media and then wave off Jewish objections as an attempt to silence criticism.
Different controversy. Different campaign. Same villain. At some point, it’s worth asking whether the destination was chosen before the journey began.
Yuval David is an Emmy Award–winning journalist, filmmaker, actor, and political commentator focused on combating antisemitism, extremism, and disinformation while advancing democratic values and human rights. He is a fellow at the Middle East Forum, a delegate to the World Zionist Congress, and the U.S. representative of Voice of the People. He advises leaders and organizations internationally and appears regularly across major global news outlets.