World War Z and the Hollywood hasbara apparatus

This essay is Part Four in a series analyzing the zombie racial Other in media. It contains spoilers for World War Z (2013). 

"The establishment of the state of Israel in mid-May 1948 was greeted with jubilation by the supporters of Zionism in Hollywood."

—Tony Shaw and Giora Goodman, Hollywood and Israel: A History

A sequel to globetrotting zombie epic World War Z (2013) has been announced after over a decade of fans waiting and wondering. Brad Pitt, who has been campaigning for the sequel since the massive success of the first film, will return to star as former United Nations investigator Gerry Lane, contending with the zombie virus ravaging the world. Next to Neil Druckmann's The Last of Us franchise, World War Z—an adaptation of Max Brooks' 2006 epistolary novel, World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War—is perhaps the most well-known and well-loved piece of Zionist propaganda. The announcement of another installment raises concerns about the propagandist work the sequel is likely to do, especially in a post-October 7 world where Zionist propaganda has become even more aggressive in a monopolized media landscape. 

After Josh Greenstein and Dana Goldberg were appointed co-chairs of Paramount Pictures post-Skydance merger under CEO and Zionist billionaire David Ellison, the long-considered prospect of a World War Z sequel became a reality. The two reportedly deemed the project a "high-priority" for the company. According to Deadline, "Skydance played a big part in getting the first film off the ground, and Skydance founder David Ellison shared Pitt's desire in moving forward with a sequel."

At the culmination of a months-long legal battle, Paramount Skydance has now merged with Warner Bros. David Ellison's tech oligarch father Larry Ellison—hardcore Trump supporter, major Friends of the Israel Defense Forces donor, and noted close associate of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—helped finance the $111 billion deal. Less of a merger and more of a forced acquisition (read: hostile takeover), the combining of Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros. has created an imposing, biased media conglomerate that will serve as a constant home for hasbara—Zionist propaganda. 

Hasbara is a blatant distortion of the narrative around Israel's settler-colonial violence. It exists among a sea of various media artifacts and other tactics deployed with the express purpose of painting Israel—a nuclear-armed regional superpower allied with both the U.S. and Europe—as the innocent victim of unprovoked attacks. Long before stories like The Last of Us and World War Z, Hollywood emerged as a valuable cog in this Zionist propaganda machine. 

Hollywood productions inform Western opinions on Zionism, Israel, and the indiscriminate killing of Palestinians. Decades of Hollywood hasbara have been crucial in the Zionist plot to indoctrinate Westerners into identifying—from one settler-colony to another—with the Zionist entity and deepening Western solidarity in the face of a livestreamed genocide this entity has been carrying out for almost 80 years. In "Palestinian Zombie: Settler-Colonial Erasure and Paradigms of the Living Dead," Anna-Esther Younes writes: 

"Westerners and others have written themselves into the modern affliction that understands Zionist settler-colonialism as the humane outcome of human history. Political Zionism thus becomes the political project of the human and of humanity—leaving everyone else as its non-human enemy."

While The Last of Us utilizes zombies to offer a "both sides"/"cycle of violence" centrist view of the colonial occupation of Palestine, World War Z is more direct and unerring in its rationalization of ethnically cleansing Palestine to prevent the destruction of Israeli civilization. Despite this contrast, the two go hand in hand. In these stories, pop culture zombie mythology is the perfect vessel to hold Zionists' apocalyptic anxieties about Palestinian existence and communicate those fears to a primed Western audience. 

Palestine must die 

In World War Z, a suspected rabies outbreak hits. It's sudden and devastating. Violent infected sprint through the streets at lightning speed—eyes rolled over grayish-white, skin marbled with creeping black veins, an inky ooze seeping from their mouths. Gnashing and convulsing, they move together like swarming insects or a teeming nest of rats. 

The behavior of the infected calls up the recurring metaphor in Zionist rhetoric that paints Palestinians as animalistic, especially as an infestation of insects. Dov Yermiya—Haganah veteran, former Lieutenant Colonel, and author of My War Diary: Lebanon, June 5 – July 1, 1982—once noted that, during his time in Israeli military service, "the attitude towards the noncombatant Palestinian population recalls the attitude towards cockroaches that swarm on the ground." Palestinians are repeatedly framed as disease-spreading vermin, swine, rodents, reptiles, and pests, and even as a biological threat themselves. 

Gerry Lane has been charged with discerning the origins of the emerging biological threat so a vaccine can be engineered. On his country-hopping search for patient zero, he is directed toward Israel, where answers allegedly lie. The Mossad, Israel's national intelligence agency, has established a secure area in Jerusalem, erecting a massive wall around the city. There, Gerry meets Jurgen Warmbrunn (Ludi Boeken), a high-ranking Mossad official, who explains that an intercepted communique from an Indian General claimed Indian forces were fighting Rakshasa—flesh-eating demons in Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain mythologies—which the Mossad wisely interpreted as zombies.

Israel approved construction on the Apartheid Wall in 2002 in response to Palestinian resistance at the height of the Second Intifada. Built "in the style of a border barrier," the wall intentionally severs occupied East Jerusalem from the West Bank. Building this apartheid wall—ruled a violation of international humanitarian law by the International Court of Justice—blocked East Jerusalem from becoming the capital of a Palestinian state as part of the Oslo Accords' proposed "two-state solution," which was meant to "address Palestinian claims to national self-determination without undermining Israel's [necro-] sovereignty." The many checkpoints along the wall are guarded by armed Israeli soldiers to intimidate, terrorize, and purposely restrict the movements of Palestinians—disrupting Palestinian communities, separating families, and impinging on access to jobs, schools, property ownership, medical care, food, and religious sites. Israel has also proposed a new apartheid wall in Jordan, an endeavor understood as an attempt to ethnically cleanse Palestinians in the Jordan Valley. 

"Iron gates, earth mounds, roadblocks, permanent and flying checkpoints, and a segregated road system that together fragment Palestinian space and regulate every axis of movement. This infrastructure does not merely restrict mobility—it reorganizes territory and people. Israeli-only bypass roads, built to circumvent Palestinian areas, facilitate land confiscation, consolidate colony expansion, and carve Palestinian communities into enclaves. Under the Israeli regime's Decisive Plan, these roads and the closure apparatus serve as tools to sever, fragment, and isolate Palestinian communities while ensuring seamless territorial contiguity for Israeli colonies."

—"Israeli Colonial-Apartheid Infrastructure: Enclaves and Implementing the Decisive Plan," BADIL Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights 

A pattern of Palestinian "humiliation and degradation" is a fundamental aspect of Israel's occupation, and the many checkpoints along the Apartheid Wall have served as common sites for this violence. Israeli border guards, police, and soldiers harass and abuse Palestinians at border crossings, often forcing Palestinians to debase themselves by behaving like animals. This animal behavior, in turn, reinforces the perceived need for the wall. Israeli historian Benny Morris defended the racial containment of Palestinians in a 2004 interview with Counterpunch, saying, "Something like a cage has to be built for them. I know that sounds terrible. It is really cruel. But there is no choice. There is a wild animal there that has to be locked up in one way or another."

Instead of demarcating an apartheid zone, the barrier wall in World War Z stands as "a very brazen rewrite of the violence and exclusion of Israel's hundreds of check-points." In fact, in the Jerusalem witnessed by Gerry Lane, Israelis and Palestinians survive together, singing and dancing while Israeli and Palestinian flags proudly flutter in the wind. 

Times of Israel film critic Jordan Hoffman asserts that, in these moments of romanticized Israeli and Palestinian fellowship, World War Z is "the greatest piece of cinematic propaganda for Israel since Otto Preminger's 'Exodus.'" Preminger's Exodus (1960) adapts the 1958 quasi-historical novel of the same name by Leon Uris, a work that explores the history of Zionism, the establishment of Israel—as in the Nakba, the 1948 ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, proudly referred to by Zionists as Israel's "War of Independence"—and the creation of Zionist military groups, the Palmach, the Haganah, and the Irgun. The novel boasts typical anti-Arab stereotypes, describing Palestinians as variations of "dirty," "stinking," and "filthy." It concludes: "If the Arabs of Palestine loved their land, they could not have been forced from it—much less run from it without real cause. The Arabs had little to live for, much less to fight for, this is not the reaction of a man who loves his land." Israel's first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, said of the book, "As a literary work, it isn't much. But as a piece of propaganda, it's the greatest thing ever written about Israel."

In the end, it's the camaraderie between Israelis and Palestinians that leads to their downfall in World War Z. One of the most intense scenes comes when the zombies are drawn to the cacophony inside the walled-off city after Palestinians begin singing with microphones. The amplified songs raised by Palestinian tongues become a death knell. Throngs of zombies swarm the city, snarling and shrieking, clamoring over each other and scaling the wall in a harrowing spectacle. A wave of putrescent, hungering bodies comes crashing into the peaceful civilization, decimating it in minutes.

Both the refugees and the zombies represent a Palestinian threat. The moment communicates that, as long as Palestinians exist, Israel is in danger of destruction. In the Zionist imagination, there is no possibility of living peacefully among or with Palestinians, and that is why Palestine must die. 

In his review of World War Z, Jordan Hoffman asks, "Who the hell wrote this movie, Meir Kahane?"—as in the ultra-nationalist terrorist extremist who espoused virulent racism and formed a fascist political party in Israel. Kahane was a supremacist and outright condemned the kind of Zionist liberalism that would allow a "two-state solution," let alone welcome Palestinian refugees during a zombie apocalypse. For staunch, far-right Zionists like Kahane, the genocide of Palestinians is not only inevitable, but vital and deserved. 

While Kahane's extremism was once disavowed by many, his politics have become more mainstream. In 2022, Itamar Ben-Gvir, an ideological disciple of Kahanism, was appointed as Minister of National Security under Netanyahu and now controls Israeli police and paramilitary border agents in occupied Palestine. During his tenure, Ben-Gvir has taunted detained flotilla activists intercepted by Israel while trying to deliver humanitarian aid to Gaza, and called for the killing of "30 to 40" Gazans every night. 

"I think targeted assassinations should be carried out in Gaza, taking down 30 to 40 every night… Not just those who pose an immediate threat… There are people there who are not worthy of life. They shouldn't live. They're not even people."

Zionist revisionism in World War Z portrays Israel as "a society safely protected by its paranoia and militarism from the outside threat," justifying the Apartheid Wall as a protection measure against a coming scourge rather than a tool of fascist control. The film uses pop culture zombie mythology to synthesize the extremist dogma spouted by Zionist leaders like David Ben-Gurion, Meir Kahane, and Itamar Ben-Gvir into a commodity for our entertainment. It's no surprise that Hollywood is intent on making a sequel. 

Hollywood hasbara history 

Tony Shaw and Giora Goodman chronicle the romance between the U.S. entertainment industry and the Zionist entity in Hollywood and Israel: A History. Though the book neglects to meaningfully interrogate Zionist ideology itself, which critic Hazem Fahmy notes in their review, it clearly illustrates "the role Hollywood has played in the diplomatic, military, and cultural relationship" between the two settler-colonial bodies, with Hollywood profiting from and helping to promote Israel's soft power. As researcher Shazmah Fatima writes in "Scripting Support: Analyzing the Hollywood-Israel Nexus,"

"Hollywood functions as a soft power tool that can influence international public opinion in favor of Israel and change US foreign policy support through ownership structures, organizational pressure, and deliberate content creation."

A significant reason for Hollywood and Israel's enduring relationship, according to Shaw and Goodman, is that the film industry and modern political Zionism emerged around the same time: the late 1890s. Moreover, the founder of the Zionist movement, Austro-Hungarian journalist Theodore Herzl, "saw moving pictures as central to furthering his cause." By the 1920s, Hollywood had become a lucrative entertainment empire in the West, and the wealthy Hollywood moguls "became new sources of wealth for the Zionist project to mine." 

During the 1920s and 1930s, the deliberate and diligent development of Hollywood hasbara began in earnest. 1935 saw the release of what is considered perhaps the most influential Zionist propaganda to date. The Land of Promise—part-documentary, part-travelogue—was "inspired by newsreel footage of Zionist endeavors in Palestine, shot by Paramount Pictures, and was originally designed as a Zionist love story mainly for American cinemagoers."

The 1940s and 1950s were an era of building more social and political support for the Zionist project among Westerners. Similar to Preminger's Exodus, Sword in the Desert (1949) and The Juggler (1953) focus on the creation of the Zionist state. Hazem Fahmy observes that, in these films, "Palestinians—as well as Egyptians, Syrians, and Jordanians—are portrayed as brutal, irrational, and devoid of any legitimate or coherent reason for their rejection of the Zionist project." 

Cecil B. DeMille's Samson and Delilah (1949) is based on the 1926 novel Samson the Nazirite by revisionist Zionist leader Vladimir Jabotinsky. In this interpretation, the warrior Samson—a symbol of hypermasculinity and military prowess in Israeli culture, so much so that an Israeli nuclear weapons program is called the Samson Option—is framed as "an awakening national leader inspiring his fractured people to reclaim their sovereignty." Biblical epics like this one helped to expand and deepen Hollywood's relationship with the Zionist entity, as film studios were willing to invest a lot of dollars into "authentic" biblical locations. 

Exodus was certainly the most impactful Zionist propaganda of the 1960s. Shazmah Fatima argues that the "foundation for later Hollywood depictions of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was established by its tremendous commercial success and ensuing cultural influence." Other films of the decade, like Judith (1966) and Cast a Giant Shadow (1966) made their own impact with pro-Israeli military operation narratives focusing, in part, on Zionist paramilitary organization the Haganah. This lionizing of the Israeli military gave way to stories about struggling against international Arab terrorism that began to surge in the 1970s. 

Rosebud (1975), directed and produced by Otto Preminger, was the first time an Arab-led international terrorist organization was portrayed on screen in Hollywood. Based on the 1974 novel of the same name, Rosebud follows an undercover CIA agent as he works with Israeli intelligence to rescue five wealthy girls kidnapped by the Palestinian Liberation Army, which plans to build a centralized global terrorist network. Black Sunday (1977) includes a Palestinian femme fatale and follows an Israeli counter-terrorist Mossad operative as he teams up with an FBI agent to stop a Palestinian terrorist attack targeting the Super Bowl. In The Delta Force (1986), Palestinian terrorists hijack an American plane and Chuck Norris must save the day. 

In the 1990s, these stories were amplified, with thrillers about elite U.S. anti-terrorist operatives fighting Islamic extremists waging a "holy war" on the West. Shaw and Goodman write:

"Religion played a conspicuous role in Hollywood's negative depiction of Palestinians and Arabs in movies in the 1990s. Many of Hollywood's screen Arabs were again portrayed as terrorists during this decade but of an even more dangerous type: Islamic fundamentalists whose goal was not national liberation… but mass destruction in the west."

In True Lies (1994), Arnold Schwarzenegger fights an Islamic jihadist. In Executive Decision (1996), Kurt Russell must go on a dangerous mission when a plane is hijacked by Arab terrorists. In 1998's The Siege, Denzel Washington and Tony Shalhoub face off against an Arab terrorist cell detonating bombs across New York. That same year, Israel's 50th anniversary was commemorated with a special screening of Exodus at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. 

After the September 11 attacks in 2001, anti-Arab storylines in film and television only became more frequent and more blatant, and a number of projects distinctly portrayed Israel as a valuable ally. Beirut (2018), Operation Finale (2018), and The Red Sea Diving Resort (2019), led by some of Hollywood's favorite stars—John Hamm, Oscar Isaac, and Chris Evans, respectively—all have pro-Israel and/or anti-Arab leanings and largely depict Israeli secret agents as patriotic, efficient, effective, and resourceful operatives who valiantly aid U.S. forces in the face of Arab terror. On television, Our Boys (2019), The Spy (2019), and The Messiah (2020) reinforce the Zionist narrative on the occupation of Palestine while demonizing Palestinians and anti-colonial resistance. 

Beyond producing pro-Zionist media, influential entertainment magnates have coordinated with Israeli military and government officials to craft messaging to whitewash Israel's war crimes—much like the U.S. military entertainment complex. In July 2014, Israel launched "Operation Protective Edge" along the Gaza Strip, a 50-day campaign of bombing Palestinian homes and landmarks. Following this attack, Hollywood lawyer and producer Glenn D. Feig emailed other executives to emphasize that Israel's version of events and Zionist doctrine must be "repeated ad infinitum until the people get it." Shazmah Fatima notes: 

"Executives hosting solidarity trips to Israel with thousands of other media executives, serving on boards of pro-Israel organizations, and using their commercial clout to support pro-Israel movies and TV shows while omitting or making irrelevant Palestinian viewpoints are perhaps the most common examples [of Hollywood hasbara] in recent years."

Since 2023, Paramount has distributed several projects to help construct the Zionist narrative around October 7, including We Will Dance Again: Surviving October 7th (2024), Red Alert (2025), and The Children of October 7 (2025). With the merger of Paramount and Warner Bros., Hollywood media and power is now even more hyperconcentrated. The multibillionaire, pro-Zionist Ellison family now exerts control over a host of films and television series, standalones and franchises alike. And, in addition to a World War Z sequel, David Ellison has made clear his intentions to grow the company's slate to more than 30 film releases every year, further disseminating Zionist propaganda to a world in which Zionism has already been globalized. 

"The zombification of Palestinian life has by now reached such a globalized audience, that the killing of Palestinians for money and 'security' has become nothing but philosophical ruminations, negotiation and diplomacy… Today, killing Palestinians is part-and-parcel of sustaining the Israeli nation-state's survival by providing the bodily logistics upon which the violence necessary to maintain capitalism can be practiced."

—Anna-Esther Younes, "Palestinian Zombie: Settler-Colonial Erasure and Paradigms of the Living Dead"

Alongside World War Z, a lengthy list of Hollywood projects were/are explicitly created with Zionist politics in mind, often in celebration of settler-colonialism and justification of genocide. A century of Hollywood hasbara has worked to desensitize Western audiences to Israel's war crimes and to normalize the prioritization of Israel's political and military interests. The entertainment industry's complicity is a necropolitical tool of zombifying Palestinians and sustaining Israel's death-world. 

Under the Ellison Monopoly, we should prepare to see more of and remain vigilant against hasbara like World War Z. After constructing Israel's Apartheid Wall as a smart, preemptive move against the zombie virus and/as Palestinian threat, World War Z is bound to beget a sequel that will tell a similarly revisionist zombie myth—if not one even more grotesque.