CONSERVATIVE political commentator Andrew Breitbart famously said “politics is downstream of culture”. He meant that any attempt to change the politics of a country must begin with changing the culture. While he said this in the context of fostering right-wing politics in America, we can also apply it to the position of Israel and the Gaza genocide in US politics.

What are the forces that drive cultural change in America and thus — if we believe Breitbart — can also transform politics? There’s Hollywood of course — films are both a mirror to society and a catalyst for societal change — along with other modes of mass entertainment, such as TV shows.

In the context of the Gaza genocide and how Israel is viewed by Americans through the lens of culture and its presumed effect on politics, much has changed in the past two years. Start with South Park, an animated series that has been running for close to 30 years on American TV and is known for its satire and “fearless social commentary”.

South Park finally took on the Gaza genocide with Sheila Broflovski, the Jewish mother of one of the characters being confronted by her gentile friends about her views on the genocide and whether she feels that, as a Jew, she should do something about it. Sheila is enraged: “It’s just pure antisemitism,” she rails, saying she is “sick of being grilled about [her] views on Palestine and [her] thoughts on Hamas” that she’s going to “find the person responsible and give them a piece of her mind”.

Many Western celebrities are unafraid to speak out against Israel.

While everyone thinks she’s going to bomb a Palestinian hospital she, instead, flies to Tel Aviv and barges into Benjamin Netanyahu’s office saying “[you’re] killing thousands of people and flattening neighbourhoods, then wrapping yourself in Judaism like it’s some shield from criticism … you are making lives for Jews miserable and life for American Jews impossible. … [Y]ou’re doing it on purpose”.

Now while this does typically centre Jewish-American feelings rather than the genocide per se, it is still a sea change when it comes to depictions of Israel in mainstream American media and we must understand this is a conversation America is having with itself, not the rest of the world. It’s impactful: the ultra-right-wing Jewish organisation Betar condemned the episode for ‘antisemitism’ and Israeli media ran handwringing pieces about how Israel was not responsible for ‘Jew-hatred’.

Much the same was seen when the new Superman movie came out. While a low-effort crowd-pleasing popcorn flick for the most part, it did depict a conflict between Boravia, a wealthy, white country with a powerful military backed by the US, and Jarhanpur, the population of which seems Middle Eastern/ South Asian and whose ‘military’ comprises mostly unarmed civilians in refugee camps. Behind the scenes is Lex Luthor, a corrupt tech mogul who wants a chunk of Jarhanpur’s land to create his own little country. If that sounds familiar, it should.

There’s more: Boravia’s president seem­­ed to many to be a thinly veiled version of Netanyahu, and while I thought the comparisons were overblown the Israeli and Zionist reaction was something to behold, even though director James Gunn had said before the movie’s release that “it doesn’t have anything to do with the Middle East”.

That the dam is — if not breaking — then certainly cracking is evident in the number of Western celebrities unafraid to speak out against Israel’s actions. Some go beyond words, with over 4,000 film industry workers — including Emma Stone, Mark Ruf­falo, Tilda Swinton, Riz Ahmed and Javier Bar­dem pledging to boycott film institutions and governments that are “implicated in ge­­­nocide and ap­­artheid agai­nst the Pales­tin­ian people”.

Earlier, the Ve­­­-nice film festival saw a record 23- minute standing ovation for the Voice of Hind Raj­ab, a docudrama on the six-year-old girl brutally murdered along with her family by Israel in 2024. Hollywood heavyweights like Brad Pitt and Joaquin Phoenix signed on as executive producers for this film and, a day after the film released their emails were flooded with “thousands and thousands” of hate messages from Zionists.

We also see actors using ‘non-political’ forums to highlight Palestine. Examples include Jewish actress Hannah Einbinder who ended her Emmy acceptance speech with a strident ‘Free Palestine’ and Hugh Bonneville, the star of Downton Abbey, who called the situation in Gaza “indefensible”. Others, who previously remained silent, are now speaking up, with Jennifer Lawrence saying the situation in Gaza is “no less than a genocide”.

There is pushback, with many (unfortunately mostly Jewish) actors and film professionals speaking out in support of Israel but these voices are increasingly becoming a minority. America’s culture is changing, when will its politics change?

The writer is a journalist.

X: @zarrarkhuhro

Published in Dawn, October 6th, 2025