The Story Machine: Hasbara, Hollywood and How the West Is Sold Israel's Version of Palestine — the Documented Record

By the Kimi Travels Team · Updated September 2026

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You do not need a conspiracy theory to explain why Western audiences see Israel's version of Palestine first, loudest and longest. You need something far more solid: budget lines, press-release calendars, casting decisions, platform moderation reports, and trade agreements — every one of them documented, dated and on the public record. This article walks through that record the way we walked through the documented hospitality and betrayal of Palestine: with receipts, not slogans. Because when the machinery managing a story is visible, the story itself can finally be checked.

Hasbara: The Word Israel Put on the Job

Start with a word that Israelis themselves use without embarrassment: hasbara — literally "explanation," and in practice the name of their state's official public-diplomacy apparatus. This is not a slur invented by critics; it is a governmental function, staffed, budgeted and celebrated inside Israel's own institutions, with the Foreign Ministry and dedicated ministries coordinating messaging for international audiences. After October 2023 the operation scaled up dramatically: government-coordinated briefings, distributed footage packages, official talking points pushed into every Western newsroom and social platform within hours of each news cycle. The clearest single illustration came on November 9, 2023, when Israeli actress Gal Gadot — a former IDF soldier and one of Hollywood's most bankable stars — organised "Bearing Witness to the October 7th Massacre" at Los Angeles' Museum of Tolerance: a curated, invitation-only screening of IDF-assembled footage for a celebrity audience, covered by the New York Times, i24NEWS and the National Post. That event was not journalism; it was state-adjacent public relations staged inside the world's story-making capital. Nobody denies it happened. The people who ran it were proud of it.

What the Coverage Numbers Actually Show

If the machinery exists, it should leave fingerprints in the data — and it does. A quantitative analysis published by The Intercept in January 2024 examined roughly a thousand articles from the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post and found coverage systematically skewed toward the Israeli narrative: Israeli deaths received far more emphasis, more sympathetic framing and more front-page placement than vastly higher Palestinian death tolls. An earlier academic study (Caballero, University of Pittsburgh, 2010) had already measured the pattern across a full year of New York Times coverage: 431% of Israeli deaths reported versus 17% of Palestinian deaths — a 25:1 ratio — with only 17% of Palestinian children's deaths covered at all. A 2025 peer-reviewed analysis on arXiv documented "false balance": Western reports persistently equated Israeli and Palestinian suffering while anchoring every story to October 7, regardless of the date. And the people paid to report fairly paid with their lives: the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) recorded 129 journalists and media workers killed in 2025 alone — the deadliest year since records began — with Israel responsible for two-thirds of those deaths and 81% of deliberately targeted killings, according to its February 2026 report covered by the Guardian and the Washington Post. The Gaza war now stands documented as the deadliest conflict for journalists in modern history. When the messengers die at this rate, the message is not an accident.

Hollywood's Two Sets of Rules: Sarandon, Barrera, Schnapp and Ruffalo

In November 2023 the industry drew a line in public, twice, in the same week. Susan Sarandon, an Oscar winner, was dropped by her talent agency UTA after speaking at a pro-Palestine rally; Melissa Barrera was fired from Scream VII by Spyglass Media for Instagram posts calling Israel's campaign "genocide" — both documented by Deadline, the Forward and NBC on November 21–22, 2023. In the same month, Noah Schnapp, star of Netflix's biggest show, was filmed among stickers reading "Zionism is sexy"; he faced backlash, issued a January 2024 apology — and kept his career, his agency and his franchise. Newsweek's coverage of that week recorded audiences asking the obvious question: why did Barrera and Sarandon lose work while Schumer and Schnapp lost nothing? That asymmetry is the fingerprint of organised pressure, not neutral principle. Even Hollywood's most sympathetic pro-Palestine voices learned the boundaries: Mark Ruffalo apologised on May 24, 2021 — documented by the LA Times and NBC — for his 2014 and 2021 posts citing "genocide" in Gaza, and by the 2024 Oscars he was wearing a red Artists4Ceasefire pin instead, alongside Billie Eilish and Ramy Youssef (Axios, March 10, 2024). Apologise under pressure, then advocate through jewellery: that is what speaking costs when the story machine watches the industry it lives inside.

The Streaming Shelf: How Israel Gets Packaged for Your Watchlist

Entertainment is public diplomacy with better production values, and the pipeline is visible. Israel's most prominent global star came to Hollywood through the IDF and has never hidden the connection — the November 2023 Museum of Tolerance screening was her most explicit intervention, but her projects travel on the largest streaming rails on earth. Israeli-made series like Fauda — created by a former undercover IDF unit member — became global Netflix flagship dramas, teaching hundreds of millions of subscribers to experience the conflict primarily through the eyes of Israeli soldiers. Palestinian-made storytelling, from cinema to streaming, has never received anything close to comparable commissioning, distribution or marketing muscle at the global scale. None of this is an accusation of illegality; it is an observation of investment. When one state's narrative is systematically financed, packaged and shipped through the entertainment industry that supplies the West's entire moral imagination, and the other side of the story is reduced to amateur phone footage from the rubble, the outcome is engineered — documented in industry trades, festival line-ups and platform catalogues for anyone patient enough to read them.

When Platforms Do the Editing: The Meta Report

The machinery does not stop at studios and newsrooms; it reaches into the phone in your pocket. In December 2023, Human Rights Watch published "Meta's Broken Promises," a 51-page investigation documenting systemic and undue censorship of Palestine-related content on Instagram and Facebook — identifying six distinct patterns of suppression, from takedowns and account suspensions to "shadow-banning" that quietly hides posts from viewers, including peaceful pro-Palestinian speech (covered by the Guardian, December 21, 2023). Meta's own oversight mechanisms had flagged the bias a year earlier; the behaviour continued. Add the documented demonetisation and moderation asymmetries across other platforms and the picture completes itself: the story machine is not one puppet-master, it is a stack — state PR feeding legacy media, agencies disciplining talent, platforms throttling the audience's counter-speech, all while claiming neutrality. Readers who feel that something is being filtered out of their feeds are not paranoid. Human Rights Watch did the forensics for you.

Normalization: The Gulf Side of the Story War

And then there is the money that keeps the whole arrangement comfortable. In 2020, the UAE signed the Abraham Accords, normalising relations with Israel in exchange for the suspension of West Bank annexation plans — and despite the catastrophic war that began in October 2023, the relationship did not pause; it grew. The Atlantic Council documented bilateral trade surging to almost $3 billion by 2023, and by 2024 the UAE–Israel trade volume reached $3.24 billion, up 11%, even as Gaza was destroyed — a continuation analysed under the plain headline "Normalization Survives Despite the Gaza War" by the Arab Center Washington DC in January 2024. An Arab state that is supposed to stand with Palestinians was, by documented trade figures, doing record business with the state destroying them, while public opinion across the Arab world overwhelmingly supported Palestine. This is what the story war looks like from the Gulf: sympathy in public, contracts in the ledger, and a quiet understanding that money anchors diplomacy harder than morality ever will. The Palestinians were not asked — they never are.

Why "They Control Everything" Is the Wrong Answer — and a Gift to the Machine

Here the documented record demands honesty about a popular shortcut. You will hear people say it plainly: "the Jews control the media." Retell that sentence, and you have handed the story machine its favourite gift — the instant ability to dismiss every documented fact above as antisemitism, and to never answer a single number in CPJ's report. The claim also fails on its own evidence: if total control existed, Al Jazeera's relentless 24-hour Gaza coverage would not exist; Israeli newspapers like Haaretz and the Jewish-led outlet +972 Magazine would not be publishing the sharpest anti-occupation reporting on earth; 157 UN member states would not have recognised Palestine. What actually exists — and what every section of this article documented — is specific organisations, specific budgets, specific decisions by named studios, agencies and platforms, all of which can be named, audited and opposed without blaming an entire ethnicity for the conduct of a state and its advocates. The truth about Palestine does not need the old lie. It never did — the documented record of 1948 and the record of 2025 are devastating enough. Name the organisations, cite the reports, count the dead. That is how the machine loses: to paper, not to prejudice.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does "hasbara" actually mean?
Hasbara (Hebrew for "explanation") is the term Israel itself uses for its official public-diplomacy work — the state-coordinated effort to shape international media coverage and public opinion. It is not an accusation; it is a governmental function with budgets and staff, which scaled up dramatically after October 2023, from distributed footage packages to curated celebrity screenings like the November 2023 "Bearing Witness" event organised by Gal Gadot in Los Angeles.

Is Western media coverage of Palestine measurably biased?
Yes — by quantitative study. The Intercept's January 2024 analysis of roughly 1,000 articles in the New York Times, LA Times and Washington Post found systematic skew toward the Israeli narrative; a University of Pittsburgh study measured a 25:1 ratio in New York Times coverage of Israeli versus Palestinian deaths (431% versus 17%); and a 2025 arXiv study documented "false balance" — persistent equating of the two sides' suffering anchored to October 7.

Why were Susan Sarandon and Melissa Barrera dropped while Noah Schnapp wasn't?
That is the documented double standard. Sarandon was dropped by UTA and Barrera fired from Scream VII in November 2023 for pro-Palestine statements, while Schnapp — after his "Zionism is sexy" appearance — kept his Netflix franchise and later issued a low-cost apology. Newsweek's coverage recorded the public questioning of that asymmetry the same week. The difference was not the offensiveness of the statements; it was the direction they pointed.

Does the UAE still trade with Israel despite the Gaza war?
Yes — the trade grew. Abraham Accords normalisation (2020) survived the war intact: bilateral trade rose from roughly $200 million in 2020 to about $3 billion by 2023 and $3.24 billion in 2024 (up 11%), per the Atlantic Council and Israel-linked trade data, a continuation documented by the Arab Center Washington DC under the headline "Normalization Survives Despite the Gaza War."

If the influence is documented, why call it anything but "control"?
Because precision wins. What is documented is a stack of identifiable actors — a state's PR apparatus, talent agencies, studios, platform moderation systems and trade-dependent governments — each making decisions that can be named, cited and contested. "They control everything" blames an ethnicity instead of auditing those actors, is contradicted by Al Jazeera, Haaretz and 157 UN recognitions of Palestine, and hands every PR department the excuse to dismiss the documented record without answering it. Receipts beat rhetoric — every time.