In October, streaming giant Netflix quietly announced that it would be removing a category of films on the platform known as “Palestinian Stories,” a curated collection that included award-winning films like Annemarie Jacir’s Salt of this Sea and Golden Globe-winning director Hany Abu-Assad’s film Omar, which took the Jury Prize at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival. As of this writing, the collection’s landing page still appears on the Netflix website but is empty.
“Instead of deleting Palestinian content, Netflix should be promoting Palestinian stories,” Sunjeev Bery, executive director of the nonprofit organization Freedom Forward, said in an email to The Progressive. Bery’s organization was one of more than three dozen signatories on an October 25 letter to Netflix executives that said the platform’s move “will further marginalize Palestinian voices at a time when over two million Palestinians in Gaza are being subjected to genocide by the Israeli military.”
The campaign went viral, with some 1.4 million people viewing Bery’s post on X which listed the deleted films. Among the groups amplifying the post was SAG-AFTRA & Sister Guild Members for Ceasefire, whose members include several prominent actors such as Mark Ruffalo and Susan Sarandon. In March, the group issued an open letter to Screen Actors Guild - American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA), the entertainment industry’s leading guild, saying that its members could not “stand idly by as our industry refuses to tell the story of Palestinian humanity.”
Lizbeth McManus, an organizer with SAG-AFTRA & Sister Guild Members for Ceasefire in the Washington, D.C., area, tells The Progressive that, despite including broadcast journalists among its members, the guild has yet to condemn Israel’s killing of reporters and other media professionals in Gaza. In October, the watchdog organization Reporters Without Borders said more than a hundred Palestinian journalists had been killed in the preceding year. Israel has also barred entry to the besieged strip by international media organizations, leading to a near-total media blackout.
Despite the international outcry over its removal of Palestinian films, Netflix took weeks to respond to critics, who contend that the sudden removal of so many titles at once was likely the result of a pressure campaign. Netflix asserts that the purge resulted from the end of a three-year licensing contract signed in 2021. One industry insider, who had helped distribute a Palestinian film previously featured on the platform, says the chances that all of the films’ licensing agreements had expired at once were slim to none. The source adds that filmmakers are typically compensated in a single lump sum when Netflix purchases a title, not by individual views. That means the streaming service has no financial incentive to take down a film if it is not being viewed by many.
If anything, given Israel’s unrelenting onslaught—which has so far killed more than 40,000 people—it seems plausible that the platform’s famously secret algorithm could be registering growing interest in Palestinian stories. That the films’ removal coincided with the headlines out of Gaza has led activists to speculate that the move was a political, rather than a business, choice. Netflix shares scant information on individual titles’ play rate, typically by featuring its top films or shows in “most popular” lists organized by category. Still, with Gaza continuing to command headlines in the United States and abroad, it’s little wonder that more than 18,000 people have already signed a petition calling on Netflix to reinstate the deleted films.
The petition, launched by CODEPINK, says the Netflix move is part of a “systemic erasure of Palestinian voices” that “prevents broader audiences from understanding the reality of Israel’s brutal occupation, apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and now, genocide of Palestinians.”
“With the ongoing occupation, ethnic cleansing, and genocide of the Palestinian people, it’s more important than ever to bring their stories to the world,” McManus said in a statement released by Freedom Forward. “As actors, artists, and media professionals, we hold firm in our solidarity with the people of Palestine, and condemn the systemic suppression of Palestinian voices.”
Netflix did not respond to a request for comment from The Progressive.
Jon Rainwater, executive director of Peace Action, adds that Netflix’s decision “denies Americans access to critical information and vitally important stories that can inform U.S. perspectives about a war that the U.S. taxpayers are footing the bill for.” Last month, Brown University’s Costs of War project estimated that U.S. military aid to Israel in the past year stood at at least $17.9 billion, a figure that excludes spending on American troops and other assets sent to the Middle East to back Israel’s campaign.
[Portside moderator- Also of interest:
No Other Land by Jennifer Lenow. Jacobin. An award-winning documentary about the dispossession of Palestinians in the West Bank, still hasn’t found a distributor in the US. November 26,2024]
Samer Badawi is a Palestinian-American writer based in Akron, Ohio and a contributor to +972 Magazine.
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