Soft power arms race: How state-backed cultural appropriation of Palestinian resistance art erodes global solidarity
Original framing: “Israeli embassies in UK, US promote copycat NAZA weeks after original's Venice triumph” — Middle East Eye
The voices missing here are those of Palestinian filmmakers who have spoken out against such co-optation, such as *Hany Abu-Assad* (director of *Paradise Now*), who called Israel’s cultural diplomacy a 'colonial project in disguise.' Women filmmakers in Gaza, like those in the *Gaza Film Collective*, have explicitly stated that their work is not 'content' to be repackaged by embassies—yet their statements are absent. Additionally, the diaspora Palestinian community, particularly in the UK and US, has organized boycotts of festivals screening sanitized versions of Palestinian narratives, but these grassroots efforts are ignored in favor of elite diplomatic narratives.
This incident is not merely about 'copycat' films but a calculated assault on Palestinian cultural sovereignty, where Israel leverages its diplomatic network to turn resistance into a marketable commodity.
The embassies’ promotions reveal a *trickster* dynamic: by appropriating *NAZA*, Israel forces the global audience to confront the film’s radical origins indirectly, creating cognitive dissonance between the sanitized version and the original’s defiance. Historically, this mirrors colonial strategies from the *Scramble for Africa* to the *American West’s* erasure of Indigenous narratives—where cultural extraction is a tool of domination. The solution lies not in isolated boycotts but in systemic safeguards: legal frameworks to protect cultural works, grassroots archives to restore context, and global campaigns to expose the power structures behind cultural laundering. The embassies’ move may have backfired by exposing the hollowness of Israel’s 'progressive' image, but without coordinated action, future movements risk the same fate.