Gal Gadot is apparently promoting a new movie, premiering on Wednesday. This one, however, is not associated with a comic book franchise or slated to break box office records. Instead, Bearing Witness to the October 7 Massacre, is a roughly 45-minute long video compiled by the Israel Defense Forces from video taken during the terrorist attack, showing graphic images including children being shot and killed.
Two weeks ago, the IDF showed the video to the Knesset as well as a set of invited journalists in Israel. The goal, seemingly, was to provide proof of the atrocities committed by Hamas, some of which had been disputed in the weeks following the attacks. But in deference to the families of the victims, the film, compiled largely from footage shot by Hamas terrorists on helmet cams or phones, was not distributed widely.
Tuesday, however, the American Jewish Committee hosted a screening of the video in New York, and Gadot is hosting one on Wednesday at the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles. The invitees are no longer members of the press and government, invited for fact-checking purposes, but instead influential figures including celebrities.
Hasbara, the Hebrew word for information — also often translated as propaganda — has long been a major front in Israel’s public relations. Israel’s heavy bombing of Gaza in response to the Oct. 7, has brought especially harsh criticism of the country, including widespread protests and accusations of genocide and war crimes from activists, influencers and politicians. Israel, for its part, has been fighting back with social media posts that emphasize the brutality of the Hamas attack and frame the war in stark good v. evil moral terms.
As the war continues, and international attention turns increasingly to the civilian death toll in Gaza, which has reportedly broken 10,000 this week, Israel has worked to keep its own dead and kidnapped in the public eye. However, as time progresses, critics of Israel have increasingly begun to sow doubt about the initial reports of the scale and intensity of the violence. So it makes sense that, despite the earlier concerns about respecting victim’s families, who oppose releasing the video more widely, Bearing Witness is being shown to a wider audience, one calculated toward moving influential people into speaking out in support of Israel, and leveraging familiar faces and names to vouch for the truth of the accounts.
The renewed efforts to screen the film come as Israel “is losing on the communication front,” Jerome Bourdon, a communications expert at Tel Aviv University, told The Times of Israel, though a spokesperson denied that public reaction to Israel’s bombing in Gaza has impacted the screenings.
Gal Gadot — who rose to fame in Hollywood for playing the all-American hero Wonder Woman — is, theoretically, perfectly positioned to recruit fellow celebrities to Israel’s cause in the U.S. But she is an imperfect spokesperson. There was the time she recruited a bunch of other famous people to sing John Lennon’s “Imagine” during the early days of the pandemic, which was widely derided by critics and Twitter users alike for being out of touch with the real grief — and death toll — of the pandemic.
Similarly, Gadot is being harshly criticized online for her focus on Israel’s death toll, when Gaza’s is now many times larger.
Nearly every comment and retweet of a widely-shared post from the Palestinian Quds News Network announcing the screening slammed Gadot, and many have garnered thousands of likes. Some referenced the infamous “Imagine” video to deride her ability to read or shift public opinion, while still more condemned Gadot both for her lack of acting ability and her support of Israel.
Gadot has not spoken out specifically about Israel’s tactics in the war, but has posted nearly frequently about the people kidnapped from Israel and held hostage by Hamas, asking for their freedom.
Counterintuitively, despite harshly criticizing Gadot online, some activists have warned each other to avoid protesting outside the LA screening.
“This event is a ZIONIST TRAP,” reads a widely screenshotted Instagram story about Gadot’s screening. “Their main goal is to get photos of Muslims/Arabs/brown and Black folks protesting outside the Museum of Tolerance to capture it as ‘antisemitism’ and derail the work we been doing.”
The guest list for the event is reported to be 120 people.
