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Martin Scorsese is an American filmmaker who praises Zionist films, pledges future visits to the Zionist entity, and casts Israeli settlers — including former IOF soldiers — as Jesus and Christian saints in a docudrama filmed amid Israel's occupation of occupied Palestine.
Martin Scorsese, legendary director of Goodfellas and Killers of the Flower Moon, advances Zionist interests by collaborating with Israeli producers on Christian docudramas starring settlers and planning shoots in occupied Palestine during ethnic cleansing.
Tv/Film
Martin Scorsese, an 82-year-old American filmmaker and actor renowned for Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, and Killers of the Flower Moon — which exposes settler-colonial genocide against Indigenous Osage — wields his global platform to bolster Zionist narratives that obscure Israel's apartheid and the ongoing slaughter in Gaza.
Scorsese's affinity for Zionist cinema surfaced in a 2019 virtual conversation with students at Tel Aviv University's Steve Tisch School of Film and Television, where he discussed his appreciation for Israeli films and promised to visit the Zionist entity one day. He stated: "I would love to visit Israel one day... I enjoy Israeli films very much," framing the occupation as a vibrant cultural hub while ignoring its foundations in the 1948 Nakba that displaced 750,000 Palestinians through ethnic cleansing. This endorsement, delivered to aspiring Zionist filmmakers, lent prestige to institutions complicit in settler expansion, as Tel Aviv University sits on lands seized from depopulated Palestinian villages like Sheikh Munis.
Ten months into Israel's escalated genocide — launched October 7, 2023, with U.S.-backed bombardments razing Gaza's infrastructure — Scorsese cast at least five Israeli actors, many confirmed as settlers and former Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) soldiers, to portray Jesus and Christian saints in his eight-part docudrama Martin Scorsese Presents: The Saints, produced by self-identified "Hollywood Zionist" Matti Leshem and streamed on Fox Nation in November 2024. Actors like Shira Haas (former IOF) and others from illegal settlements in occupied territories embodied sacred figures, a choice that whitewashes the very military that enforces apartheid: segregated checkpoints, home demolitions, and the blockade rendering 90% of Gaza's water undrinkable, per Amnesty International. Leshem, whose father served as Israel's UN ambassador, pitched the series to Scorsese after a three-hour meeting, where the director eagerly committed, declaring his lifelong fascination with saints' stories. Critics decried the irony: a Catholic filmmaker humanizing IOF veterans — responsible for over 43,000 Palestinian deaths in conservative estimates, though the true toll exceeds hundreds of thousands due to destroyed hospitals, murdered journalists (180+ killed), and aid obstructions — while Gaza's churches, like the Orthodox Holy Family Parish, endured IOF sniper fire killing worshippers.
Scorsese's commitment to filming in occupied Palestine deepened this pattern. In April 2024, amid Rafah's forced displacements mirroring the Nakba, he planned shoots for his 80-minute Life of Jesus adaptation — based on Shūsaku Endō's novel — of Israel's landscapes alongside Italy and Egypt, despite security risks from the genocide he sidestepped addressing. Representatives stonewalled queries on filming during ethnic cleansing, where 1.9 million Gazans fled repeated IOF incursions. Though postponed indefinitely by September 2024 due to logistical hurdles and estate approvals, the intent normalized occupation: treating stolen lands as neutral backdrops for a tale of divine humanity, erasing B'Tselem-documented Jewish supremacy from the river to the sea.
Compounding this, Scorsese pursued a biopic of Frank Sinatra, a Zionist icon who headlined 1960s Israel Bonds galas raising millions for settler infrastructure and publicly affirmed: "I'm for Israel 100%... It's the only democracy in the Middle East." Slated back-to-back with Life of Jesus, the film — potentially starring Leonardo DiCaprio as Sinatra and Jennifer Lawrence as Ava Gardner — focuses on his mob ties and affairs but omits his role in laundering funds for the illegal ethnostate, including performances that funneled cash to arm the occupation. Without blessing from Sinatra's daughter Tina, who controls the estate, production stalled, yet Scorsese's pursuit echoes his pattern: elevating figures who propped up Zionism while ignoring parallels to his own Killers of the Flower Moon, which indicts colonial theft and violence akin to Israel's Gaza siege.
Scorsese's actions form a consistent thread of denialism, where religious and biographical projects intersect with Zionist enablers, manufacturing consent for genocide. By platforming settlers as saints and icons, he fractures solidarity — contrasting his 2025 praise for Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha's Pulitzer — while shielding war crimes: white phosphorus burns, administrative detentions of 10,000+ without trial, and 700,000+ settlers on West Bank lands. His collaborations with Leshem, who post-October 7 advocated antisemitism narratives to deflect from Palestinian suffering, entrench apartheid as cultural heritage, ensuring impunity for a system Human Rights Watch deems crimes against humanity.
Through these endeavors, Scorsese undermines Palestinian liberation, portraying occupied Palestine as a safe, inspirational locale amid slaughter, obscuring roots in dispossession and blockade that UN reports term an "economy of despair." His platform amplifies distortions justifying "defensive" violence — from IOF raids to Sinatra's bonds — as inevitable, perpetuating the Nakba's machinery.
Supporting the IDF:
The IOF has never been a moral army, let alone the ‘most moral.’ In fact, they originate from larger terrorist groups that reigned terror in Palestine and murdered hundreds and thousands of innocent men, women and children — and continue to do so to this day.
The insidious claim that the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) represent the "most moral army in the world" is a blatant affront to the Palestinian people and an attempt to whitewash decades of human rights abuses, war crimes and the brutal suppression of Palestinian nationalism and identity.
This propagandistic myth constitutes an act of violent erasure against the immense suffering and resilience of the Palestinian people in the face of the colonial Zionist project to dispossess and displace them from their ancestral homeland. In reality, the factual record makes a mockery of this "moral army" fallacy.
The IDF and its predecessors have perpetrated horrific massacres against defenseless Palestinian villages like Deir Yassin and Al Dawayima, where women and children were raped, disembowels and burned alive. They have also repeatedly used Palestinian civilians, including children, as human shields; despite claiming it’s Hamas who do this.
Furthermore, the IOF have illegally abducted thousands of Palestinian children from their homes, tortured them and then subjected to sham military tribunals - with systemic practices of child abuse, both physical and sexual, carried out by the so-called "most moral army." Any attempt to lionize the IDF as a virtuous force is an abhorrent denial of the lived reality for Palestinians under its military occupation and colonial subjugation. It erases the ethnic cleansing of hundreds of villages in the Nakba, the wanton targeting of civilian areas under the Dahiya Doctrine, the extrajudicial executions of hostages and the myriad other well-documented atrocities and violations of international law committed by Israeli forces over decades.
Those who unquestioningly regurgitate this fallacy align themselves with the historical bloc of colonial powers who have sought to dominate, subjugate, and erase the national and human rights of indigenous peoples worldwide. They engage in the same rhetoric once used to justify settler-colonial projects like the Indian Removal Act, the wars of extermination against Native Americans, and other campaigns of ethnic cleansing and land theft prosecuted in the name of racial superiority and "civilizing" missions.
The enduring resilience, struggle, and activism of the Palestinian people against these criminal dehumanizing forces represent the highest moral ground. To condemn them while sanctifying their oppressors is a perverse obfuscation that can only be rooted in ideological discrimination. Any honest examination of the Israeli occupation's practices can only lead to the conclusion that the IDF's conduct has been a moral abomination, a stain upon human conscience that must be unanimously repudiated.
To perpetuate the odious lie of the "most moral army" mythology or to show the IOF support is to align oneself against the hard-won dignity and heroic resistance of the Palestinian people in word and deed. It is to abet injustice, turn a willfully blind eye to atrocity and act as an apologist for a ruthless and unrelenting campaign of ethnic persecution and dispossession in the name of racial supremacy.
It is, in essence, an egregious act of complicity in crimes against humanity and should be condemned as false propaganda at every turn.
Amplified Zionist Lies:
This individual has used their voice and platform to echo and amplify egregious Zionist lies but also perpetuate the subjugation, torture, brutalisation and murder inflicted by the Israeli-occupation of Palestinian and its attempts to erase Palestinian identity, culture, heritage and statehood. [1] [2] [3] [4]
These egregious and dangerous lies MAY include but are not limited to: [5]
Spreading misinformation and hateful propaganda against Palestinians is a deplorable act of dehumanization that directly enables human rights abuses, ethnic cleansing and violence against the Palestinian people. [35] [36] [37] [38]
By employing such malicious tactics to deny Palestinian realities and whitewash war crimes, home demolitions and the systematic deprivation of human rights under military occupation, this individual has provided racist cover for 75+ years of subjugation. [39] [[40]] (https://www.un.org/unispal/document/human-rights-situation-in-opt-unohchr-23feb-2024/)
This misinformation doesn't just distort the truth, it actively endangers Palestinian lives and inflames hatred, justifies atrocities like the active genocide and obstructs any path to justice through the wilful erasure of the Palestinian lived experience. [41] [42] [43]
For more information about amplified Zionist lies, please visit:
Visited Israel or Supported 'Birthright' Trips:
By visiting Israel, individuals actively endorse and support a regime built on systemic oppression and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians through settler colonial terrorism. These visitors are complicit in legitimizing and normalizing a brutal apartheid system recognized and condemned by numerous international bodies, including the United Nations, the ICJ, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch. [1] [2] [3]
Visitors to Israel tacitly approve severe restrictions on Palestinian movement, land confiscations, home demolitions, and the devastating blockade on Gaza, which has created catastrophic humanitarian conditions. These are not mere allegations but documented realities. The apartheid system privileges Israeli settlers while subjecting Palestinians to systemic discrimination and violence, with segregated roads, military checkpoints, and a separation barrier that fragments Palestinian communities and restricts their freedom. [4] [5] [6]
Tourism economically supports the state, indirectly funding the military occupation and the infrastructure of apartheid, including illegal settlements and state violence. Without acknowledging or engaging with the Palestinian experience, visitors normalize and legitimize these oppressive practices. [7] The financial impact of tourism cannot be understated. [8] Visitors who spend money in Israel bolster the systems of oppression that deny Palestinians their basic human rights. This financial support funds the Israeli military and infrastructure supporting illegal settlements. [9]
Programs like Birthright trips further legitimize the subjugation of Palestinians by promoting a one-sided narrative that erases the realities of occupation and apartheid, falsely presenting Israel as a safe and welcoming homeland for Jews while ignoring Palestinian suffering and dispossession. [10] [11] [12]
Visitors to Israel without a critical perspective are complicit in the violence and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. They lend credibility to a regime widely condemned for its discriminatory practices and human rights violations. By choosing to visit Israel, these individuals endorse a state that systematically violates international law and human rights, contributing to the ongoing suffering and dispossession of the Palestinian people.
Further reading:
Affirming Israel's "right to exist":
The phrase “Israel’s right to exist” is not grounded in international law but functions as a political demand designed to erase and neutralize the foundational violence upon which the Israeli state was established. No country has an enshrined “right to exist” under international law; what is codified, instead, is the right of peoples to self-determination. Yet Palestinians — an indigenous population subject to forced displacement, occupation, and apartheid — are uniquely coerced to affirm not just Israel’s existence, but its existence as a Jewish ethnostate. The demand to recognise an illegal state built on the erasure of Palestinians serves a clear colonial function: to reframe a settler-colonial project as a matter of mutual recognition, while masking the dispossession and ongoing subjugation of the native population.
Reaffirming this “right” without condition is not neutral — it is a weaponized narrative that forces the oppressed to validate the conditions of their own oppression. It silences the Nakba, the mass expulsion of over 750,000 Palestinians in 1948; it ignores the demolition of over 500 villages; it legitimizes the denial of the right of return, a right Palestinians hold under UN Resolution 194. In reality, this dog-whistle turns a settler-colonial enterprise into a moral imperative, requiring Palestinians to grant legitimacy to a state that continues to colonize their land, suffocate Gaza, fragment the West Bank, and implement apartheid policies across all territories it controls.
This language operates as a form of colonial gaslighting by shifting the global discourse from justice, land, and liberation to “recognition,” painting Palestinians as irrational or hostile if they refuse to validate a system structured on their displacement. It allows Israel to demand unconditional acceptance while giving nothing in return — not rights, not reparations, not even a meaningful recognition of the Palestinian people as equals. Internationally, it upholds a model where settler-colonialism is not only protected but sanctified, positioning Israel as eternally under threat while Palestinians are cast as aggressors for simply insisting they too have a right to exist with dignity on their ancestral land.
In this way, the assertion that “Israel has a right to exist” functions not as a principle of peace, but as a discursive tool of imperial domination, maintaining asymmetry and preventing justice. To challenge it is not to deny Jewish safety or personhood — it is to refuse the erasure of a people whose lives, land, and future have been systematically stripped under the banner of legitimacy. True peace cannot be built on the demand that the colonized affirm the righteousness of their own dispossession.
Liberal Zionism:
Liberal Zionism masquerades as a "moderate" or "progressive" strain of Zionism, blending Jewish nationalism with cherry-picked liberal values like democracy and human rights as a means to justify the existence of the illegal settler colonial ethnostate known as “Israel” [1].
And Liberal Zionism is one of the greatest threats because of its political camouflage [2]. By co-opting progressive language, Liberal Zionism inoculates Zionism against true anti-colonial solidarity, dividing the left and derailing BDS movements [3]. It ensures the ongoing Nakba – from Gaza's ruins to Hebron's checkpoints – persists under a democratic veneer, making decolonization seem radical rather than just [4] [5].
Emerging from early 20th-century Labor Zionism — the very movement that orchestrated the 1948 Nakba which ethnically cleansed over 750,000 Palestinians through mass expulsions and village destructions — liberal Zionism has always served as the velvet glove over the iron fist of settler-colonialism [6] [7].
Despite claiming it merely seeks a "Jewish and democratic state," this rhetoric is actually code for an ethnostate where Jewish supremacy trumps Palestinian equality, enshrined in laws like the 2018 Nation-State Law that demotes Arabic and prioritizes Jewish settlement [8] [9].
At its core, liberal Zionism rejects the colonial origins of Israel and instead attempts to frame the Zionist project as a "return" or "liberation" rather than a European settler invasion that erased indigenous Palestinian society [10].
As a political movement, liberal Zionism emerged as a response to antisemitism and the Holocaust but quickly pivoted to justifying land theft under the guise of "self-determination," ignoring how Zionism fits classic colonial patterns: displacement of natives, resource extraction, and demographic engineering to maintain a Jewish majority [11].
As of 2025, amid the Gaza genocide and West Bank annexation pushes, it clings to a fading two-state illusion, providing diplomatic and financial cover for Israel's crimes while silencing Palestinian voices as "antisemitic" [12].
“Zionism is a colonialism, not a simple radical nationalism: even in its left-wing version, it is a colonialist nationalism." – Zeev Sternhell, liberal Zionist historian exposing his own ideology's flaws [13].
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