In the Dark of the Theatre, Palestine Flickers

Hollywood has long harbored an open secret: it has been quietly telling the story of Palestine for decades. From Avatar to Star Wars, some of our most beloved blockbusters draw direct inspiration from the struggles of occupation and resistance. Yet, they rarely utter the word “Palestine”—a subject that still unsettles the powerful. In this article, the author, himself an immigrant, unpacks how the silver screen has been revealing the truth, one allegory at a time.

In the Dark of the Theatre, Palestine Flickers

Amandeep Midha

The lights dim. The screen glows. Superman (2025) opens with war: a larger power invades a smaller land. The occupier claims "security," the occupied bleeds. Superman hovers, caught in the moral dilemma: intervene and risk becoming an occupier himself, or stand aside and watch injustice unfold.

It feels familiar. The plot is new, but the story is not. Hollywood has been staging the specific drama of modern military occupation and empire for decades - always displaced, always allegorical, but always pointing back to the same power dynamics.

The Galaxy Trick: A Blueprint of State Terror

Take Star Wars. George Lucas was clear: his Empire was modeled on the United States in Vietnam. But the allegory is evergreen. Watch the stormtroopers-a uniformed army of a state-like entity-raze desert villages. This is not the chaotic violence of a rogue terrorist cell; it is the systematic, bureaucratic imposition of power by an empire. Hollywood's sleight of hand is to shift the unspeakable acts of state power into a galaxy far, far away.

This trick reveals a recurring historical script, one written by empires and modern military powers. Consider the Deir Yassin massacre of 1948. This was not an act of "terrorism" as loosely defined today; it was a calculated military operation by Zionist paramilitary groups (the Irgun and Lehi) aimed at terrorizing a civilian population into flight to achieve a political goal: territorial expansion for a new state. It was a tactic of conquest.

The script was repeated in the Shatila and Sabra massacre of 1982. Here a modern state military encircled the camps and enabled their allied militia to commit the slaughter. This is the essence of state-sanctioned atrocity: a powerful, recognized military providing the logistical framework for a massacre, under the pretext of "cleaning out terrorists."

This is the crucial distinction. These films are not allegories for the violence of non-state actors like ISIS. They are allegories for the violence of the “state”, the “empire”, the “occupying power”, the very entities that possess F-35s, billion-dollar budgets, and the diplomatic language to justify mass death. This is the violence of the planet-destroying Death Star, not the rogue lightsaber of a single villain.

The Modern Corridor: A Seventy-Five Year Pattern

The logic of Deir Yassin, using terror to clear land, has never ceased; it has only evolved. The sudden emergence of the Netzah Yehuda Corridor (also referred to as the Netzarim Corridor), an Israeli-controlled military road that bisects Gaza, is not an anomaly. It is the latest iteration of a decades-old strategy. This corridor, slicing the Strip in two, was only made possible by the mass ethnic cleansing of northern Gaza, a campaign of such devastation it has been called a textbook case of genocide by leading international legal experts.

Its purpose is straight from the colonial playbook: to fracture a territory, control movement, strangle the population, and create a permanent military foothold under the guise of a "security buffer." It offers a "trade road" for the occupier's economy while besieging the native population, ensuring a permanent pretext for military outposts. This is not a new tactic. It is the same logic that created the settlements and bypass roads in the West Bank after the 1967 war, infrastructure built on confiscated land that fragments Palestinian territory into disconnected cantons. It is the same logic that followed the massacres of 1948, which systematically cleared over 500 villages to create a contiguous Jewish state, permanently severing Palestinian geography and society.

Allegories Keep Returning: The Face of the Empire

The pattern is relentless. Our screens are haunted by the ghosts of state-sponsored atrocities, replaying the dynamics of Deir Yassin and Shatila.

Avatar (2009 & 2022) - The Resources Development Administration (RDA) is not a terrorist group; it is a corporate-military entity with private armies, interstellar contracts, and the backing of a world government. Its destruction of the Hometree is a direct allegory for the "shock and awe" of Deir Yassin and modern US military campaigns: using overwhelming, technological force against a civilian population to clear territory for resource control. This is the violence of the empire, not the insurgent.

District 9 (2009) - The Multinational United (MNU) corporation is a stand-in for apartheid South Africa, but its dynamics mirror the US-led war machine and Israel's military occupation. It is a "legitimate" bureaucratic power that confines a population, controls their movement, and then secretly conducts brutal experiments on them for profit. This is the cold, complicit logic of a system of oppression, the very structure that enabled Shatila.

Children of Men (2006) - The antagonist is the British state itself. Its military hunts, cages, and brutalizes refugees. This is not a story about ISIS; it is a story about Fortress Europe and the brutal enforcement of borders by state power. The siege by the settlers within West Bank is a direct echo of the state violence in Gaza and the West Bank.

Star Wars (1977) - The Empire is a clear metaphor for the US empire. It is a vast, technological military force that destroys entire planets (Alderaan) to demonstrate its power and crush dissent-a clear parallel to the disproportionate force used by imperial powers to set an "example."

When someone says, "What about ISIS?" in response to these allegories, they are missing the point entirely. Hollywood is not telling the story of the beheading lunatic; it is telling the story of the faceless stormtrooper, the corporate soldier, the drone pilot, the checkpoint guard-the anonymous, systematized violence of the powerful.

Superman as Immigrant, as Witness to Empire

James Gunn's framing of Superman as an immigrant is more than a buzzword; it's the key to the allegory. But this isn't the sanitized myth of the migrant who seamlessly assimilates. This is the story of an immigrant who carries the ghost of a dead world in his bones. He didn't just “leave” Krypton; he witnessed its cataclysmic destruction, feeling the visceral trauma of a home violently erased from the cosmos. He knows, in a way no human can, what it means to have your entire culture, your memory, your very geography annihilated. This is the profound, unspoken knowledge that every refugee from a war-torn land carries-the knowledge of what it is to “lose” a home, not merely leave one.

His struggle is one of dual identity. He is tasked with integrating into a society that preaches "truth, justice, and the American way," even as he watches that same society's tanks crush homelands and its rhetoric justify rubble. He is the ultimate insider-outsider, blessed and cursed with the power to stop the violence, yet paralyzed by the fear of becoming the very imperial force he fled.

His hovering over the conflict is the perfect metaphor for the immigrant's, and the global citizen's, dilemma. He sees the modern military-the empire-invading and devastating a homeland. He understands the brutal logic of conquest, the same logic that rendered his own world to dust. His powerlessness in that moment is not a physical one, but a political and moral one: How do you challenge a superpower that wraps its violence in the language of law and security, even as it commits atrocities that follow the old, brutal scripts of Deir Yassin and Shatila? He is a witness to the gap between a nation's professed ideals and its imperial actions, a dissonance that every conscious immigrant and ally must navigate. Superman's struggle is to find a way to belong to a new home without being complicit in its crimes.

The Paradox Hollywood Cannot Speak

Hollywood whispers these stories yet rarely names the US or Israel directly. Allegory is safe. But the pattern is undeniable. The "empire" in these films is never a ragtag group of terrorists; it is a sophisticated, technologically advanced state or corporation. It is the face of modern colonial power. Resistance is celebrated in fiction, but in reality, the machinery of the US-Israeli empire is often sanctified by mainstream discourse, its violence excused as "complex" and "necessary"

The Audience's Dilemma

And so the question returns: if you can recognize and condemn the Empire in “Star Wars”, if you can cheer the Na'vi against the corporate military in “Avatar”, and if you can see the clear parallels to the state violence in Deir Yassin and Shatila-what stops you from naming the US and Israeli governments when the screen fades to black?

Hollywood has drawn the map for decades. It points relentlessly to the violence of the powerful. The screen goes dark. The conscience begins. The only question left is whether we will follow the map to its real-world destination.

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Amandeep Midha is a technologist, writer, and global speaker with over two decades of experience in digital platforms building, data streaming, and digital transformation. He has contributed thought leadership to Forbes, World Economic Forum, Horasis, and CSR Times, and actively engages in technology policy-making discussions. Based in Copenhagen, Amandeep blends deep technical expertise with a passion for social impact and storytelling.