Transcription
Look at the credits of some of the biggest films of the last 40 years, and you'll find the same name hiding in the footnotes. Fight Club, Pretty Woman, JFK, Heat, LA Confidential, The Revenant, 12 Years a Slave, Birdman, Gone Girl, Bohemian Rhapsody, The Big Short—over 130 films, including two Best Picture winners back-to-back. That might not seem too unusual at first. Hollywood has its share of prolific producers, but the man behind those films is a small, visible piece of a much bigger operation, and one most people know remarkably little about.
And I was surprised again and again to find just how much effort and care and thought had been put in by Israeli government officials, by Israeli IDF officers, into bringing over to Israel's cause what is, uh, the global entertainment capital. It involves untraceable investments, mysterious talent agencies, an unstoppable PR operation, and a cover-up attempt touching one of Hollywood's biggest predators.
"Anything that their clients want is available and carried out by people who've usually been trained in Israeli intelligence, in Mossad and other intelligence agencies."
"And the agency helping to run it is the agency that even other agencies are scared of."
"My experience is universally negative. Universally negative. I've never had a positive encounter with Mossad. I have never met a CIA officer who has had a positive encounter with Mossad because the Mossad doesn't give two shits what you think or what you are trying to focus on in your job. They care only about Israel. They don't care what you think of them because, for them, it's an issue of survival."
This is a chain of command that first involves someone who has been at the center of Israel's Hollywood operation for years. He's worked closely with Scorsese, Stone, Fincher, and countless other directors. And he did all of this while juggling his other jobs as a spy and arms dealer. Justin Timberlake, Vince Vaughn, Brad Pitt, and Angelina Jolie—hits like 12 Years a Slave, Pretty Woman, and Fight Club—says he spent years as an Israeli secret agent and arms dealer. Milchin indicated other big Hollywood players were also involved. CBS went further, revealing that he truly lived a double life. Behind the scenes, the Israeli-born Hollywood producer was also becoming one of his country's largest weapons dealers.
In a recent interview for an Israeli documentary, Milchin confirmed what had been rumored for years. He was working for Israel's top spy agency all along. He said he'd shared these stories with his friend, Robert De Niro.
"I remember some point I had asked Arnold about that, uh, being friends. I was curious, but not in an accusatory way. I just wanted to know. And he, he said, 'Yeah, I did. I'm Israeli. I, that's my country.'"
In fact, you know, when he'd been asked about his background before, he denied it. In 2000, on 60 Minutes, he denied everything.
"Was I a spy? No, I was not a spy."
But years later, in front of the camera, the answer changed. He even admitted to using his Hollywood contacts to run a separate propaganda operation for apartheid South Africa, all in exchange for uranium. As for what life looked like for him in Hollywood after the confession, he had this simple answer.
"Hollywood looks for hits. If I will be able to provide heat, they will work with me."
"So, as long as you can produce a hit in Hollywood, you're in good shape?"
"You're in good shape."
So, that's on Milchin, and his influence on films is a lesser-known quantity of a story that goes far, far beyond this one man. But before we continue, this video is sponsored by Chat LLM by Abacus AI.
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When you look through the titles he's attached to, like Fight Club, Natural Born Killers, JFK, and The Revenant, one could speculate that they all seem to convey the corrosive nature of American power. Think about their almost anarchistic subject matter, portraying Americans as hypocritical, violent, fallible, and morally bankrupt. But we really don't know why he was involved, and whether there's any correlation between his job titles and his films. Whether he's just doing this for the love of the game, or whether this was a convenient front for his other dealings. What we do know is that the system that produced him has made Hollywood influence into both an art and a science, with a huge documented impact, as revealed in an award-winning book by an Israeli historian called Giora Goodman. The book, Hollywood and Israel: A History, was published in 2022 and won an academic award. He wrote it using sources taken directly from Israel's state archives, military archives, and the personal papers of Hollywood figures.
With Arnon Milchan still fresh in the memory, Goodman wrote this about him: "For all of his undisputable support for Israel and his contribution to Israeli image-making, it is worth noting that after early attempts in the 1980s, not one of the 150 films Arnon produced in Hollywood over the decades had either been about Israel or been made there. Arnon was, in this respect, like many other pro-Zionist Hollywood producers before him, someone who firmly separated profits from patriotism in the film business."
Goodman had initially set out to document standard public relations. But what he found was a sustained, decades-long operation in which Israel had a government committee that vetted foreign film scripts. Hollywood productions couldn't get any money from the Israeli government, or equipment, or location access, unless an Israeli official had personally signed off on the screenplay first. And further than that, the Foreign Ministry ran direct lobbying campaigns on Hollywood A-listers. In one case, Israel's Foreign Minister gave a private policy briefing at Arnon's Malibu estate to 70 Hollywood figures, including people like Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt.
For most of the last century, the people running Hollywood had a direct line to the very top of the White House. And at points, Goodman argues that they used it for a specific pro-Israel motive. One was Arthur Krim, who ran United Artists, the studio behind James Bond and countless other hit films. He was a personal friend of Lyndon Johnson, who would regularly call him for advice. Decades later, the Israeli-American billionaire Haim Saban, who brought Power Rangers to the US, used his Hollywood fortune to make himself one of the largest donors to the Clintons. Goodman's book documents a pattern where studios make the films, the studio bosses gain political access, and Israel ends up with a side door into the White House that no other country has.
As for the products of this relationship, some of the biggest films from the last few years fall into this bucket. One of the more obvious ones is World War Z, where Israel is the first to act on a global zombie outbreak. Around halfway through the film, Brad Pitt's character flies to Jerusalem. A Mossad chief then meets Brad Pitt at the airport and explains why Jerusalem is the only major city left standing in the entire zombie apocalypse. He then explains that Israel is great at predicting and intercepting threats. Inside the walls, Israel has opened its checkpoints. Jews and Muslims, including people holding Palestinian flags, are dancing and singing together to celebrate their salvation. But the zombies eventually form a human ladder to scale the wall and devour the inhabitants.
Film critics pointed out how the political message here is that Israel's openness destroys it. The wall is good, but the inclusion is dangerous. The hordes outside are an unstoppable existential threat, and Israel survives only when it walls itself off. The moment it tries to let the outside in, the outside ends up consuming it. Of the more centrist critics, Steven Zeitchik from the Los Angeles Times said, "In the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a wall is a heavily fraught symbol, but here it turns into an instrument of peace." Jeffrey Goldberg from Bloomberg said, "World War Z is the most pro-Israel movie ever made, or at the very least the most pro-Israel zombie movie ever made." Others said the comparisons are overblown and there's nothing in it.
But in either case, the original novel by Max Brooks tells a totally different story. In the book, Israel doesn't survive by walling itself off from the outside world. It survives by giving up the settlements and the occupied territories, while also withdrawing to its old borders and opening them to the uninfected. But crucially, the disaster when it comes isn't caused by hordes of zombies. It's caused by Israel's own ultra-Orthodox rebelling against the withdrawal and then triggering a civil war. The film flipped it, making Mossad heroic rather than compromised. The Times of Israel called it "the greatest piece of cinematic propaganda for Israel since Otto Preminger's Exodus," and Max Brooks himself said that the film is "World War Z in name only."
Brad Pitt produced the film through his own company, partly funded by David Ellison, the son of Larry Ellison, the tech billionaire who founded Oracle, one of the largest software companies in the world and one of the biggest pro-Israel donors in America.
Speaking of Exodus, which The Times of Israel refers to as great propaganda like World War Z, that was one of the first films in this decades-long strategy. Released in 1960, Exodus was an epic about the founding of Israel. It was made hand-in-hand with the Israeli government to the point where the Israeli government gave their corporation an actual code name. They called it Operation Exodus, and the Israeli army loaned the production trucks, equipment, and active duty soldiers—the first time the army had ever been allowed to take part in a Hollywood film. Paul Newman, the lead actor, wrote a private letter to the Israeli Prime Minister's office calling the film "excellent propaganda." This was his famous line: "No, I just wanted you to know that I'm a Jew. This is my country."
In his book, Goodman writes about this quote: "It's hard to imagine anything conveying the Zionist claim to the land of Israel, Palestine, more movingly or forcefully than this famous romantic scene in Otto Preminger's Exodus." Not long after, in 1986, came the action film The Delta Force, featuring Chuck Norris and a young Liam Neeson. It was directed and produced by Israeli filmmakers, financed through their American studio. Before the film was shot, the Israeli military's PR department wrote an internal memo, which, according to the book, concluded that "the film will work in favor of Israel." The Chief of Staff signed off on the script, and the Israeli military provided helicopters, fighter jets, and a submarine. The famous line was this: "Israel is America's best friend in the Middle East, and it's only 20 minutes from Beirut. You're going to get anything and everything you want to do it right."
The philosophy has transcended to this present day. President Nixon said this in the 1990s, and you can find many similar comments from other presidents.
"We don't have an alliance with Israel, as you know, they're not an ally of the United States in a technical sense, but we have a bond to Israel that's much stronger. It's a moral commitment."
A much more recent example of this trend to the present day came in 2011 with Homeland, the most successful spy drama on television that decade. It was an American adaptation of an Israeli show created by an Israeli director called Gideon Raff.
In 2015, Homeland's increasingly obvious political stance was compromised and exposed. Last Sunday's episode had a shocking twist that no one who can't read Arabic saw coming.
"Three graffiti artists hired to add a touch of authenticity to a set for the show Homeland. They use the opportunity to make a statement. Carrie Mathison, played by Claire Danes, can be seen striding past an Arabic wall, reading, 'Homeland is racist.'"
"That is a major intelligence failure."
The artists were Egyptian and Lebanese, hired to make the set look legit, and nobody on the production read what they wrote. Other messages they snuck onto the walls included, "Homeland is a watermelon," and "Homeland is a joke, and it didn't make us laugh." They said afterward that they've been protesting the show's relentless stereotyping of Pakistanis, Afghans, and the Muslim world generally. Colbert ran several minutes of jokes naming each of Homeland's positive Muslim characters. "Come on, that is not fair. Homeland has plenty of positive Muslim characters, like that college professor who... No, wait. He was Al-Qaeda. Okay. All right. Okay. That plucky reporter who was also Al-Qaeda. Oh, wait, wait. How about the Iranian intelligence chief who helped the CIA infiltrate his own government after he stabbed his wife in the throat for betraying him?"
By the time CBS's Late Show was openly mocking Homeland, its Israeli creator had already moved on. He had gone on to make a string of others: Tyrant, Dig, then The Red Sea Diving Resort and Spy, both for Netflix, and both glorifying Mossad. In The Red Sea Diving Resort, Captain America actor Chris Evans plays a Mossad agent rescuing Ethiopian Jewish refugees. In The Spy, Sasha Baron Cohen, best known as Borat, played a Mossad agent executed in Damascus. Ben Kingsley also played Adolf Eichmann being hunted down by Mossad in a film called Operation Finale. Fauda, a drama about Israeli special forces, is another big Netflix show with IDF and Mossad connections. When activists threatened to boycott in 2018, over 50 Hollywood executives signed an open letter defending it. The Tyrant on Apple TV Plus follows a Mossad agent sent undercover into Iran to sabotage a nuclear reactor, a fictional version of the kinds of operations Mossad has been carrying out against Iran in real life.
Behind some of these, there's a mysterious talent agency in Los Angeles called Spy Legends, run by ex-Mossad officers and founded by a 28-year veteran of the service. Most of the productions they work on are heavily protected by non-disclosure agreements. We'll really never know by name how many films and TV shows have run their scripts through ex-Mossad officers for review. But across decades of streaming and high-budget drama, Mossad has been depicted as a category of brave, principled cinematic heroes.
Here's what CIA whistleblower and ex-agent John Kiriakou says when asked what makes the Israelis different from other intelligence services he's worked with.
"And what the Israelis did was they got the cell phone numbers of literally every, uh, Iranian nuclear scientist. And they had these Israeli Jews, I'm sorry, these Iranian Jews call on their cell phones, call the scientists and say, 'Listen, you're going to die tomorrow, right? We're going to kill you tomorrow. You have no hope. You're going to die. Just accept it. Or you can defect to us right now.' And they're like, 'Ah, you...' and they hang up the phone."
He carries on describing the grim, truthful realities of events made into Netflix and Apple TV dramas. "Then they call the wives and say, 'Listen, we're going to kill your husband tomorrow. So tell him this is his only chance. He's going to die tomorrow.' And what they ended up doing is just taking out the entire, the entire block of apartment buildings. They killed 14 nuclear scientists. That devastates the entire program. And, uh, and family members as well. They wiped out entire families. The, the US would never have a policy like that."
But there are many more levels to this. Arguably the most aggressive Mossad Hollywood operation didn't even involve films at all. It involved spying on the people who make them. In 2016, Harvey Weinstein was the most powerful producer in the industry. He was also about to be exposed. To kill this story, Weinstein hired a private intelligence firm called Black Cube. Their Wikipedia page describes them like this: "Black Cube provides intelligence, evidence, and advisory services in multi-jurisdictional legal and white-collar crime cases. Their clients are mainly wealthy individuals, oligarchs, and global corporations." Black Cube was founded in 2010 by two former IDF intelligence officers. Its advisory board includes one man who served as Mossad's chief director from 2002 to 2011. Another former Mossad chief sat on the board, and so did the former head of the Israeli National Security Council. Weinstein was allegedly referred to them by Ehud Barak, the same former Israeli prime minister whose name turns up dozens of times in the Jeffrey Epstein files released in 2026.
According to The New Yorker, the contract Weinstein signed with Black Cube aimed to stop the abuse allegations from surfacing. The agents pursued the women and journalists involved. Ronan Farrow, the journalist who would eventually break the story, found himself tailed for months. For Rose McGowan, the actress who publicly accused Weinstein of... They would send in an operative named Stella Penn. She used a fake identity and posed as a woman's rights advocate. They told McGowan she wanted to hire her for a speaking engagement, then secretly recorded their conversations over the course of months for leverage.
From The New Yorker's Ronan Farrow: "In a report released on Monday evening, Farrow details how Weinstein hired private security agencies, including ex-Mossad operatives, to retrieve information on women, specifically actresses Rose McGowan and Asia Argento, in an attempt to stop the allegations from going public."
One of Black Cube's employees was Seth Freedman, who revealed this to the BBC.
"The list was updated by Harvey, and it had Rose McGowan's name on the actress. Through her agent, I called up and said, 'My normal thing. My name is Seth Reeb. I used to write for The Guardian. I'm doing a big broadstrokes piece about life in Hollywood now compared to how it was 20 years ago.'"
He says the list was much bigger than anyone reported at the time.
"The list of people that Harvey wanted us to go after grew bigger. It, it culminated in 91 names."
And he specifically admits Mossad's involvement. "Anything that their clients want is available and carried out by people who've usually been trained in Israeli intelligence, in Mossad and other intelligence agencies."
There is an impermeable war surrounding some of these stories and their implications, with similar subjugation tactics having been used for decades. In the 1970s, Vanessa Redgrave won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for Julia, a war drama where she played a real-life anti-Nazi resistance fighter. Earlier that day, members of a militant Zionist group had been outside the venue burning her likeness in effigy. This was her acceptance speech, met by hisses from the crowd.
"And you have refused to be intimidated by the threats of a small bunch of Zionist hoodlums whose behavior, whose behavior is an insult to the stature of Jews all over the world and to their great and heroic record of struggle against fascism and oppression."
Her other film was so controversial because it gave Yasser Arafat, the leader of the Palestinian movement at the time, airtime to explain his side of the conflict. For that, an Oscar-winning actress was being threatened outside an awards ceremony. At the afterparty, she then sat alone with two bodyguards and didn't get cast in another major American studio film for nearly a decade. Then, decades later, she was asked whether it was worth what it cost her. And this was her answer.
"You have lost a few roles, I understand. I've had several theatrical engagements canceled, found yourself in financial straits, even because of your politics, because of your activism. Was it worth it?"
"I think that it's always worth to stand by some basic principles. So if I've lost some roles because somebody, some distributor didn't like my politics, that's par for the course, as they used to say."
That was the cost for standing between Hollywood and this powerful lobby. And it's the same today. Mark Ruffalo openly commented on the Israel-Gaza war, joining a huge open letter pledging to boycott Israeli films. Within two weeks, he was apologizing on Twitter, calling his own previous comments inflammatory and saying they were being used to justify anti-Semitism. In 2014, the Spanish actors Penélope Cruz and Javier Bardem signed an open letter calling Israel's Gaza operation a genocide. So, top Hollywood producers privately said they'd never hire either of them again. So, within days, they had to reverse their positions. Susan Sarandon was dropped by her agency in 2023 after making comments at a pro-Palestinian rally. Melissa Barrera was fired from Scream 7 the same week for an Instagram post about Gaza.
The flip side is what happens to the actors who support the government. Two of the biggest actors of the streaming era both came out of the Israeli military. Gal Gadot, from Wonder Woman, Fast and Furious, and Heart of Stone, served two years in the IDF as a combat fitness instructor before she ever auditioned for anything. She said, quote, "The military gave me good training for Hollywood." She then got her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in March 2025, sparking protests like this.
"As Hollywood residents, we're not going to stand for this. We're going to come, we're going to make no noise, and we're going to let her know, and we're going to let Hollywood know that this is not acceptable, and we're not going to stand for this as Palestinians."
"Gal Gadot is a racist."
But there are some very important exceptions. In 2024, a Jewish American director, Sarah Friedland, won multiple awards at the Venice Film Festival to say this.
"As a Jewish American artist working in a time-based medium, I must note I'm accepting this award on the 336th day of Israel's genocide in Gaza and 76th year of occupation. I believe it is our responsibility as film workers to use the institutional platforms through which we work to address Israel's impunity on the global stage. I stand in solidarity with the people of Palestine in their struggle for liberation."
In March the same year, the Jewish British filmmaker Jonathan Glazer won the Academy Award for Best International Feature for The Zone of Interest, his devastating film about Auschwitz. He then used his acceptance speech to say this.
"All our choices were made to reflect and confront us in the present. Not to say, 'Look what they did then.' Rather, look what we do now. Our film shows where dehumanization leads at its worst. It shaped all of our past and present."
Now, if you want to know what happens when a Hollywood filmmaker tries to push back from the inside and not back down, there's exactly one major case study, and this involves the most influential director of all time. That man is Steven Spielberg, who released Munich in 2005. And so immediately, you're probably wondering why this isn't well-known despite exceptionally good reviews and multiple Academy Award nominations. Well, the film follows Mossad operatives hunting down and killing the Palestinians held responsible for the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre, where 11 Israeli athletes were taken hostage and killed at the Olympic Games. Israel's response was to send Mossad teams across Europe to assassinate every Palestinian they believed had been involved. It was hugely successful and seen as one of the most celebrated operations in Mossad history.
Spielberg had watched the original massacre on television with his father at the age of 25. The subject was sacred to him, which is why what he did with it was so unexpected. The standard Hollywood treatment of the story would have probably been a tight, righteous revenge thriller in which Mossad agents hunt down terrorists and justice is served. And that's probably the film that would be made if it were today. But Spielberg didn't make that film. He hired Tony Kushner, a Jewish American playwright and a prominent left-wing critic of Israel, to write the screenplay. The film they made follows a lead Mossad operative, Avner Kaufman, played by Eric Bana, and is loosely based on a real-life Mossad agent. It shows that his certainty about the morality of his actions slowly breaks down and decays. He starts the film as a patriot. He ends it as a man who can't sleep, can't trust anyone, and isn't even sure if the targets are right anymore. It's about a seemingly unbreakable chain of tragic events and consequences that no one can truly control.
The moral center of the film is a powerful scene in which the operative, posing as a German, finds himself sharing a safe house with a young Palestinian. They don't know they're enemies. They argue about home, exile, and what either of them would do to get a country they feel safe in and can call home. The audience is meant to view the men as equals and the moral complexity of perpetual war in the Middle East. For some, this was an uncomfortable nuance. The film then closes with a shot of the Twin Towers. The implication being that the cycle of revenge had gone somewhere none of these men could have predicted.
To its fans, this is one of Spielberg's most resonant and daring works. But the pro-Israel side accused Spielberg of softening on terrorism, while former Mossad officers mocked it to the press. To his credit, Spielberg held the line and arranged a private screening for the widows of the murdered Israeli athletes. And so, one of them even came out and praised the movie. Munich got five Oscar nominations and won none. It made $130 million at the box office, which is modest by Spielberg standards. War of the Worlds made $600 million six months earlier, and his next film, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, made around $790 million. If you're not Spielberg, and nobody is, you do not survive making this movie. Almost nobody has tried since. And it stands more or less alone as an obscure example of challenging the status quo built by this enduring influence campaign.
The truth is, there's just so much we don't know about that story and the many strategies behind it. Every country with money and a story to tell tries to influence how it appears on screen. The US has done it. The British have done it. The French have done it. The Saudis are doing it now. And the Chinese and Russians certainly have tried. But this operation is a forerunner, deeply embedded, yet rarely discussed openly. The figures involved are not fringe. They are the producers behind the biggest movies ever. They are the companies hired by the most powerful men in the industry. They are the agents on the payroll, the script consultants under NDA, and often the investors writing the checks. The main thing is, we just don't know how far it can go or how far it has gone in the past, in the very films we love, and even some we point to as anti-establishment. Manipulating the media is a strategy as old as time itself. But in some cases, and maybe in this case, it goes to deeper and darker places than we would probably even want to know.