Inside the Pro-Israel Campaign to Stop ‘The Voice of Hind Rajab’ From Winning an Oscar
A group led by top Hollywood executives and linked to the Israeli government is trying to smear a film about a little girl killed by Israeli forces.
An obscure group of entertainment industry professionals is smearing the film, ‘The Voice of Hind Rajab,’ in a concerted effort to stop it from winning an Oscar for Best International Feature Film. While the group purports to be “apolitical,” it has ties to a pro-Israel organization that’s shut down speech in the US.
‘The Voice of Hind Rajab’ is an Oscar-nominated documentary-drama film that depicts the Palestinian Red Crescent’s response to the Israeli military’s brutal killing of 5-year-old Hind Rajab and her family members – a case known around the world as emblematic of the Israeli government’s ruthless genocide of Palestine.
The Creative Community for Peace (CCFP), an influential organization in Los Angeles, is smearing the film — whose executive producers include Brad Pitt, Joaquin Phoenix, Rooney Mara, and Jonathan Glazer — as “propaganda” and “manipulation,” casting doubts on the circumstances that led to her killing by Israeli soldiers.
The war crime made international news: On Jan. 29, 2024, 5-year-old Hind Rajab and her family sought to escape the violence surrounding them in Gaza – only to be met with the very thing they were fleeing from. The Israeli military brutally killed several of her family members as they attempted to flee. Then her cousin. Hind was then left alone for hours, pleading with emergency workers on the phone to help her. After agonizing hours, paramedics finally got approval from the Israeli government to rescue her.
Then the Israeli military killed Hind and the paramedics – who were found dead just hundreds of meters from her.
This sequence of events is documented in painstaking detail in ‘The Voice of Hind Rajab.’ Final voting for the Oscars ends Thursday evening.
‘Propaganda’
According to its website, the CCFP was founded in 2012 by David Renzer, the former chairman and CEO of Universal Music Publishing, and Steve Schnur, who is the president of music at Electronic Arts (EA) and the former chairman of the Grammy Foundation. The group describes itself as an “apolitical” organization that’s made up of “prominent members of the entertainment community,” and says it “strives to provide balance to the discourse regarding the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.”
The CCFP counts professionals from Warner Bros., Sony, Atlantic Records, Amazon, and more as members of its advisory board and networking committee. Its annual gala has been sponsored by a wide range of companies and individuals, including the foundations of Len Blavatnik, a Russian oligarch, and Casey Wasserman, chairman of the Los Angeles organizing committee for the 2028 Olympics – both of whom are featured in the Jeffrey Epstein files.