“Regardless of what I think,” says Arab American actor Amin El Gamal, “they decided to make a one-sided statement without involvement from their members.” El Gamal, 38, is referring to SAG-AFTRA’s pro-Israel statement issued six days into the Israel-Hamas war that began on October 7, 2023. El Gamal chairs the actors’ union’s Middle Eastern/North African member’s committee (MENA), and notes that the SAG-AFTRA statement, after deploring “the horrific acts of aggression against the Israeli people on Oct. 7,” never mentions the plight of Palestinian civilians killed, displaced, or wounded—people who had nothing to do with Hamas’s surprise attack on Israel. By October 13, the date SAG-AFTRA issued its statement, CNN reported that Israeli forces had already killed 1,900 Palestinians and wounded 7,696 more.
El Gamal, who first joined SAG-AFTRA in 2012 after landing his first acting job on Aaron Sorkin’s series The Newsroom, has since acted in shows like Good Trouble, Prison Break, and the indie movie Breaking Fast. He’s never been shy when it comes to speaking up about Hollywood’s depiction of Arab or Arab American characters, starting with his Newsroom role. “My character was an Egyptian amateur reporter during the Arab Spring, and there were major errors with his name—I think it was a Swahili name originally, not Arabic—and there were some factual errors in the script confusing Ancient Egyptian script with Arabic. I don’t know how I was so bold then, but I convinced wardrobe to take me to Sorkin during my fitting and requested that he fix the errors. To his credit, we ended up collaborating on a new name.”
Over the last two months, we’ve spoken and e-mailed about the September 11 petition that El Gamal cosigned and co-organized with the group SAG-AFTRA and Sister Guild Members for Ceasefire. The inter-union coalition delivered its petition publicly via Instagram and trade magazines like The Hollywood Reporter. Its cosignatories include high-profile SAG-AFTRA members like Mark Ruffalo, Common, Riz Ahmed, Brian Cox, and Rosie O’Donnell, but also hundreds of other rank-and-file actors, writers, directors, and IATSE members. In part, their petition demands that “our leadership issue a public statement calling for a permanent ceasefire, release of all hostages—both Palestinian and Israeli—and immediate funding and delivery of desperately needed humanitarian aid; to speak out against the targeting and killing of innocent Palestinian civilians, health workers, and our journalist colleagues; to condemn our industry’s McCarthyist repression of members who acknowledge Palestinian suffering; and to eliminate any doubt of our solidarity with workers, artists, and oppressed people worldwide.”
A public demand was not El Gamal’s first choice. On January 2 of this year, he says, he reached out to different guild offices in hopes of getting a more balanced statement that asked for a ceasefire. He and his co-organizers didn’t go public with the petition, which has a list of specific demands, until September 2024, just weeks ahead of the first anniversary of the October 7 attacks. The entertainment guilds have taken a range of positions on the Israel-Hamas War. On October 11, 2023, the Directors Guild of America (DGA) issued a statement sympathetic only to Israel. “The DGA unequivocally condemns terrorism and joins the many voices in our community decrying the recent Hamas terrorist attacks in Israel and violence against innocent civilians,” it read in part. “We stand against the growing spread of anti-Semitism here in the US and abroad, and remain committed in our actions, words and deeds to supporting the Jewish people.”
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Following the DGA’s lead, SAG-AFTRA released its similarly one-sided statement two days later. It came as producers broke off an intense nine-day bargaining session in the final weeks of the 2023 strike. On October 12, the negotiating committee issued a 12 am tweet to its members saying that the producers had walked out and also inflated the value of their offer to the press. The following day, SAG-AFTRA issued its Israel statement. The guild’s declaration, coming at a moment when the numbers of Palestinian dead and wounded were dramatically rising, comes off as either archly ideological or simply not that well thought out.
After the violence in Gaza escalated to horrifying numbers of deaths in 2023, El Gamal began 2024 by contacting the guild for a more balanced statement. American public opinion had shifted toward a ceasefire and hostage return deal. IATSE Local 839 of Los Angeles, aka the Animation Guild, issued a ceasefire-and-hostage-return statement on February 16, 2024, that recognized the loss of life on both sides. It also included the boldest language yet from an entertainment industry guild on America’s role in arming Israel, and flagged a mounting backlash against critics of Israel in the creative community. “The United States must honor its mission as a member of the United Nations to uphold adherence to international humanitarian law and ICJ rulings, to prevent genocide,” IATSE members said. They also denounced “the pervasive censorship and penalizing against those in Hollywood who are speaking out against these horrors in solidarity with Palestine or Israel. Freedom of speech and expression is vital for creating authentic art and must not be stifled.”
The Animation Guild’s demands revealed a growing rift in opinion on the war and its fallout in Hollywood. From the beginning of the conflict, the Writers Guild of America (WGA) struggled internally on how to weigh in, but ultimately chose not to issue a statement. The union’s abstention triggered one high-profile resignation, longtime member Dan Gordon, and an open letter to the WGA from a raft of high-profile showrunners and screenwriters. WGA leaders clarified the reasons behind the union’s silence, which did not come out of apathy—they were unable to find language that could satisfy its diverse membership on the issue. WGA-West president Meredith Stiehm wrote to members, “Like the membership itself, the Board’s viewpoints are varied, and we find consensus out of reach.”
“I can respect that position,” El Gamal says, noting that unlike the WGA, SAG-AFTRA leaders did not try to incorporate the full range of views of its members or committees before weighing in with its statement. The dissenting statement from SAG-AFTRA members and the Sister Guild argues that the top-down structure of SAG-AFTRA bypassed rank-and-file member input. Nor has the guild publicly addressed the petition or the members who signed it, as Meredith Stiehm did with her union’s members. When contacted by The Nation, a SAG-AFTRA spokesperson responded, “The petition request was reviewed by the Executive Committee which voted not to act. The 80 member national board considered the executive committee decision and voted to let it stand.”
As to the October 13 statement, SAG-AFTRA’s spokesperson disagrees with El Gamal and the petition’s view of SAG-AFTRA’s decision-making process as “top-down” or that it simply comes down to the guild’s president, Fran Drescher. “SAG-AFTRA has multiple authorized spokespeople and public statements are routinely reviewed with members and staff leaders prior to distribution. Multiple members reviewed and contributed to the union’s Oct. 13 statement.”
That said, Drescher is a celebrity who has attended Friends of the IDF fundraisers with Miriam and Sheldon Adelson. Adelson also gave President-elect Trump’s campaign a $100 million donation over the 2024 presidential cycle. This coziness with pro-Israel hard-liners isn’t a good look for a nominally progressive union whose only official statement weighed in on Israel’s side in the Gaza conflict. Given the more than 44,000 dead in Palestine, that statement has not aged well. “I saw this blatant double standard,” El Gamal said in September when the Sister Guilds’ petition was released. “How can you mourn the loss of certain kinds of people and not others—especially when you have such a diverse membership? You don’t get to cosplay equity and inclusion and then leave your most vulnerable members on read.”
Weeks after the Animation Guild issued its statement, the Hollywood community signaled a major shift on the issue when the Motion Picture Academy awarded director Jonathan Glazer an Oscar for Zone of Interest. Before the most powerful and influential people in the industry, he made his plea that the world recognize the humanity on both sides of this conflict. The Academy had to know it was coming, since Zone of Interest ’s producer James Wilson made a similar plea, with Glazer applauding it, when the film won at the British Academy Film Awards; it was a statement to award that Oscar. The award, and the extended round of applause Glazer received from the Academy audience, produced a new thaw in debate around the war. Despite some pushback, it created a greater space for artists to support Glazer, acknowledge the suffering of the Palestinian people, and advocate for a resolution to a brutal and unjust war.
In 2023, Drescher proved an effective and charismatic union leader who won significant concessions from studio and streaming bosses for both SAG-AFTRA and, in a pivotal show of solidarity, the WGA’s parallel strike. And it’s a valid question as to whether unions like SAG-AFTRA need to comment at all on political issues or world events outside a union’s wheelhouse. Certainly, no one expects a statement from an entertainment union to tip the balance one way or another. When the WGA issued an apology for its silence to outraged members, it noted that it did not issue statements on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine or terrorist attacks on Somalia or Pakistan, and that “it can be an imprecise science for a labor union to pick and choose where it weighs in on both domestic and world affairs.” After all, how does the Israel-Hamas War directly affect the working lives of actors, writers, and directors? At first glance, not much, but the political and professional dimensions of the Gaza war can’t be neatly separated out from each other. For example, the three top talent guilds represent documentarians, news writers, on-air reporters, and digital print journalists. More than 131 journalists and media workers have been killed in this war. None of these guilds have issued a statement on that issue on behalf of members in the affected professions.
As the national MENA committee chair, El Gamal says that the union’s neglect of Palestinian suffering most certainly is a serious detriment to working conditions. “I would argue that this does affect actors,” he says. “When the union practices selective humanity, as they did with that statement, they feed right into the industry’s dominant narrative of Arabs as barbaric aggressors with random, inherently evil intent—whose lives don’t matter as much as everyone else’s. How could this not affect their Arab members and their working environment?”
“Actors are workers, and unions are the working person’s economic leverage,” he argues. “Historically, they have been a powerful tool for everyday people to be heard when democracy seems to fail them…and more relevant to my work on the committee, the industry has a history of demeaning Arab people and marginalizing Arab actors. Sometimes this is in explicit collaboration with government entities like the DoD who often get final say on scripts in exchange for free military equipment or locations. In this way, our industry has an inherently political component and has provided diplomatic cover for our own crimes against people in the region and Israel’s.”
It’s surprising that, given El Gamal’s position as chair of the MENA committee, and his role in drafting the follow-up ceasefire petition, that he got no official response for so long. El Gamal says he got unofficial reassurances and backchannel calls on private cell phones from union staffers, some in leadership, and members who said they agreed with him—that the October 13 statement was a mistake—and that the union should issue a follow-up statement. Still, the guild held back, and over time its official silence became galling. “As the MENA Committee chair, it’s hard to hear many in leadership admit that the statement was regrettably handled behind closed doors and then offer to take no accountability for it. It’s also troubling that they are entirely unbothered about our union appearing to have an anti-Arab bias.”
In an Los Angeles Times survey of LA unions and their positions on a ceasefire for the Israel-Hamas war in April of this year, SAG-AFTRA sidestepped its very direct statement from October 13. “SAG-AFTRA has received several requests for public statements,” the union’s spokesperson Pamela Greenwalt told the Times. “Those requests are currently under review by union leadership.” After five more months of review, El Gamal and his cosigners went public with the Sister Guilds petition. When The Nation requested comment from SAG-AFTRA on the issue, it got this response: “SAG-AFTRA has heard from many members personally affected and deeply distressed by the events in Gaza and shares their passionate desire for an end to the conflict. We support and will defend their rights to express those views without retaliation and will use all available resources to protect any members experiencing discrimination.”
That comment at least reinforces the guild’s vow to protect members from political censorship—a serious issue in Hollywood that has seen some firings of pro-Palestinian artists—but the union continued avoiding El Gamal and the petitioners’ demand for a revised statement on Israel and Palestine. In late October of this year, El Gamal finally got a one-on-one meeting with Linda Powell, executive vice president of SAG-AFTRA, and daughter of the late secretary of state Colin Powell. It was made clear no new statement on the war would be forthcoming. El Gamal got mixed signals that union leaders would be reviewing the process of issuing guild statements—yet without accounting for serious input from membership.
El Gamal, meanwhile, plans to forge ahead in organizing industry workers against the war. “My grassroots organization is regrouping now, but we’ll continue organizing until our unions and the wider industry join the global Palestine solidarity movement,” he says. “We also plan to build our own systems of protection and care—outside of the racist, bloated structures of our unions.”
