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Why Is Anti-Colonial Resistance Only Worth Cheering When It’s Fictional?

BYKhaoula Ghanem

July 21, 2025

Western moviegoers are on their feet, cheering as Superman swoops in to save a besieged nation from an invading army. On screen, it’s a thrilling triumph of good over evil. But that fictional battle looks a lot like a real one unfolding in our world. In DC’s new 2025 Superman film (directed by James Gunn), the Man of Steel intervenes to protect an oppressed people from a colonizing force, in a storyline that has unmistakable echoes of Israel’s genocide of Gaza. The same audiences who applaud this liberation in spandex often shy away from supporting it in reality. Why do we find anti-colonial resistance so palatable on the big screen, yet so controversial on the evening news?

The film doesn’t name real countries. Instead, it depicts the fictional nations of Boravia, a U.S.-allied military power armed to the teeth, which is poised to invade its impoverished neighbor Jarhanpur. In early scenes (seen in the trailer), Boravian tanks and troops mass at a barbed border fence while unarmed Jarhanpurian civilians flee or bravely protest. One child even waves a makeshift Superman flag, praying for a savior as soldiers aim rifles at the crowd. If this imagery evokes the Gaza Strip– armored personnel facing desperate families behind a fence—you’re not alone. “Feels like a major cultural moment that Israel is quite clearly the bad guy villain country in a big budget Hollywood movie…I thought it would be subtle, but it was not subtle,” commented political analyst Krystal Bal.

Feels like a major cultural moment that Israel is quite clearly the bad guy villain country in a big budget Hollywood movie (Superman) Going in I thought it would be subtle but it was not subtle. My mind is kind of blown.

— Krystal Ball (@krystalball) July 13, 2025

On social media, viewers have been buzzing that Superman’s mission to stop Boravia’s invasion of Jarhanpur is an allegory for Israel’s war on Gaza. The parallels are hard to miss: Boravia’s leaders are depicted as ethnically white and speak with Slavic accents, while Jarhanpurians are portrayed as brown-skinned and non-white– women in modest dress, men with simple tools– underscoring a clash between a “Caucasian West and a brown-skinned East.” Boravia’s plan, we’re told, is explicitly settler-colonial: they aim to displace Jarhanpur’s indigenous people and annex the land. In other words, Superman is thwarting a fictional ethnic cleansing plot; a scenario uncomfortably familiar to anyone following Palestine’s recent history.

Yet neither Gunn nor his cast have publicly said the story is about Israel-Palestine. In fact, the director insists it isn’t: “When I wrote this the Middle Eastern conflict wasn’t happening… it doesn’t have anything to do with the Middle East,” he told one outlet. He describes the film’s political thread in broad terms— “an invasion by a much more powerful country run by a despot into a country… that has totally no defense”– as if such narratives exist in a geopolitical vacuum.

But of course, no audience needs the director’s permission to draw connections. Art reflects life, intentionally or not. Early viewers and reviewers have run with the comparisons, dubbing the movie “the most overtly political studio blockbuster in years” and “as anti-Zionist as a major Hollywood production can be without getting its cast and crew blacklisted.”

Clearly, people are seeing in Superman a bold allegory of a real struggle that is usually tiptoed around in entertainment. And how does the Western audience respond? In the safety of a cinema, they applaud the hero. The same themes that spark controversy or discomfort on the news– military occupation, settler colonialism, resistance against overwhelming force– become crowd-pleasing righteousness when wrapped in comic book packaging. It’s a striking irony. On screen, the black-and-white difference between good and bad is simple; off-screen, suddenly “nuance” is central to the plot.

From Star Wars to The Hunger Games, pop culture has long made rebellion entertaining, even cathartic, for Western audiences. They all love rooting for the plucky underdogs who take on empires in fiction. But when similar scenarios play out in actuality– an occupied people rising up against a colonizer– many of those cheers turn to silence or scolding. Why do we need caped aliens and sci-fi settings to comfortably champion the oppressed?

Part of the answer lies in how media framing shapes our instincts. The late Malcolm X warned decades ago that if you’re not careful, the press will “have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.” In real conflicts, Western news media often muddies the morality. We’re told everything is complex. We hear equivocating phrases about “both sides,” or narratives that shift blame onto the very victims of dispossession. When Palestinians protest or resist, they’re labeled “terrorists” endangering innocent lives, their context and suffering erased. Meanwhile, Israel– a state with vastly superior firepower– is cast as exercising “self-defense.” The result? Western audiences, even those who just cheered Superman stopping a massacre, get cold feet about supporting actual people fighting for their freedom.

If it’s fictional or far away, we comfortably empathize with rebels. If it challenges our real-world biases or political loyalties, we suddenly discover a moral gray zone. Hollywood has long been complicit in this cognitive dissonance. For years, American films sanitized resistance by displacing it into fantasy. Our heroes often battle faceless Nazis, aliens, or robots– enemies no one will humanize or mourn. The Avengers mowed down endless hordes of Chitauri aliens in New York without viewers batting an eye. But imagine a war film where those “invaders” resemble an actual ethnic group. Suddenly studios get skittish. Even in war movies, Western soldiers’ perspectives dominate, and the “other” side’s humanity is rarely explored. This pattern has conditioned audiences to be comfortable with violence only when it’s comfortably abstract. A rebel with a cape and catchy catchphrase? Cool. A real teenager with a keffiyeh and a stone? Whoa, that’s political. As cultural critic Edward Said observed, American popular culture has relentlessly projected “the vilest racist stereotypes” about Arabs and Muslims, portraying them as irrational, violent, and inferior.

Generations of Western viewers have absorbed these depictions, consciously or not. So when a real Middle Eastern population appears, many have trouble seeing them as the sympathetic “good guys,” no matter the reality of their suffering. To the colonized, Said wrote, empire always claims to be on a civilizing mission to educate and liberate–never to oppress. Western audiences have internalized those imperial narratives for so long that an actual liberation struggle appears suspect, while a fictional one– safely couched in metaphor– feels straightforward. That’s what makes this new Superman film so fascinating. It slips an anti-colonial story past the usual filters by dressing it in the primary colors of a superhero blockbuster. And it doesn’t hurt that Superman himself is an American icon, the archetypal do-gooder. Here, he’s essentially performing direct action to stop an ethnic cleansing, even defying the U.S. government in the process. A U.S. government which, in the film, is “angry” at him for intervening against its ally Boravia. (Yes, you read that right: the American Secretary of Defense is not happy that Superman saved lives, a pointed detail the movie uses to question official morality.)

For once, a major studio film unabashedly sides with the occupied, not the occupier, and even portrays the authorities pressuring our hero to look the other way. It’s a jarring inversion of the usual Hollywood formula, where American might is inherently right. No wonder many viewers– especially Arabs and progressive fans– find it exhilarating. Lebanese-American media personality Mia Khalifa quipped that “Superman that freed Palestine is my favorite movie of the year.”

At the same time, pro-Israel pundits are incensed that a character created by Jewish artists (Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster) is being used to “promote anti-Israeli messages to the world.” One disgruntled Redditor complained it was “disrespectful and distressing” and couldn’t fathom “how the film was green-lit with global antisemitism on the rise.”

The studio’s willingness to weather such backlash suggests a significant shift in the cultural winds. Not long ago, a script even tangentially sympathetic to Palestinians might have been nixed as too “controversial.” Now it’s filling multiplexes and getting rave reviews. To appreciate how big a deal this is, consider Hollywood’s track record on portraying Arabs and colonized peoples. Scholar Jack Shaheen spent decades documenting these depictions, concluding that Arabs have been the most maligned group in Hollywood history. In countless films, Arabs were presented as villains, terrorists, or backward “savages,” their humanity flattened into harmful caricature. These “hateful Arab stereotypes…rob an entire people of their humanity,” Shaheen wrote, and they paved the way for the public to accept real-world injustices against Arab nations. Within that context, seeing Middle Eastern-coded civilians as the sympathetic victims in a blockbuster– and a white militarized nation as the clear-cut villain– is almost revolutionary.

It’s not that Superman or DC have never tackled political issues before (indeed, the fictional country Boravia itself first appeared way back in Superman #2 in 1939, in a story where Superman intervened in a European war). But framing a conflict so transparently around a modern anti-colonial struggle, and inviting audiences to emotionally invest in the freedom of an occupied people, signals a new level of boldness in pop culture. The Jarhanpurians on screen may have fictional names, but their plight clearly evokes Palestinians. In one scene, intrepid reporter and Superman’s love interest Lois Lane parrots a familiar talking point, suggesting Jarhanpur’s leadership could be as guilty as Boravia if left “unchecked” (an allusion to the way real-world media demonize Gaza’s authorities to justify violence). Superman rebukes that cynicism, maintaining that stopping the slaughter is what matters. The film pointedly avoids the dreaded “both-sides” pitfall; it doesn’t create a fake equivalence between aggressor and victim.

In an era when even news outlets often bend over backwards to appear “neutral” (even when neutrality favors the oppressor), this straight-shooting stance in a superhero flick feels downright subversive. So why does this fictional liberation go down so easily with Western viewers, when real ones do not? It might be because fiction allows a sort of moral clarity that our politicized reality obscures. In the comics, Superman’s motto was long “Truth, Justice, and the American Way.” But here, he represents a higher ideal of justice unbound by geopolitical alliances. He’s an outsider (an immigrant from Krypton, as Gunn has emphasized) who sees humans simply as humans, not as “us” versus “them.”

Stripped of real-world labels, the Jarhanpurians can be empathized with by an American audience without triggering the biases that words like “Palestinian” or “Arab” often do, after years of slanted media coverage. By the time viewers make the connection (if they do at all), they’ve already emotionally invested in Jarhanpur’s cause. It’s a bit of narrative sleight-of-hand that forces a perspective shift.

This phenomenon isn’t entirely new. Consider how James Cameron’s Avatar got audiences to side with blue alien tribes fighting human colonizers, essentially a retelling of indigenous resistance stories in sci-fi drag. People cheered that on, even if in reality they might not have spoken up for Amazon rainforests or Native American land rights. Pop culture often repackages true injustices in fantasy wrapping paper, making them palatable. The problem, of course, is when the credits roll and viewers compartmentalize what they felt. It’s comfortable to support justice in hypotheticals, less so when it requires questioning one’s own side or government in real life.

Yet, there’s reason to hope that these lines are blurring. The enthusiastic response to Superman (2025), despite its clear political undertones, suggests a growing appetite for authenticity and conscience in mainstream media. Many young Western viewers today are more globally aware, connected via social media to footage from Gaza, Ukraine, or Ferguson, and they notice the double standards. Arab Gen Z audiences in particular are hyper-attuned to how their stories are told (or not told) in Western media. For them, seeing a mega-budget film mirror the Palestinian struggle, even allegorically, is deeply validating. Instead of the old trope of Arab-as-terrorist, here the Middle Eastern-coded populace are helpless villagers that the hero must defend, and the invaders with tanks and bombs are the ones unequivocally vilified. That flip is emotionally powerful.

It also begs an uncomfortable question: If we can recognize right from wrong in this fictional scenario, what’s stopping us in the real scenarios it mirrors? The sanitation of resistance in pop culture may make revolutionary ideas digestible, but it shouldn’t stop at entertainment. The hope is that audiences carry that clarity outside the theater. When Western viewers watch reports of actual occupied populations fighting back– be it Palestinians, or other colonized peoples historically like South Africans under apartheid or Indians under the British Raj– maybe they’ll remember what it felt like to cheer for Superman saving Jarhanpur. Maybe they’ll question why those real-world struggles were never framed in such a human light. Why, in reality, did we not see the Palestinian child with a flag as a hero in the making, too?

That the film exists at all, and is drawing both praise and ire, shows that the cultural conversation is shifting. The veil is thinning between fiction and fact. In the end, it’s not about turning every moviegoer into an activist overnight. But stories shape perceptions, and perceptions shape reality. It’s heartening, and to be honest, a little surreal, to see an A-list superhero film force viewers to confront that paradox. Call it cognitive dissonance or call it progress. Superman has always stood for the best of humanity, and here his heroics implicitly ask something of us as well: to reconcile our love of justice as entertainment with our duty to justice in the real world. The next time life starts imitating art (when an oppressed people stands up and cries for help) will we shy away, or will we respond with the same moral clarity we afford our fictional heroes? It’s a question hanging in the air as the credits roll and the house lights come on. And as Superman himself might remind us, the fight for truth and justice doesn’t end when the screen goes dark.

Why Is Anti-Colonial Resistance Only Worth Cheering When It’s Fictional?

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Why Is Anti-Colonial Resistance Only Worth Cheering When It’s Fictional?

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