Hollywood's ugliest corporate fight just left Instagram and landed on a stage in London.
Avi Issacharoff, the journalist and co-creator of the Netflix thriller Fauda, used a public panel to go after Mark Ruffalo by name. He didn't soften it. "Mark Ruffalo saying 'Genocide, genocide.' Then you know that there's a kind of people that are ignorant, there are some people that are stupid.
He's a rare combination of those two," Issacharoff said during a panel in London. "I'm sorry to say that," the Middle East analyst and producer continued.
He kept going. "Do you understand what it means 'genocide'? Do you, as a lead actor in Hollywood, understand that when Israel allows every day 600 trucks of food and supply to go into Gaza, they are not intending or planning to kill the people of Palestine?" He added one more challenge.
"Do you understand if more people were born during the war in Gaza than died, so no one was trying to eliminate those people, and the only ones that were trying to commit genocide were Hamas people?"
The setting mattered. Issacharoff was speaking at a Jewish News event in London for the Tel Aviv University Trust. He wasn't optimistic about changing anyone's mind. He noted "Even Jewish people don't get it.
Why? Because it's kind of, you know, cool and nice to come on stage and say 'Fuck this' and 'Fuck Israel.'" But the producer conceded that he is unlikely to change their minds.
For anyone late to this fight, here's how it started. Ruffalo has spent months campaigning against the Paramount Skydance takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery. He had linked Paramount's proposed $111bn acquisition of Warner Bros to Larry Ellison, cofounder of tech giant Oracle and whose family owns Paramount, and his support for Israel's "genocide" in Gaza, together with Oracle's work with the Israeli military.
On Aug. 21, that campaign turned sharper. Ruffalo reposted a video to his Instagram Story of Oracle's executive vice chair Safra Catz boasting about the company's efforts to help Israel in the wake of the terror attacks of Oct. 7.
He didn't stop at Catz. He called Oracle co-founder and executive chairman Larry Ellison a "classic oligarch" and accused him and his son, David, of "powering some of the most destructive and inhuman forces in the world." The line that lit the fuse came next.
He urged his followers to "look how she revels in what we now have come to see as a genocide, which was built on an apartheid system of oppression powered by Oracle."
Paramount hit back fast. A spokesperson for the David Ellison-run enterprise said the company is "troubled when antisemitic tropes are invoked in purported service of a business dispute. Words like 'genocide' and 'apartheid,' applied to a corporate transaction, aren't just wrong, they're a bridge too far, and they cheapen the very real suffering those words are meant to describe."
The studio added it wouldn't dignify the post further. "This doesn't deserve a response in kind, and to be clear, we don't tolerate prejudice of any kind, against anyone."
Ruffalo didn't back down either. He called Paramount's accusation that he was antisemitic "appalling and fundamentally dishonest," adding: "Criticizing the actions of the Israeli prime minister, a military technology contract, or the executives who supply it is not the same as criticizing Jewish people."
Support arrived within days. More than 180 prominent Jewish figures, most of them from the entertainment industry, came out in strong support of Ruffalo, rejecting the accusations of antisemitism he has faced since opposing the merger.
The names on that letter carried weight. Actor and writer Hannah Einbinder was among them, alongside filmmaker Joel Coen. Einbinder, who is Jewish and has been outspoken in her support for Palestinian rights, thanked Ruffalo for drawing a "connection between the Ellisons providing military technology to Israel during a genocide and their unprecedented media takeover."
Screenwriter and director Kenneth Lonergan weighed in too, calling the antisemitism charge against Ruffalo a "cynical and disgusting lie," according to Variety's reporting on the letter.
There's also a jobs angle fueling the anger. The merger, currently being challenged by a dozen state attorneys general including California, would reportedly cost 4,500 jobs. That's the backdrop Ruffalo has been pointing to since well before the Instagram post ever went up.
Issacharoff isn't a random voice in this. He's a veteran journalist who provides expert Middle East news analysis for several outlets, with a background of serving in an undercover unit of the Israeli army.
Alongside actor Lior Raz, his childhood friend, he built Fauda into one of Israel's biggest television exports. The show won the Israeli Academy Award for Best TV Drama of 2015 and was sold to Netflix in late 2016, where it became a global phenomenon.
Timing is doing a lot of work here. The fourth season of Fauda returns to Netflix next week. Whether that's coincidence or calculation, it puts Issacharoff in front of cameras right when he's chosen to escalate.
Ruffalo hasn't responded publicly to Issacharoff as of this writing. That silence is its own story. The actor has never been shy about firing back at critics, and his defenders have shown they'll mobilize quickly.
What happens next probably depends on whether Ruffalo sees an Israeli showrunner as a different kind of opponent than a studio press release. A corporate statement is easy to dismiss as spin. A fellow creative calling him stupid to his face, on camera, is harder to shrug off.
Either way, the merger fight isn't cooling down. Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery still have regulators and attorneys general to satisfy.
Ruffalo still has an audience of 20 million Instagram followers. And now Fauda is about to be back in the conversation, whether Netflix planned it that way or not.
Check topics and authors from this story to see more stories like this in your personalized feed and receive updates when new work is published.
