Marvel has a new franchise crossover, and it isn’t the one Disney is marketing. Over the past week, more than 20 actors with Marvel Cinematic Universe credits – Benedict Cumberbatch (Doctor Strange), Mark Ruffalo (the Hulk), Don Cheadle (War Machine), Ian McKellen, whose X-Men run predates the MCU but whose fandom overlaps it – signed onto “Freedom for Marwan,” a campaign demanding the release of Marwan Barghouti from Israeli prison.
The post went up on Instagram, tagged #MCU #Avengers, aimed with some precision at an audience that knows these people as superheroes and not as newly minted foreign-policy authorities.
This is not a new campaign. Barghouti’s family and UK-based advocacy groups launched “Free Marwan” in December, and it collected north of 200 signatures from novelists, musicians, and film actors before the superheroes arrived.
What’s new is the branding. Someone decided the fastest route to a younger, historically illiterate audience runs through the MCU fan account, not the literary supplement. It is a genuinely modern piece of message discipline, and it deserves to be examined as such rather than waved off as showbiz noise.
What the campaign doesn’t sign its name to
The “Freedom for Marwan” statement is built, like its December predecessor, on a request for signatures – dozens of famous names, printed in full, each one lending credibility to the next. Cumberbatch is identified by his role. Ruffalo by his. The campaign understands the value of a name attached to a face.
It extends no such courtesy to the five people Marwan Barghouti was convicted of murdering.
An Israeli court did not take the state’s word for this. In May 2004, a three-judge panel in Tel Aviv heard the evidence and convicted Barghouti on five counts of murder, arising from three attacks: the June 2001 shooting of a Greek Orthodox monk, Tsibouktsakis Germanus, on the Jerusalem–Ma’aleh Adumim highway; the January 2002 shooting of Yoela Chen in Givat Ze’ev; and the March 2002 grenade-and-gun attack on the Seafood Market restaurant in Tel Aviv, which killed Eli Dahan, Yosef Habi, and Salim Barakat, and wounded 25 more.
The same panel acquitted him of 21 further murder counts across 33 other attacks – not for lack of guilt in the campaign’s telling, but for lack of evidence tying him personally to the trigger. The court still found he led the organization, al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, that carried out the broader campaign.
Salim Barakat is worth sitting with for a moment, because his name complicates the “Palestinian versus Israeli” framing the campaign leans on. He was an Arab Israeli, killed alongside two Jewish patrons at a restaurant table.
The Free Marwan campaign’s own biography page, by outside accounts of it, presents Barghouti as a “husband and father” and “nation builder” and simply does not mention what a court found him responsible for. That’s not a simplification. It’s a redaction, and every celebrity who signs the letter without independently checking the verdict is co-signing the redaction, whether they know it or not.
Ignorance, or something worse
I don’t think most of the names on that list are antisemites. I think most of them are people accustomed to lending their fame to causes vetted by someone else’s staff, and this cause arrived pre-packaged with a Nelson Mandela comparison that made due diligence feel unnecessary. Robben Island photo ops. Desmond Tutu quotes recycled from a 2013 campaign launch. The emotional architecture does the thinking, so the signatory doesn’t have to.
That is a real distinction from malice, and it is also not much of a defense. A five-minute search – the Washington Post’s contemporaneous trial coverage, the court’s own findings, the Israeli Foreign Ministry’s public accounting – would have surfaced the same five names I’ve just listed.
Cumberbatch and Ruffalo did not have to dig. They had to decline to look away. A smaller number of repeat organizers behind these campaigns know the record cold and use the Mandela framing anyway, because they’ve calculated, correctly so far, that it works better than the truth.
Whose grief doesn’t trend
My daughter Alisa was murdered by Palestine Islamic Jihad in April 1995, on a bus near Kfar Darom. I have spent 30 years arguing, in this space and elsewhere, that the men who plan and order these attacks do not stop being murderers because a peace process needs them released, or because a campaign needs them mythologized. I am not going to pretend Alisa’s case is uniquely illustrative here. It isn’t the case at issue. Barghouti was never charged in her killing.
What her case and Salim Barakat’s and Yoela Chen’s and Eli Dahan’s and Yosef Habi’s and the murdered monk Germanus’s cases share is simpler and, I’d argue, more damning for the campaign: none of them get to sign anything. They don’t get an Instagram post. They don’t get their profession listed under their name. The asymmetry is the whole story – a campaign that trades in the currency of famous names, built around the erasure of the five names a court of law took the trouble to establish beyond reasonable doubt.
Nelson Mandela was never convicted of ordering the murder of a restaurant patron. The comparison was always doing more work than the facts could bear. It is doing that work again this week, with better production values and a Marvel logo.
The writer is an attorney and president of the Religious Zionists of America-Mizrachi. He is the father of Alisa Flatow, murdered in a 1995 Palestine Islamic Jihad terrorist attack, and author of A Father’s Story: My Fight for Justice Against Iranian Terror. He’s a new oleh (immigrant to Israel) dividing his time between New Jersey and Jerusalem.