On the evening of June 15, 1978, the Doheny Plaza Theater in Los Angeles was hours away from a scheduled screening of Vanessa Redgrave’s ‘The Palestinian’ when a bomb exploded just outside the entrance door.

The blast, which was caused by a pro-Israel protester, damaged the building and forced the opening to be abruptly postponed.

It was only about two months before that, that Redgrave had stood onstage at the 50th Academy Awards to accept an Oscar for her role in Julia. Instead of sticking to the usual thank-yous, she used part of her speech to address the backlash surrounding her support for Palestine.

“I think you should be very proud,” she said, “that in the last few weeks you’ve stood firm, and refused to be intimidated by the threats of a small bunch of Zionist hoodlums…”

She was drowned out by a chorus of boos before she could finish.

Redgrave had sold two homes to fund a documentary in which she travelled through refugee camps and interviewed Palestinian figures, including the PLO’s Yasser Arafat. This made her a public enemy in much of Hollywood, particularly for the film’s portrayal of the Palestinian experience and its refusal to align with the prevailing pro-Israel narrative in Western cultural circles at the time.

The Jewish Defense League, among her fiercest critics, was quoted as saying: ‘If she gets a nomination, we are going to be down at the Oscars with a militant demonstration.’

By the time she was announced the winner of Best Supporting Actress, protests had already begun outside the theatre.

Demonstrators gathered beyond the venue, many aligned with the Jewish Defense League. 

An effigy of Redgrave was burned, marked ‘Arafat’s whore.’ Chants of ‘Down with the PLO’ were heard, along with slogans including ‘What do we want? Redgrave. How do we want her? Dead.’ Police snipers were reportedly positioned on nearby rooftops.

Paddy Chayefsky, who was scheduled to present the writing awards and also happened to be a longtime supporter of Israel, then took the stage in protest of her speech.

“I'm sick and tired of people exploiting the occasion of the Academy Awards for the propagation of their own personal political propaganda,” he said. “I would like to suggest to Miss Redgrave that her winning an Academy Award is not a pivotal moment in history, does not require a proclamation, and a simple thank you would have sufficed.”

He spoke to raucous applause.  The word “Propaganda” landed with a certain weight coming from a man who had written a film about media spectacle that nonetheless portrayed Arabs as a “shadowy” background threat to US-American freedom of the press and corporate sovereignty.

Redgrave was reportedly left sitting alone afterward, accompanied only by security. Even Jane Fonda, her co-star and a figure long associated with anti-war activism, later distanced herself, and expressed support for Israel during the 1982 invasion of Lebanon.

To many, including some who knew her personally, Redgrave had crossed a line. The irony was that some of the people doing the booing had themselves been blacklisted under McCarthy not twenty years before – punished, as she was being punished now, for holding political views that also made the room uncomfortable. 

Leave that aside entirely, and the idea that the Oscars is some apolitical sacred space still doesn't hold up historically. Year after year, people have used the stage to give entire sermons up there. It’s part of the tradition at this point.

The problem with Redgrave’s speech was that it was delivered in a way that violated the sacred US-American expectation that emotion must be politely formatted. You are allowed to be political, but only in the same way you are allowed to cry in a hotel lobby: briefly, preferably beautifully, and without making the carpet feel implicated.

Despite the lingering memory of McCarthyism, though, the industry’s response after the ceremony showed little historical caution.

The speech was singled out in coverage and quickly became material for satire on shows like Saturday Night Live.

Redgrave's appearance on ABC to promote her film 'Julia' caused the network to reportedly receive nearly a hundred complaints simply for putting her on air, despite the fact that she avoided discussing her documentary entirely. What's telling is that, at this point, most people hadn't even seen it.

She tried to get the film broadcast and hit a wall everywhere she turned. Public television producers warned it could jeopardize oil sponsorships. No one would touch it.

In 1982, she returned from a trip to Palestine, where she'd been filming a second documentary and found she'd been dropped as narrator of Stravinsky's Oedipus Rex with the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

The decision came after internal pressure, including objections from a member of the orchestra’s board, and threats from the Jewish Defense League once again.

By that point the pattern was impossible to miss. In the US you are allowed to spend twenty years taking a tire iron to the president, the pope, Congress, the CIA, the entire wheezing carcass of US-American foreign policy, and people will still shrug and call it free speech. But touch Israel and everything you do afterward is treated as suspect from the outset. The interpretation arrives before you do. It no longer matters what the rest of your record looks like, or how consistently you stood on the right side of other political questions. None of that is considered relevant anymore. It is worth remembering that the group she was describing did not have a political identity thrust upon them against their will; militant Zionism was the explicit purpose of the organization. To characterize a group that had actively coordinated violent threats against her life as mere 'hoodlums' was, if anything, a major understatement. Yet public discourse inverted this reality, treating her choice of words as the true scandal rather than the violence directed at her. 

In any normal context, her words would be recognized for what they were: a woman naming, plainly and accurately, the organization that had just threatened her life. Instead, they were received as a scandal, as though the real offense that night was not the threats themselves but the fact that she fought back.

If the West's standard of mandatory condemnation possessed even a shred of consistency behind it, you would have had every Johnny Carson and Barbara Walters type under the sun spending the next ten years mechanically pressing guests to condemn the JDL before being allowed to continue speaking. But nobody was going to do that, because it would have been ridiculous.

Whether the term itself was accurate was never really the issue. 

The reality is, there exists, within US-American public discourse, a relatively narrow and informal but strongly enforced boundary defining what counts as legitimate speech. Once you cross it, you will stop being treated as someone pointing out a problem and will instead be treated as the root of the problem itself.  For a long time this boundary held up, because the cost was high enough that most people stayed on the right side of it.

Redgrave didn't. She was simply too stubborn and too accomplished a performer to be pushed out of public life entirely, but that didn't stop the cycle from restarting every time her name came up. It still hasn't, even now, at 88 years old.

What’s changed is that too many people have crossed that line from many directions, and enough of them are Jewish that the usual script of condemnation no longer has a clean or consistent response. Obviously the tools of suppression are still there and so is the institutional will to use them, but you cannot credibly threaten an entire generation of observers into silence. And at some point the attempt to do so becomes its own kind of argument.

The irony in all of this, of course, is that none of the things they rushed to suppress, not her speech, nor her film, nor any film before or since, that ultimately shifted public opinion. This happened because of Israel's own escalating military actions and state policies, broadcast day after day in full view of the world. 

What Vanessa Redgrave did do, however, was something history is not always good at measuring. She held a position publicly, and at a personal cost, for long enough that history eventually caught up with her. Those who came after, and there are now too many of them to be made into examples, had her record to point to: the woman at the height of her fame who had her effigy burned on the most important night of her career and flew back to Palestine to make another film.