Introduction: From Adoption to Selection
If earlier parts of this series examined how antizionist frameworks were developed, globalised, and institutionalised. This instalment addresses a different question: how they are selected, circulated, and normalised within cultural life.
Cultural transmission does not operate through formal adoption. It operates through gatekeeping — the processes by which stories are chosen, amplified, funded, and legitimised.
Editors decide which narratives are published. Producers decide which projects are commissioned. Festivals decide which works are platformed. Cultural institutions decide which voices are included — and which are not.
The result is not uniform. But it is patterned.
And over time, these patterns shape not only what is said about Israel, but what is easily said, and what cannot be said without cost.
1. Cultural Gatekeeping: Selection as Structure
Cultural production is not neutral.
At every stage — publishing, broadcasting, funding, programming — decisions are made about what content is visible. These decisions are influenced by professional norms, audience expectations, and increasingly, the interpretive frameworks described in earlier parts of this series. The sociological analysis of cultural production developed by Pierre Bourdieu describes how such fields operate through structured selection rather than neutral distribution.¹
This is where cultural transmission differs from academic argument.
In Part 3, frameworks structured interpretation. In Part 6, they shape selection.
Stories that align with dominant frameworks — emphasising asymmetry, oppression, and moral clarity — are more likely to be commissioned and distributed. Stories that complicate these narratives face higher barriers to entry.
These selection patterns reflect an alignment between editorial incentives, audience expectations, and prevailing moral vocabularies. When these elements converge, certain narratives become easier to commission, publish, and promote, while others encounter higher thresholds for inclusion.
The effect is cumulative. Over time, selection becomes normalisation.
2. Media: Framing as Repetition
Journalism plays a central role in this process.
Reporting necessarily involves framing: choosing what to emphasise, what to contextualise, and what to omit. In fast-moving conflicts, these decisions are shaped by access, safety, and immediacy — but also by editorial norms. The concept of framing, as developed in communication theory by Robert Entman, highlights how selection and emphasis shape interpretation.²
Critics argue that coverage of Israel and Gaza can, at times, emphasise humanitarian impact without equivalent attention to causal context, including the role of armed groups or legal frameworks governing conflict. Others contend that such emphasis reflects the realities of civilian harm and the expectations of global audiences.
What matters analytically is not which view prevails, but how repetition functions.
When particular framings are consistently selected, they become interpretive defaults. Subsequent events are understood through those defaults rather than evaluated independently.
This is how narrative becomes expectation.
3. The Arts: Narrative and Moral Imagination
The arts operate differently from journalism. They do not claim neutrality. They shape moral imagination. Philosophical work on narrative and ethics, including that of Martha Nussbaum, emphasises how storytelling structures moral perception.³
Film, theatre, and literature often translate political conflicts into narrative structures that prioritise emotional clarity over historical complexity. In the case of Israel, this frequently takes the form of allegory: coloniser and colonised, oppressor and oppressed.
These frameworks are not imposed uniformly. They emerge from the same cultural environment described above — where certain narratives are more easily funded, staged, and circulated.
Cultural boycotts and funding decisions can influence which artists and perspectives are platformed in international festivals and institutions. In documented cases, campaigns associated with the BDS movement have called for cultural boycotts of Israeli institutions and artists.4 Works that align with dominant moral narratives may encounter fewer barriers to visibility than those that complicate them.
The result is not censorship in a formal sense.
It is selective amplification.
And over time, repeated representation reshapes perception: audiences encounter a conflict already interpreted for them.
4. Cultural Exclusion and the Question of Participation
At this point, the series’ functional argument becomes directly relevant.
If cultural systems consistently favour narratives that frame Jewish self-determination as illegitimate, what happens to those who reject that framing?
In some reported cases, individuals who express support for Israel’s existence — even alongside criticism of its policies — encounter barriers to participation, including exclusion from collaborative spaces, reduced access to platforms, or reputational costs that discourage engagement. Reports by organisations such as PEN America have documented pressures affecting participation and expression in cultural and academic contexts.5
These dynamics are not centrally coordinated. They arise from the interaction between frameworks and institutional incentives.
But their effects are structural.
Where inclusion is conditioned on adopting a particular stance toward Jewish sovereignty, the pattern identified in Part 1 reappears — not as explicit prohibition, but as cultural constraint.
The question, as throughout this series, is not intent. It is outcome.
5. Popular Culture: Diffusion Beyond Argument
Where institutions select, popular culture saturates.
Television, film, music, and celebrity discourse do not operate through formal argument. They operate through familiarity, identification, and repetition.
Ideas embedded in these forms are rarely encountered as claims to be evaluated. They are absorbed as assumptions. Cultural theory, including the work of Stuart Hall, has emphasised how meaning is encoded and reproduced through media systems.6
This is where cultural transmission differs most clearly from political or academic discourse.
Arguments persuade. Culture normalises. And what is normalised no longer appears controversial.
6. New Zealand Context: Culture and Public Discourse
In New Zealand, these dynamics can be observed across media framing of international conflict, university environments, and arts funding and cultural programming. Each reflects the same underlying condition: a high degree of exposure to global narratives combined with limited local counterweight.
New Zealand’s position as a small, globally connected democracy makes it particularly receptive to international frameworks. Cultural and media ecosystems draw heavily on external sources, while local debate often reflects globalised narratives.
The question for New Zealand is therefore practical: whether its cultural and public institutions maintain the distinction between critique and delegitimisation — or whether that distinction becomes blurred through unexamined adoption of external frameworks.
Conclusion: Culture and Responsibility
This series has traced a cumulative argument.
Antizionism was defined (Part 1), globalised (Part 2), embedded in intellectual frameworks (Part 3), amplified through digital systems (Part 4), and institutionalised within political and legal structures (Part 5).
Part 6 adds another dimension: it is normalised through culture.
The significance of this is not that it resolves the debate about Israel. It does not.
It is that it explains why certain conclusions now appear self-evident — not because they are uncontested, but because they are culturally reinforced.
If cultural systems shape what is visible, sayable, and legitimate, then they carry responsibility.
That responsibility is not to eliminate disagreement. It is to ensure that disagreement remains possible — that frameworks do not become filters through which only one conclusion can pass.
For New Zealand and other liberal democracies, this is not a theoretical concern. It is a cultural one.
To resist conclusions that are fixed in advance is not only an intellectual discipline. It is a cultural responsibility.
References
- Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).
- Robert M. Entman, “Framing: Toward Clarification of a Fractured Paradigm,” Journal of Communication 43, no. 4 (1993): 51–58.
- Martha C. Nussbaum, Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995).
- Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI), Guidelines for the International Cultural Boycott of Israel.
- PEN America, America’s Censored Classrooms (2023).
- Stuart Hall, “Encoding/Decoding,” in Culture, Media, Language (London: Routledge, 1980).
