Actress Natalie Portman is one of Hollywood’s most recognizable stars. She has featured in some of the biggest hits of the last 25 years, playing roles such as Queen Padme Amidala in the Star Wars movies, Jane Foster in the Avengers superhero series of movies, and receiving multiple awards for her roles in Jackie and Black Swan.
Portman is also Israeli. But the website of the International Movie Database, a resource used by literally millions of users each day, instead listed her as being born in “Jerusalem, Palestine.”
Natalie Portman was born in Jerusalem, Israel. Her family left internationally-recognized Israel, not "occupied Palestine," for America when she was young.@IMDb, why is your entry on @OfficialPortman riddled with propaganda? pic.twitter.com/5K42r8Taw4
— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) March 25, 2021
Furthermore, the page described Portman’s family as having left “occupied Palestine” when Natalie was four-years-old, but in reality the land she left was internationally-recognized as Israel. The incendiary phrase “occupied Palestine” is as accurate as describing Texas as “occupied Mexico.”
Join the fight for Israel’s fair coverage in the news
IMDb is a website that runs on a model similar to that of Wikipedia. Both are powered by their readers, who are free to edit articles. While edits on Wikipedia can be instantaneous, though, edits to IMDb are submitted to IMDb’s “data editors” for checking.
As the IMDb site notes:
We often need to check your updates before we complete them. The time it takes us to do this can vary. Please see here for our current waiting times.
If your update doesn’t show up within the normal time-frame, this usually means that we have not been able to verify it or there is a problem with the submission; see this guide for more information.”
Despite an editing system being in place, edits using Portman’s entry as a platform for anti-Israel propaganda were allowed to pass. However, within hours of HonestReporting flagging the blatant misinformation on Twitter and Facebook, the page was updated to more accurately describe Portman as being born in “Jerusalem, Israel,” and as having left “Israel” for Washington, D.C., when she was young.
Featured image: Gage Skidmore via Flickr — Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-SA 2.0)
