The history of Israeli hasbara is commonly traced to the attempt by the Israeli government to do “damage control” in the wake of the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre facilitated in Lebanon by the Israel Defense Forces. Hasbara goes back much further, however, to Israeli attempts after 1948 to counter the Arab League economic boycott of companies doing business with the Israeli occupation (Lustick and Shils). In contrast to its earlier iterations, contemporary hasbara, while theorized and formulated quite publicly, has taken a particularly clandestine turn in an exceedingly aggressive Zionist effort to out-maneuver the powerful delegitimation campaign to which Israel has been subjected since 2005 by the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. Cinema has been a central arena for this propaganda putsch. One of the most significant because well-funded and deeply effective hasbara tactics has been the production of transnational film vehicles that are marketed and distributed as Palestinian or Arab when they have in fact been conceived by Israelis and paid for, increasingly surreptitiously, by Zionist foundations and/or the Israeli state. Several such films have enjoyed international recognition and acclaim, even occasionally slipping in to Palestine film festivals and solidarity screenings, with others going unrecognized as rip-offs of earlier, historically and aesthetically more complex Palestinian and Arab films concerning the same topics. In the context of explicating the hasbara phenomenon, thus far minimally discussed in the extant scholarship (see Jankovic; Arouagh), my proposed paper will expose the hasbara character of a selection of nominally Palestinian and/or Arab films. The paper's analysis will enable critical interventions into the films’ ideologics, revealing their respective distortions and dissimulations of Palestinian culture, history, and politics. More importantly, this paper is a work of theory: less interested in proffering a correspondence mode of truthfulness, in the course of decipherment the paper serves as a reminder of interpretive tools from the oft-ignored annals of film, literary, and cultural theory available not only for detecting but thwarting hasbara, its aesthetic tendencies and thematic patterns, tropes, and memes. Bibliography: Arouagh, Miriyam. "Hasbara 2.0: Israel’s Public Diplomacy in the Digital Age." Middle East Critique 25.3 (2016): 1.27. Ginsberg, Terri. Visualizing the Palestinian Struggle: Towards a Critical Analytic of Palestine Solidarity Film. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Jankovic, Colleen. “'You Can't Film Here': Queer Political Fantasy and Thin Critique of Israeli Occupation in The Bubble." Canadian Review of Film Studies 22.2 (Fall 2013): 97-119.