During the “neo-liberalizing” years of the 1980s-1990s, when film scholars turned their attention to (multi)cultural studies, focus on Arab cinema remained within the well-worn confines of auteur, genre, and theme studies. The aim of this paper is to problematize that limitation by discussing Arab cinema studies’ contemporary emergence as a modality of post-Cold War area studies. In this context, the paper will propose and explore the extenuating hypothesis that Arab cinema studies is an intellectually riven phenomenon of the postmodern petrodollar economy, and that interpretations and analyses offered by and within this new, more sophisticated sub-field subsist in contestation within a crisis-ridden arena characteristic of the history of area studies. It will argue that, on the one hand, Arab cinema studies may support and benefit from petrodollar economy by advancing social, cultural, and philosophical discourses that serve to rationalize its location at the core of contemporary capitalism--and the international cinemascape; and that, on the other hand, it may challenge such ideological positions by drawing attention to their implications and critiquing their contradictions, in turn shedding anticipatory light on anti-colonial/imperialist avenues of possible inquiry. The paper will focus its gaze on the particular role of Zionism in fostering and enabling contemporary Arab cinema studies as such. This will entail not only a critique of Zionist discourse per se as it circulates within the discipline, but, furthermore, of the practices by publishing venues and higher educational institutions, located primarily in the Arab region and funded largely by Western governments and private interests, that serve to facilitate Israeli hegemony by promoting the production of Zionist discourse in new and innovative, often increasingly insidious forms. In turn the paper will foreground and discuss ways in which filmmakers and film scholars in Arab-world settings have called Zionism, its discursive and institutional practices, to task and have as such helped carve spaces within the Arab cinemascape that redirect interest away from traditional area studies agendas toward questioning the viability and ethicality of carbon-based education, culture, and society.