The Pitt has been winning major Emmy Awards for two years running. Set in the post-Covid era, the series does more than pay tribute to healthcare workers; it also offers a striking portrayal of the problems facing the US healthcare system. It could even be argued that, by addressing more pressing issues such as poverty, the series points towards a way out of the political impasse facing US Democrats, whose agenda has become increasingly bogged down in identity politics. On the other hand, by touching almost every issue in US society from a liberal perspective, the series turns the emergency department into a microcosm of the US.
The staff themselves simply call the Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Centre ‘the Pitt’—the pit. This pun reminds both doctors and viewers… that they are all caught up in the same predicament.
In one scene, we encounter a patient who has been subjected to a discriminatory attack; in another, a mother who initially opposes her daughter’s abortion but is later persuaded by a doctor to allow it.
It is impossible, of course, to view the series’ success independently of its dense political messaging. This analysis argues that The Pitt’s silence on Palestine and Islamophobia is not an incidental omission but a constitutive feature of the kind of liberal representation the series offers. The show’s model of inclusion is conditional: Muslims are granted a place in the emergency department—and in the American imaginary—only insofar as they demonstrate loyalty to Jewish suffering, disavow the Middle East, or embody trauma that can be comfortably contained within a Western humanitarian frame.
This is not the series’ failure alone. It reflects the institutional, economic, and ideological conditions under which American cultural production operates—conditions in which even a production committed to addressing every social ill cannot name the genocide unfolding in Gaza and cannot represent the Muslims most affected by its consequences.
To understand why this silence exists—and why it matters— requires asking a more immediate question. Would the American cultural industry be applauding the series so enthusiastically if it had also tackled the issues it chooses to leave unaddressed?
In this regard, the first question that comes to mind is this: how can a production so concerned with touching on almost every issue make not a single reference to Palestine, at a time when a genocide is being financed with US taxpayers’ money? This is particularly striking given that tensions over this very issue have reached their peak on US streets, university campuses and even election campaign trails.
The objection is predictable: that this is whataboutism, or an unreasonable expectation to place on a hospital drama. However, the series’ own production choices make that objection harder to sustain. In an interview with The Jewish Chronicle, Noah Wyle, who plays the protagonist, says that playing a Jewish lead character has become much more meaningful since 7 October. That commitment is not merely rhetorical. Wyle also signed the “Israel Under Attack” statement, in which Israel’s use of disproportionate force, attacks on densely populated residential quarters, and restrictions on humanitarian aid and food supplies in Gaza were described as “necessary.” By the time this interview was published on 12 October 2023, Israel had already killed 1,400 Palestinians, including 447 children and 248 women.
Wyle is not merely the lead actor in the series. He is also an executive producer and has written several episodes. In one of Wyle’s much-discussed scenes, we see a conversation between a Jewish woman and a Muslim nurse. The Jewish patient thanks the nurse because Muslims supported the Jewish community after the 2018 synagogue attack. Rather than an expression of a vision of a peaceful, multicultural society, this feels more like a utopia in which Muslims are promised inclusion only to the extent that they demonstrate their commitment to fighting antisemitism. Although the series addresses discrimination in various forms, it is difficult to find a direct reference to Islamophobia. While almost every identity-related issue finds a place in the series, one wonders what the family of Wadea Al-Fayoume, a six-year-old Palestinian American murdered because of his identity in Illinois on 14 October 2023, would have felt if they watched the show. They would probably have realised that there was little room in this pit for their own suffering.
Consider, for example, the only Middle Eastern character among the emergency department’s doctors – Dr Al-Hashimi, an Iranian who joins the team in the second season. She is not a displaced Palestinian whose right of return has been denied. Nor is she a practising Muslim, of whom we know there are millions in the United States, or even a secular Muslim who carries simple Islamic cultural references. Instead, she fled the Iranian Revolution. The contrast is telling. After all, Dr Robby, for instance, utters a Hebrew prayer in a moment of emotional breakdown, despite being far from religious himself. On the contrary, Al-Hashimi’s background reminds us that this American representation can accommodate a Muslim who has “left the Middle East behind”. Still, it leaves us wondering whether it can establish a similar connection with most Muslims who don’t fit this mould.
In short, Muslims in the series are granted the right to representation only insofar as they meet certain conditions, such as supporting Jews and leaving the Middle East behind. Yet the slightest reference to the genocide in Gaza, or to the surge in Islamophobia that has followed it, has no place in front of the camera in this semi-didactic production, which otherwise touches on almost every issue.
This conditional model of inclusion is not unique to ‘The Pitt’. It reflects a broader pattern in liberal cultural production in which minority characters are admitted into the national narrative on terms that affirm the existing moral order rather than challenge it. The Muslim who appears on screen must be a certain kind of Muslim: disembedded from their own religious and cultural context, sympathetic to Jewish suffering, and safely distanced from the political realities of the Middle East. The Muslim who remains attached to Palestine—or to Islam as a lived tradition—falls outside the frame of legible representation. This is not simply a matter of casting choices. It is a structural feature of a cultural industry that operates within, and is funded by, networks of institutional and philanthropic support aligned with the political consensus the series claims to interrogate. As the Al-Hashimi example demonstrates, the inclusion of an Iranian refugee who left the Middle East behind is not an accident. It is the only kind of Middle Eastern character the series can accommodate without disturbing the conditions of its own production.
This pattern is visible on screen. But it is also visible in the conditions of production—and it is there that the argument becomes hardest to dismiss. To see why, we need to look behind the camera—where a striking connection emerges. In several scenes, we are reminded of Al-Hashimi’s trauma from her experience in the Dasht-e-Barchi hospital in Afghanistan. These scenes, in turn, bring to mind the familiar trope of the white man’s burden– only this time, whiteness has been stretched flexibly enough to include an Iranian. Sepideh Moafi, who plays Dr Al-Hashimi, says that she prepared for the role with Dr Seema Jilani, who, like her character, has worked in war zones. Dr Jilani, meanwhile, is known for her humanitarian work in Gaza.
One could call it a twist of fate. Or, to put it another way, the devastating reality of the genocide unfolding throughout the filming of the series is so overwhelming that, even as the show avoids representing the genocide and the ensuing wave of Islamophobia, it cannot escape their presence in its own production process.
Would The Pitt still have been deemed worthy of the Emmy Awards if it had addressed the genocide in Gaza, to which $17.9 billion was provided in its first year – an amount equivalent to the annual health insurance premiums of nearly two million Americans – as well as the Islamophobic incidents and complaints, which reached historic levels?
But the series would have faced another problem much earlier. It is difficult to know whether the production would have faced any obstacles in working with Allegheny General Hospital had it chosen to address these issues. The hospital, which inspired the fictional one, belongs to Allegheny Health Network, whose Research Institute has a formal cooperation agreement with the Israel Innovation Authority, an Israeli government agency. The point is not that this agreement determines what appears on screen, but that Israel’s institutional ties are embedded in the very networks within which American cultural production operates.
Many applaud The Pitt for addressing important problems in American society. But perhaps Israel’s influence over US politics – and over the cultural industry expected to voice society’s problems – is wounding the American pit in ways we cannot see, far beyond the billions of dollars sent to the genocidal state.
The point here is not to demand that an American television series address Palestine. It is to recognise that a genuinely comprehensive understanding of US society—and of the cultural products that claim to represent it—requires confronting the conditions that produce such silences. The Pitt is not uniquely complicit. It is a product of networks of funding, institutional affiliation, and ideological alignment that make certain silences feel necessary, certain representations feel risky, and certain inclusions feel safe. The show’s model of conditional inclusion—the Muslim who supports Jews, the Iranian who left the Middle East behind—is not a failure of imagination. It is a rational response to the conditions under which American cultural production operates.
Yet, those conditions are not immutable. The midterm elections have been read by politicians and commentators as a sign of growing public unease with the US relationship with Israel. If that unease is genuine, it will eventually find expression in the cultural sphere. The question is not whether The Pitt should have been the first show to break the silence on Gaza. It is whether the networks that produce such shows will recognise that the silence is no longer sustainable—not because artists demand it, but because the public mood that sustains their industry is shifting beneath their feet.
The Pitt is a good show. It addresses poverty, discrimination, and the failures of the American healthcare system with sincerity and skill. But the measure of a truly comprehensive cultural production is not only what it includes. It is what it cannot bring itself to say. And on Palestine, The Pitt has little to say at all.
