Antics or antisemitism? Pro wrestler Sami Zayn has Israeli WWE fans feeling betrayed.
Some Israelis want the pro-Palestinian wrestling superstar to be disciplined for his social media posts
Professional WWE wrestler Sami Zayn hypes up the crowd during “Monday Night Raw” at T-Mobile Arena on April 21, 2025 in Las Vegas, Nevada. (Mike Marques/WWE via Getty Images)
(JTA) — In 2021 at a viewing party for “WrestleMania,” the world’s flagship pro wrestling event, Oren Treitman and his fellow Israeli fans cheered for Sami Zayn.
In the larger WWE storyline, Zayn had taken on the persona of a conspiracy theorist, filming a documentary to prove the promotion was deliberately repressing him. But the grizzly, redheaded Syrian-Canadian Muslim suffered a double humiliation that year, losing a marquee matchup to rival Kevin Owens while also being betrayed by YouTuber Logan Paul, an ostensible ally of Zayn’s. Paul, in turn, was knocked down in the ring by Owens, who was upset over his treatment of Zayn.
Backstage, Zayn acted out the part of his conspiracy-addled character.
“None of this feels real to me right now,” he told a WWE announcer, about an apparent rival standing up for him in the ring. “None of this feels like it’s really happening.”
It was a typically over-the-top storyline from the wildly popular WWE, which specializes in these kinds of betrayals and larger-than-life personas. And the Israeli fans, like millions of others around the world, ate it up.
“As a wrestler, we think he’s one of the best,” Treitman, who hosts a Hebrew-language wrestling podcast, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency about Zayn. “He’s charismatic, he’s very lovable. As a professional, he’s probably one of the best wrestlers on the planet.”
The appearance, and many others like it, was fuel to Zayn’s growing popularity. He’s won four Intercontinental Championships with the WWE, along with a host of other prizes. Soon he would drop the conspiracist gimmick and segue from a “Heel,” a villain, to a “Face,” a heroic character — like fellow WWE alums-turned-superstars John Cena and The Rock.
But four years later, Zayn has become a heel once more, to the Israeli viewers who once admired him. His post-Oct. 7, 2023, social media output, which threads pro-Palestinian messaging both implicit and explicit for his 1.3 million follwers, has become all but impossible for them to ignore.
Some want the WWE or its parent company to take action.
“When it comes to involving his personal opinions into the product, that’s where we draw the line,” Treitman said. “When Sami started doing all this stuff I was really annoyed, and mostly just disappointed in the WWE for letting this happen.”
Treitman and other Israeli fans have exhaustively catalogued any social media posts from Zayn that seem to reference Israel, as well as anti-Israel accounts Zayn follows — especially galling, in their view, because Zayn posts under his “ring name,” which they say should be seen as an extension of his WWE brand. (His given name is Rami Sebei.)
In recent weeks Zayn has posted a photo of a Palestinian UFC fighter waving the Palestinian flag; another photo of himself wearing a sweatshirt displaying a watermelon (adopted as a symbol of the pro-Palestinian movement) with a sign reading “Free $19.48,” a reference to the slogan “Free Palestine” and the 1948 war for Israel’s independence, which Palestinians commemorate as the year of the Nakba, the term connoting their mass displacement in the war. He wears a keffiyeh in his photo on X.
According to a screenshot shared by Treitman and his team, Zayn also appeared to “like” an Instagram photo juxtaposing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with Hitler, accompanied by the caption, “History repeats it self [sic]. ZionNazi… War criminals.”
Other posts focus more on empathy for Palestinians. He has supported hunger aid charities in Gaza (in addition to a charity he founded to help Syrians), shared commentary by YouTube children’s personality Ms. Rachel expressing empathy for the children of Gaza, and tweeted the phrase “One day everyone will have always been against this,” a reference to the recently published book of the same name by journalist Omar El Akkad, a harsh critic of the Gaza war.
Of issue, too, the Israelis say, is the social media content of Zayn’s wife Khadija (currently private on Instagram). In screenshots shared with JTA, Khadija shared a message from the anti-Israel singer Kehlani reading, in part, “It’s f**k Israel from the top of my lungs.. DISMANTLE ISRAEL. ERADICATE ZIONISM.” Screenshots of Khadija’s other posts include an image of graffiti reading “Zionism Terrorism,” and an image promoting an encampment at McGill University in Montreal, where both husband and wife are from.
But it’s Zayn’s more cryptic communications that drive much of the Israeli fans’ obsessions. Like his love of the musical acts Macklemore, Propagandhi and Kneecap, all known for vociferous Israel criticism. Or a seemingly innocuous photo he uploaded to Instagram of him smiling on a city street, in which is visible, on a trash can in a small corner of the frame, a sticker reading, “Israel will murder over 60 Palestinian children. Today.” The Israeli fans are convinced Zayn posted the photo to draw attention to the sticker.
And then there was an appearance Zayn made on “WWE Raw,” a few weeks after Oct. 7, in which he offered some choice words for a rival faction called The Judgment Day.
“My entire career, my entire life, I have fought people like The Judgment Day,” Zayn announced in the ring to cheers. “People who think that all that matters is power, and as long as you’re chasing power, you can do whatever you want. You can be as ruthless as you want, as cutthroat as you want, you can rule with an iron fist, you can oppress whoever, whenever, as long as it’s in the name of power.”
He continued: “Understand, if that’s your game, my name is not Sami Zayn. My name is Rebellion. My name is Resistance.” He ended: “As long as there’s a breath of air in my body, I will fight.”
Zayn never referenced the conflict in his remarks. But online, to both Israeli and Palestinian supporters, it seemed clear he was channeling the Palestinian cause. “Very clear that this was [a] thinly veiled allegory for the plight of Palestine. Amazing promo,” one YouTube commenter wrote.
Treitman agreed, but not that it was amazing. Quite the opposite: “We knew what that promo meant,” he said.
For the Israelis, who had increasingly turned to wrestling as a means of escape from the horrors of the Hamas attacks and ongoing war, Zayn’s social media output and his remarks in the “Raw” episode were a violation of that social contract: “It’s kind of a red light above our head saying, ‘Wait a minute, where’s WWE’s control on that?’”
But the WWE has historically operated with a different set of rules from the rest of the entertainment and sports industries. Here, controversy — of any stripe — is part of the game.
Founder and former longtime CEO Vince McMahon, who has scripted himself using the n-word during a WWE event and who resigned in 2024 amid an ongoing rape and sex trafficking lawsuit, is close with President Donald Trump, who himself has made multiple appearances on “WrestleMania.” McMahon’s wife Linda, a former WWE executive who has stepped into the ring herself, is currently the U.S. Secretary of Education, charged in part with addressing campus antisemitism as she maintains shares in the WWE.
“The very idea that the WWE is somehow apolitical is complete nonsense,” said Josie Riesman, author of the WWE history book “Ringmaster: Vince McMahon and the Unmaking of America.” Riesman added, “Wrestling brings up politics all the time. It always has.”
Riesman, who is Jewish and active in pro-Palestinian causes, emphasized that she wasn’t familiar with the extent of Zayn’s social media posts or the Israeli fans’ complaints. But she noted that Hulk Hogan, who himself was caught on tape using the n-word, spoke at last year’s Republican National Convention in support of Trump. And one of the last interviews Trump participated in before the election was with The Undertaker, another retired wrestler — during which they discussed the WWE in great detail.
Beyond McMahon, wrestling has long dealt with issues of misconduct among its ranks. The “#SpeakingOut” movement in 2020, an equivalent of sorts to the“#MeToo” movement, aired accusations of sexual misconduct against several active wrestlers. Earlier this year, pro wrestler Tessa Blanchard — who is signed to a WWE competitor, TNA — entered the ring to chants accusing her of being a racist, following allegations from fellow wrestlers dating back years. Hogan himself also continues to be an active WWE presence despite his years-old recorded racist rant.
The Middle East has also historically been a part of WWE storylines, most notably during the Gulf War, when Hogan faced off against “General Adnan,” an Iraqi wrestler portrayed in the ring as right-hand man to Saddam Hussein. (The real wrestler portraying him, Adnan Al-Kaissie, was high school classmates with Hussein.) And the Iron Sheik, a caricature of an Iranian nationalist, was one of the most popular “heel” wrestlers of the 1980s.
And then there was the infamous Muhammad Hassan (in actuality played by an Italian-American), a wrestling villain in the post-9/11 era, whose allies mock-beheaded his enemies, playing on the fears of an audience traumatized by Islamic terror — many of whom might have been aware of the 2002 beheading of Jewish journalist Daniel Pearl by terrorists in Pakistan. Hassan’s character arc coincided with the 2005 London bombings, and he was written out of the WWE following the controversy.
Previous Arab-American wrestlers were polarizing. To Arab fans, Zayn feels like a breath of fresh air.
“He has no need to leverage stereotypes. No need for a one-dimensional gimmick,” the journalist Khalil AlHajal wrote of Zayn this week in the Detroit Free Press, while paying tribute to Sabu, an older Arab-American wrestler who recently died. “Zayn can just be a charismatic wrestler who happens [to] have Arab heritage.”
To that end, the WWE’s popularity has grown considerably in the Arab world, and it’s there the company has devoted considerable effort to growing its audience of late — with Zayn’s help.
He’s appeared in multiple events held in Saudi Arabia, speaking Arabic to the crowd during one such event last year. In an earlier trip to the country, posted to the WWE’s YouTube channel, he made a pilgrimage to Mecca.
But the sport has grown in Israel, too. In the 1980s, the Von Erich brothers, subjects of the recent biopic “The Iron Claw,” became massively popular in Israel. More recently, a streaming deal between the WWE and Netflix has brought another spike of interest in Israel.
That’s why these Israeli fans describe feeling disappointed by Zayn’s posts. Wrestling has its own term for maintaining the illusion of its in-ring rivalries at all times: “kayfabe.” And while the WWE has not explicitly addressed the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the ring, recently Zayn, in the view of the Israeli WWE fans, seemed to incorporate his views on Israel into his kayfabe when the wrestler appeared to flip off a fan who had unfurled an Israeli flag.
Treitman talked to the fan afterwards and insists he did not bring the flag to antagonize Zayn, but instead makes a habit of always bringing Israeli flags to international events. On Instagram, Zayn shared a photo of himself in the ring with his back turned to the flag visible behind him, complete with another cryptic caption: “hoes stay mad.”
Even before Oct. 7, Zayn had been vocal outside the ring about social justice causes, and has referenced Israel in ways that have nothing to do with his in-ring activities.
In a 2020 podcast appearance with the leftist Irish media personality Blindboy, he said he would not perform in Israel — a country where the WWE has not staged an event since 1994. (A planned WWE 2006 show in Israel was cancelled owing to the breakout of war with Hezbollah.)
“It became very popular and very easy to say, ‘Well, you shouldn’t go to this country, because they do these awful things.’ And I understand and I agree,” Zayn told Blindboy. “Like, you know, if I was asked to perform in Israel, I wouldn’t, right? But at the same time, I perform in the United States.” Laughing, he added, “I feel like I’m a part of the system that I criticize.”
The lack of institutional response has been especially galling, Treitman said, because the board of the WWE’s parent company is majority Jewish.
The chair and CEO of TKO Group Holdings, which also owns the Ultimate Fighting Championship and the bull-riding promotion PBR, is Hollywood super-agent Ari Emanuel. Other Jewish board members include Jonathan Kraft, son of New England Patriots owner and anti-antisemitism advocate Robert Kraft; entertainment executive Mark Shapiro; entertainment executive Nancy Tellem, a child of Holocaust survivors; and Brad Keywell, the billionaire co-founder of Groupon and an AI investor.
Representatives of the WWE and TKO Group did not return requests for comment or to interview Zayn. Treitman and others have hoped to push either group to discipline the wrestler for his social media posts.
Firing Zayn, the podcaster said, would be the “best case scenario.” Failing that, he said, “there have to be some kind of repercussions against this man.”
He pointed to the film, music and other cultural industries, in which celebrities have been disciplined for comments about Israel since Oct. 7 — though not always without pushback. “Wrestling can’t be the only field where this stuff is not addressed,” Treitman said.
Riesman, who theorizes that Zayn’s leftist views may in fact be hurting his WWE career by keeping the promotion from awarding him the top title, says focusing on Zayn’s social media output is the wrong approach.
“There are much more hateful, awful people in wrestling than Sami Zayn,” she said.
As for why the WWE hasn’t intervened in the wrestler’s social media output, Riesman offered, “I think he’s allowed to do it because they know that the culture war will always lead to attention. That’s what wrestling is all about, is the attention economy.”
