‘Chetanyahu?’: NBA star sucked into Gaza culture wars over workout video
A clip of Chet Holmgren shooting three-pointers set off a legion of anti-Israel activists on X
When you read the comments section. Photo by Sam Hodde/Getty Images
By Louis Keene August 21, 2025
It all started innocently enough: a video of NBA star Chet Holmgren practicing jump shots in an open gym.
Holmgren doesn’t speak in the 11-second clip, which was posted Tuesday on X but appeared to originate on Snapchat. The caption, composed in ordinary hoop parlance, was affirming.
“Chet back in the lab working on his 3 ball,” wrote Oklahoma City Thunder fan @SkyedOKC, who uploaded the video to X.
What Holmgren does in the clip — making three three-pointers in a row from the left wing — is, as these videos go, unremarkable; for Holmgren, a lanky seven-footer known for his marksmanship, it is extremely basic. Yet this video has been viewed millions of times — it had 2.8 million impressions on X as of this writing — for reasons that will be obvious to most people who watch it: On the walls behind Holmgren are a pair of Israeli flags.
what happened chetanyahu?
— fei (@fyzzi04) August 21, 2025
The reaction was fierce. “Your boy’s a Zionist?” asked one commenter. “Delete this,” wrote another. “Now it’s a hate watch,” said a third. At least a dozen comments were variants of “F— Israel.” By Wednesday night, commenters had taken their outrage to Holmgren’s X profile, where a comment calling him “Chetanyahu” had accrued more than 7,000 likes.
The “lab” where Holmgren was working out is a Jewish school in Los Angeles whose gym has become popular among NBA players, for various reasons that have nothing to do with Israel — privacy and location, mainly. Shalhevet High School, which is Orthodox and pro-Israel, has hosted many athletes with greater wattage than Holmgren, among them the LA Clippers’ James Harden and the Philadelphia 76ers’ Joel Embiid. LeBron James has been spotted a couple miles away, at Shalhevet’s Orthodox rival YULA, which also identifies as pro-Israel.
Holmgren, 23, has been working out at Shalhevet in the offseason since the summer before the 2022-23 season — that is, long before Oct. 7, 2023 — when, reporting an article about the trend of NBA players practicing at Orthodox high schools, this writer saw him there. That Holmgren has never posted about Israel or the war in Gaza, much less opined on a topic as complex and fraught and as irrelevant to his profession as Zionism, hardly matters. He has now been sucked into the vortex of Israel-Gaza discourse.
The backlash to Holmgren, apparently for not turning around and leaving the gym as soon as he saw the flags, reflects the sheer revulsion many people have to the Israeli flag as the country’s war in Gaza approaches the two-year mark. (The New York Knicks’ Isaiah Hartenstein — he’s not Jewish — is seen shooting in the same video but seems to have escaped criticism.)
For a professional athlete like Holmgren, who signed a five-year, $239 million contract extension last month, outrage over the court he’s shooting on is likely the only fallout from the war he will feel directly. For the people trolling him online, expressing that outrage might feel like their only recourse against the war, or just the safest one. And for a Jewish student who goes to that high school, it’s a reminder that the flag inside the gymnasium may mean something very different outside of it.
