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‘The settlers are winning now’: West Bank activists aiding Palestinians are increasingly targets themselves
DUMA, WEST BANK — For three decades, Rabbi Arik Ascherman has devoted himself largely to helping Palestinian civilians in the occupied West Bank. He heads Torat Zedek, which means Torah of Justice — a group that is out in the field trying to protect them from one of the most intensive waves of settler violence since 1967.
Judging from what he sees, hears and documents during his daily forays, things are going very badly for those in the way of Israel and its massive settlement project, which includes proliferating outposts and sheep farms that serve, he says, as staging grounds for violence against Palestinians.
“The settlers are winning now,” Ascherman says, driving past outposts southeast of Nablus that are illegal according to both international and Israeli law “Outposts are expanding and Palestinian communities are disappearing.”
Fifty-nine Palestinian communities have been displaced by settler violence since Oct. 7, 2023, with another 16 communities losing about half of their residents, according to the human rights organization B’tselem. About 170 new outposts have been established during that period, it says.
Violence is the engine of that process, with Palestinians and their property becoming exposed targets in remote Bedouin areas and increasingly around larger locales, rights groups say. According to UN figures, settler violence reached a 20-year high in March, just after the outbreak of the Iran war. This has rippled into greater risk for protective presence activists like Ascherman. Two volunteers say they were almost burned alive in their sleep on April 9 in Mukhmas village.
Activists say they feel much more frustrated and less effective because the army is now increasingly barring them from key areas they used to protect. The army says the new restrictions are necessary to prevent friction and disturbances, but activists say locking out outside advocates leaves Palestinians even more exposed to settler violence.
“In Duma there have been days the army comes looking for us. It was never like this before,” said Ascherman, who was hospitalized in June after being beaten with a rifle butt and club by settlers. “We can’t protect people. Instead of protecting people, the situation becomes that the Palestinians feel they need to hide us. Then the question is: At what point do you risk arrest?”
In the June incident, Ascherman and others carrying out protective presence in Mukhmas were attacked by a gang of six settlers, he told the Jewish Chronicle at the time, adding that two volunteers suffered broken elbows. The IDF described the incident as a “violent confrontation” involving Palestinians accompanied by Israelis and other Israeli citizens “that included stonethrowing and mutual physical assaults.”
Ascherman stresses that there have been waves of settler violence throughout his years as an activist. For decades, settlements went through a formal Israeli government approval process, even as Amnesty International and other human rights groups declared they violate international law prohibitions against an occupying power transferring its nationals into the occupied territory.
But he views the start of the Iran war as an inflection point similar to Oct. 7, which too was followed by a major surge of settler attacks. In both cases, settlers “cynically exploited” the distraction from the West Bank caused by wars to act more violently, he says.
Thirteen Palestinians have been killed during settler incursions since March 1, according to Haaretz, the latest being 29-year-old Odeh Awawdeh near Ramallah on Wednesday a day after 14-year old Aws Hamdi al-Nassan and Marzouq Abu Naim, 32, were killed, also in the Ramallah vicinity.
The UN Office for the Coordinator of Humanitarian Affairs says March saw the highest number of Palestinian injuries caused by settlers during the last 20 years. In the week between March 31 and April 6 alone, at least 23 Palestinians were injured by settlers during 47 attacks on persons and/or property, according to the office. The attacks involved arson, physical assaults, stonethrowing and vandalism, it said in a report.
“Attacks on residential areas, on villages, cities and roads are a constant threat to the lives of Palestinians,” says Ramallah-based analyst Jehad Harb, former senior researcher at the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research. The violence is not haphazard, instead serving a state goal of “ethnic cleansing” in stages, he alleges. Ascherman likewise sees the violence as part of an intensified government dispossession effort, citing what he sees as unprecedentedly tight cooperation during the last several months among settlers, the army and police.
For the perpetrators, the violence is not about claims to a specific property nor is it violence for violence’s sake. Rather, it stems from belief that God endowed the territory of the West Bank to the Jews, making them exclusive owners of all the land there, with the Palestinians seen not only as trespassers but as terrorists, according to Shabtay Bendet, formerly a prominent settler who in 1995 was one of the first permanent residents of the West Bank outpost Rehelim but years later decided to leave the fold and now gives lectures about what he sees as the need to end the occupation.
Direct causes for violence, he says, include “desire to seize more territory and drive away Palestinians, vengeance in the belief that all Palestinians are supporters of terrorism and, for a small minority, a belief that the IDF is not deterring the Palestinians.”
‘Why weren’t you here?’
Torat Zedek, one of the more prominent groups in the field, gives protection by serving as non-violent human shields during settler violence, documenting it, notifying the army, police and media, and funding fences to protect Palestinians and their property, Ascherman says. He adds that he has “too few” volunteers, with between 15 and 20 whom he calls “particularly active.”
The spiraling violence is broad in geographical scope and becoming so recurrent that it is increasingly getting coverage in mainstream Israeli media. Last month, dozens of settlers raided the Bedouin area of Khirbet Humza in the northern Jordan Valley. Settlers sexually assaulted a man in front of his family, beat girls and threatened to kill children and rape women, according to witnesses quoted by Haaretz. In one tent, six masked settlers used clubs to beat a resident and two protective presence activists, who were among six people that needed to be treated at a hospital, according to one of the activists who had been assaulted.
Qusra village, in the Nablus district, suffered three settler attacks during the week beginning March 31, according to the UN, which said settlers killed a Palestinian man there and injured eight people. The UN said settlers attacked houses, stole sheep and vandalized vehicles.
For Ascherman, an emotional turning point came even before the war, when a settler fatally shot a 19-year old Palestinian-American, Nasrallah Abu Siyam, in Mukhmas, in an incident that his family said had started with armed settlers stealing goats. Mukhmas is a place Torat Zedek tries to help, but Ascherman was elsewhere at the time. “I felt guilty that I was not there. Palestinians asked me ‘Why weren’t you here?’”
The army spokesman’s office sent a statement to the Forward stating that the army’s mission in the area “is to maintain the security of all residents of the area” while preventing terrorism and harm to Israeli citizens.
But members of the ruling Israeli government coalition are being more brazen in voicing intent to oust Palestinians. The senior Israeli minister for Judea and Samaria, Bezalel Smotrich, who also holds the finance portfolio and is head of the Religious Zionism party, told a party meeting in late February that the government should “encourage migration” of the Palestinians in the West Bank. Last year he unveiled a map showing the Palestinians would be confined in the future to six disjointed urban clusters on less than a fifth of the West Bank.
Settlers and their backers say that Palestinian attacks that are launched against Israeli targets are the main problem in Judea and Samaria, the biblical names of the West Bank area. The protective presence activists just make the situation worse, according to Moshe Solomon, a member of the Knesset from Religious Zionism.
“They work against Jews in Judea and Samaria, which is the heritage of our forefathers. They come to harm the fabric there. I’m against violence against them but their provocations can’t be allowed,” he said. Solomon said that where he used to live in the Gush Etzion bloc of settlements south of Jerusalem, “non-Jewish locals” got along with Jews until the moment when “external actors, whether Jewish or European, would arrive and cause ferment and chaos.”
‘Fire dripping like water’
The activists stress that the Palestinians bear the real cost of the mayhem and bloodshed. But they themselves — some Israelis and some international visitors, are themselves increasingly targeted.
On April 7, two volunteers were nearly burned alive on the outskirts of Mukhmas village, northeast of Jerusalem, at around 2 a.m. on a hill overlooking a chicken farm that settlers often pelt with stones, they told the Forward. Noah Benninga, 48, said he awoke to see “fire dripping like water from the ceiling,” which was made of nylon.
“I started to shout. Later we understood they had poured gasoline and lit it. There was a strong smell of gasoline. They may have poured around, but only the nylon caught fire,” he said in an interview.
“I’m not sure they knew there were Israelis inside and I don’t think they care. For them it’s all the same thing,” he added.
After he shouted for help, Palestinians rushed to put out the embers, which had not spread to nearby wood, he recalled. He attributed what he considers a narrow escape to the arsonists not having enough time to complete their job.
“More serious things have also happened there to us: burning of buildings, injuring activists. One of our women activists was beaten unconscious,” Benninga said. He called the police but they did not come, he said. He then filed a complaint, sharing with the Forward the police’s confirmation of receiving it. The Israel Police’s spokesperson’s office did not respond to questions about the incident.
Two days later, when Ascherman and this reporter visited the area, settlers in black were again descending towards the chicken farm. This time they contented themselves with a show of presence, but they have often attacked the property, Ascherman said.
Frozen zones
The army is now making it much harder for activists to reach areas that need protection, according to Ascherman. He shared with the Forward closed military zone orders applicable to protective presence personnel. With the West Bank under military occupation, the army is entitled to declare zones closed to everyone except security forces and others at the discretion of commanders. In practice they are not enforced against settlers, creating a situation where Palestinians lose their protective presence and face greater danger, activists and Palestinians say. On initial closure, those excluded are required to leave the area. If they make a return entry, they are subject to arrest.
The army, citing what it said is the need to prevent friction and disturbances, recently issued a one-year closure order for parts of Duma, effectively depriving of protective presence the tiny Bedouin community of Sheqara, which, according to Torat Zedek activists, had been intensively targeted by settlers bent on using violence to drive out the Palestinians.
When the activists had to leave, the 12 families of Sheqara, fearing for their safety, also relocated — ending up in other places in Duma or in the town of Salfit.
“The solidarity activists were prevented from being with us and without them we couldn’t stay” and face the violence alone, said Deif-Allah Arare, who had a permit to work in Israel prior to Oct. 7, 2023, and like many others in the West Bank has been without a job since. A settler’s vehicle could be seen in his former living compound on April 9, while he had moved to a tiny concrete rental apartment on the other side of Duma. “How would you feel if there is a settler in your house?” he asked. “He stole not only the house, but the entire life, there is no life now. My land is gone, my house is gone, the place of my children. They stole everything.”
“My children all the time say, we want to be in Sheqara,” he added “They destroyed our lives.”
The IDF spokesman’s office denied the army allows settlers to remain in closed zones while excluding activists “As a rule, the IDF enforces the closed zone equally against anyone who violates it. The purpose of the enforcement is to maintain order and prevent friction in the area.” it said in a written response to a query by the Forward.
Herd of Justice, a group that documents settler violence, provided the Forward with video showing settlers running through Sheqara and one of them pepper spraying activist Yael Rozmarin in the face during a March 1 confrontation that was followed by another confrontation on March 2. Rozmarin said both confrontations and others at the site previously were started by the settlers. “On March 1 the soldiers joined the attack and on March 2 they did not prevent it from continuing.” she said A settler was photographed armed with a rifle in what Herd of Justice said was the March 1 confrontation.
The IDF, in its response, did not address the events of March 1, but it said that on March 2 “forces were dispatched to the area following a report of Palestinians hurling rocks at Israeli civilians. Upon arrival, the soldiers acted to disperse both Israeli and Palestinian civilians.”
The IDF added: “There were other incidents reported, including Israeli civilians vandalizing property in Duma and Israeli civilians attacking Palestinians in the area, for which a local security coordinator was dispatched and conducted a search but found no evidence substantiating the claims.” Local security coordinators in the West Bank are local settlers who are employed by the ministry of defense.
Doron Meinrath, a retired IDF colonel turned protective presence activist, alleges that the Israeli army has no qualms about violent dispossession of Palestinians by settlers. “In general the army very much supports what the settlers are doing,” said Meinrath, who is part of the group Looking the Occupation in the Eye. He used to be director of planning in the IDF General Staff and before that a commander of troops in the West Bank.
“I don’t think the army supports the most severe forms of violence, like murder. But ongoing violence, theft, harassment and anything that makes people’s lives more hard to bear, it does support.”
In area C, the rural territory under full Israeli control that comprises most of the West Bank, “the army has no problem with harassments. The opposite is the case. It would be happy if area C was empty of Palestinians and also area B,” said Meinrath, referring to places that are under Israeli security control and Palestinian Authority civil control. That would leave Palestinians only in area A, the non-contiguous urban clusters in Smotrich’s plan.
Meinrath said his experience shows that the IDF’s attitude towards the protection activists is “very negative and hostile. If there are activists and settlers, the settlers are favored. Socially, the soldiers pal around with the settlers and in practical terms when they make a closed military zone they enforce it against the activists, not the settlers.”
The IDF spokesman’s office, in a statement sent to the Forward, declares that the military opposes settler violence. It says police, who are members of the same police force that operates inside sovereign Israeli territory, bear primary responsibility for dealing with violations of the law by Israeli citizens. But, the statement said, soldiers are required to stop violations “and if necessary to delay or detain the suspects until the police arrive.”
“In situations where soldiers fail to adhere to IDF orders, the incidents are thoroughly reviewed and disciplinary actions are implemented” the IDF statement said.
Meanwhile, Benninga, the activist who described being almost set on fire in Duma, says he will return there. ”It was the first time I experienced such a thing. Maybe it can be an educational experience for activists to help them understand what Palestinians go through all day, every day.”
The post ‘The settlers are winning now’: West Bank activists aiding Palestinians are increasingly targets themselves appeared first on The Forward.
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The Jewish friendship that let David Hockney experience ‘dangerous perfection’
Think of the British painter David Hockney, who died Thursday at 88, and you think of color. 1967’s “A Bigger Splash,” almost certainly his most famous work, is a study in blue so profound that it’s nearly synesthetic: The pool is such a saturated cool that you can feel the water lap your feet, and the sky so rich with California sunlight that your shoulders burn. When Hockney turned more toward landscapes in later years, trees came in every color of the rainbow — here a pink trunk, there a purple — and roads were streaked salmon and teal.
Which makes it stranger that one of the works of his that I find most evocative has no color at all. It’s a 1975 pen and ink drawing of the American Jewish artist R.B. Kitaj, one of Hockney’s dearest friends, sitting on a bench outside an art school in Vienna.
Kitaj, head propped in his hand, looks out toward the left side of the page. His face is the lone area of detail in a scene thrown together with brisk, expressive lines. There is a sense of place around him, but that place is in the act of disappearing. As the scene spreads to the right and lower edges of the page — the areas that would fall outside Kitaj’s line of sight — it ceases to exist. Kitaj’s bench is slatted, rounded and real, but the bench abutting it is depicted in a few brief strokes. The buildings and street are sketched with light attention within what seems to be Kitaj’s periphery line, and are nonexistent beyond it.
The picture is a study of a man in deep focus. Hockney draws Kitaj’s head — and by inference, everything within it — as real and lifelike. But beyond the scope of Kitaj’s vision — the material the world presents him, possibly to be made into art — Hockney shows his surroundings as being valuable only as perspective lines, helping to situate the subject in space.
To be caught thinking is a vulnerable experience. To have someone restore your sense of your own physical self is a shock. By sketching Kitaj in his moment of remove, Hockney gave a renowned and somewhat glamorous friendship a sense of life. And he gave a sense of life, too, to the thing that made his own art so attractive: the impression of a rare and gorgeous intensity of vision, one that could draw a viewer’s attention so completely that it seemed what was on the canvas was the only real thing on earth.
In his drawing of Kitaj, the line is blurred between his subject’s concentration and his own. Is it really that Kitaj is so immersed in the act of seeing — or that Hockney is, his gaze so rapt upon his friend as to make him able to capture, briefly, what it was like to see through Kitaj’s eyes?
From the first days of their friendship at the Royal College of Art, Hockney and Kitaj existed on two planes for one another: human and artistic. As each worked to find the right way to reflect their own humanity in their art, their concepts of both themselves and their work influenced one another. “I was painting about my Jews and my books and Hockney was just coming out of the closet, so I said paint that,” Kitaj once said. And another time: “He switched to his gay culture as I began on my Jewish culture in its first forms.”
When Kitaj married the painter Sandra Fisher in 1983 — after Hockney introduced them in the 1970s — Hockney was his best man. “Those orthodox Rabbis had never seen such a gang under the chuppa,” Hockney told 032c magazine in 2025. At that moment, he said, “life for me had reached a dangerous perfection.”
A “dangerous perfection.” What did that mean? I see a glimpse of the answer in Hockney’s drawing of Kitaj — a sense of connection so complete as to threaten the boundaries of selfhood. At Kitaj’s wedding, Hockney experienced that threat as a kind of transcendence: Look, how wonderful being alive among other people can be. The experience captured in his drawing of Kitaj is different, but related. It’s that of a kind of looking, and seeing, that briefly gives total knowledge.
That kind of completeness is one of the aims of friendship, and also of art. There will be much to miss about Hockney, an artist who was easy to love. But the rare experience of absolute immersion that his best work gave its viewers may have made, out of all he accomplished, the biggest splash.
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Aristotle, Jewish ethics and the vexing case of Graham Platner
In last Tuesday’s Democratic Senate primary in Maine, nearly three quarters of voters decided that Graham Platner — Iraq War veteran, oysterman, Reddit misogynist and SS tattoo bearer — was their best hope to defeat the Republican incumbent, Susan Collins, come November. While the result was wildly cheered by his supporters, other Democrats and independents were left deeply uneasy.
There are good reasons, philosophical no less than political, for this disquiet. For some Democrats, the winning approach to the election is not necessarily one that leads to victory, but instead one that leads from virtue.
Much attention has been given to the political issues raised by Platner’s candidacy. His embrace of economic populism and excoriation of our country’s oligarchy, his denunciation of forever wars and defense of the common man were and remain compelling stances. That Platner speaks his own mind, and does so simply but rarely simplistically, rather than from a script bolted together by handlers, is clearly a plus as well.
But the matter of his character also raises a serious ethical issue not just for Platner, but also for those who voted for him this spring and plan to do so again this fall. It is less a matter of achieving a good result, than of affirming the good itself.
Moral philosophy comes in three flavors: consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics. For reasons of space, let’s focus on the first and last. As the name suggests, consequentialism focuses not on the means but instead on the ends. But this does not mean, as some think, that any end can justify any means. Instead, philosophical consequentialists argue that acts must be judged by a simple measure: seeking the greatest good at the least moral cost.
For a hypothetical example, say I have a student who is floundering in one of my classes. They are doing their best, but for various reasons their best will probably not help them avoid a failing grade. Afraid to disappoint or depress the student, I allow them to continue in the class. Consequently, the student sinks rather than swims by semester’s end. Or, instead, I can sit down with the student earlier in the semester and suggest that they withdraw today and try again a later day when they are better prepared. The result is the least cruel and most good: some suffering in the short term rather than greater suffering in the long run.
Yet, consequentialism can be complicated. Consider the election of John Fetterman to the Senate in 2022. Faced by the prospect of voting for the Republican candidate, Democrats and independents gave Fetterman the winning margin despite a stroke he suffered during the campaign, one that raised serious questions about his capacity to hold the office. For reasons that are hard to parse, Fetterman has since broken with his fellow Democrats on several vital issues.
Rather than realizing the greater good, some Pennsylvania voters may now realize their reasoning was misplaced.
This brings us to virtue ethics, which is now enjoying a second wind among moral philosophers. Inspired by Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, virtue ethicists are less concerned with actions than they are with character. As the philosopher Todd May writes in his book The Decent Life, the key question for consequentialists (and deontologists) is “How should I act?” But for those who promote virtue ethics, the question is “How should I live?”
By this, they mean what Aristotle seems to have meant: how can we live a happy or flourishing life? The answer is by living that life in accord with virtue.
Simply put, virtues are those traits of character — think bravery and constancy, sagacity and generosity—crucial to human flourishing. And to flourish as humans requires a deep disposition to see and feel, choose and respond to the world and others in ways that align with those virtues. In the words of the late Alasdair MacIntyre, the philosopher who reintroduced virtue ethics to modern readers, “The exercise of the virtues is itself a crucial component of the good life for man.”
Inevitably, just as with the other ethical theories, there are problems with virtue ethics. But there are also advantages, principally that it seeks to build character rather than build a calculus of the highest good. This brings us back to Graham Platner. What is at issue with his campaign is not just the character of the candidate, but the character of the nation we wish to realize. The unavoidable question is not whether the ends justifies the means, but whether the means justifies the end—in this case, a nation dedicated not to winning a Senate majority, but to one dedicated to reversing the waning of virtue. Even if this means giving Susan Collins 6 more years.
Modern Jewish thinkers find ties between pagan and Jewish ethics. Yonatan Brafman, who teaches at the Jewish Theological Seminary, points to fascinating parallels between the writings of Aristotle and the medieval philosopher Moses Maimonides. The latter, Brafman suggests, sought various ways to encourage the practice of generosity. “Fulfilling the commandment of matanot le-’evyonim (gifts to the poor) and even prioritizing it over other commandments both expresses and fosters the virtue of generosity,” Brafman writes. “Moreover, in Maimonides’ view, this virtue is central to human flourishing. Generosity enables an individual to achieve divine joy.”
Of course, the exercise of generosity should apply to Platner, a man who insists that he has changed. Come November, we will learn whether this is true for our nation. As for Platner, who insists he has changed, it may take much longer for all of us to know.
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What does it say that Gwyneth Paltrow is advertising luxury Israeli real estate?
What does Gwyneth Paltrow have to do with a new luxury apartment building in Tel Aviv suburb Herzliya?
Not much, it seems, judging from a new ad that dropped this week. It features Paltrow going on a morning jog in the city — New York City, that is. She wakes up, voices some pat complaints about why “mornings have to be so early” and how her “coffee needs a coffee,” before she heads to Central Park. She comes home, showers, then asks her driver to take her to 51 Park.
Her driver asks if she means New York. “Herzliya, Israel,” she clarifies, smiling into the camera, as though the black SUV can drive across the ocean.
The ad makes so little sense that my first instinct was to think that it must be some sort of AI rendition of Paltrow. But a LinkedIn post about the project, from Gabi Attal, the CEO of the ad agency Why Worry, which made it, says that they did indeed shoot the ad in real life, in New York City, and that Paltrow is the face of the ad campaign behind a luxury apartment building called 51Park in Herzliya.
51Park is the name — though seemingly not the address — of an enormous new apartment complex that does not appear to exist yet; the website for the building is written in future tense. In renderings, two 51-story glossy towers, with — depending on which part of the website you read — either 636 or 733 apartments total, shine over a park. The neighborhood, it promises, is about to become the beating heart of Herzliya, bounded by highways, the light rail and Herzliya Park.
Paltrow, who is Jewish, has hawked a lot of weird products in her time — vagina-scented candles, anyone? And in some ways, the luxury building makes sense as a product for the actress, who has often flaunted her wealthy lifestyle. But everything else about the 51Park campaign places it back into Paltrow’s stranger offerings.
First off, of course, is the simple setting of the ad, which is nowhere near the apartment building Paltrow is lending her face to.
“To bring this architectural masterpiece to the Israeli audience, we needed a figure who effortlessly embodies international elegance, a premium lifestyle and uncompromising quality,” Attal wrote in the LinkedIn post about the ad.
No one behind the ad responded to my questions about how Paltrow was selected except the director’s agent, Tal Nathan, who said that he couldn’t comment beyond saying the actress “looks absolutely fantastic.” Still, Paltrow certainly embodies a certain kind of “premium lifestyle” — her lifestyle brand, Goop (tagline: “beauty as wellness”), sells such wealth signifiers as a $425 black tank top and a $55 “sex oil,” and also partners with other luxury brands to market expensive jewelry, clothing, and wellness accessories via Paltrow’s own website as “Gwyneth’s picks.” (These include a $225 “eyelift bioremodeling peptide matrix” and a cream for “mindfulness and intuition.”)
The actress has made her name, at least since her Oscar win in 1999, by defining an ideal of minimalist, luxurious perfection — one with little care for qualities like accessibility, approachability or reality. (She had to pay a fine after Goop sold bespoke jade eggs promising questionable health benefits for one’s “yoni.”) In fact, part of her allure is her lack of those values. Her aesthetic seeks to soar above plebian concerns like pragmatism or cost. Who cares if that $491 pewter cocktail strainer requires regular polishing to maintain its silver sheen? It’s covetable. Similarly, who cares where your luxury building is, the 51Park ad seems to say; the important part is the luxury.
Still, it seems odd to market the building to Israelis via an ad filmed in New York City, in English. Sure, New York might signify wealth and luxury in the international market. But the ad doesn’t highlight the amenities 51Park actually offers, such as proximity to Herzliya Park; it shows Paltrow in a luxury apartment in New York with convenient access to a different, and more famous, park: Central Park.
Instead, it feels as though the ad is directed at Americans, selling the idea that New York City and Herzliya are the same. That’s patently absurd though — even if we were to equate Tel Aviv and NYC, which are really not very similar outside of being their respective countries’ most cosmopolitan cities, Herzliya is neither; it’s a separate, much smaller city. Which means Herzliya is, at best, Hoboken. Perhaps that’s why Paltrow didn’t even bother flying to Israel to film the ad.
Marketing an Israeli home to Americans, however, is a controversial proposition. Over the past couple of years, Israeli companies selling homes and land to Jewish Americans, often at fairs held in synagogues, have been a target for protests. Sure, Herzliya is not in the West Bank. But for an actor to wade into obvious controversy like this, especially when she has a new major project coming up — starring as Belle Burden in an adaptation of the heiress’ best-selling memoir Strangers — is a confusing choice.
The ad was reposted by viral celebrity gossip account PopBase, leading to thousands of retweets and comments accusing her of supporting, as many commenters put it, “gwynocide.” Others said it was tone deaf to market luxury apartment buildings only a few hundred miles from razed apartments in Gaza, and compared her to the Nazi wife who enjoys her garden outside Auschwitz in the Oscar-winning film The Zone of Interest.
Yet, in the ad, Paltrow seems blissfully unaware of all that, or at least doesn’t betray the slightest political statement. It’s not the first time Paltrow has been impressively out of step with public opinion — for example, saying that being a mother while working on movie sets is harder than being a “regular” working mother who is not extremely wealthy and famous, or that she would rather die than let her child eat a “Cup-a-Soup” and would rather do crack than eat cheese out of a tin.
Paltrow’s serene smile in the ad implies she can just float above the political realities tied to Israel without touching them. The idea that one can move to Israel and live a life indistinguishable from the one you once had on Park Ave in NYC, is fundamentally a political statement, of course; not everyone has that freedom of movement, whether due to financial or political realities. But Paltrow has not responded to criticism online or to journalists reaching out to ask what she meant to say with the ad. Though she voiced support for the hostages after Oct. 7, she hasn’t implied that her ad for 51Park is any kind of statement. In fact, she’s carefully avoided making one.
Instead, Paltrow — as is so often the case with the actress famed for her snobbery — has demonstrated that she is not as interested in Israel, Gaza, the war, or Judaism as she is in the disembodied ideal of luxury. As she once said, she “can’t possibly pretend to be someone who makes $25,000 a year.” The rest isn’t important; she can ignore it.
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