No, it's not some new, strange wellness hack that she promoted on Goop.
Academy Award-winning actress Gwyneth Paltrow has finally gone one step too far for the "anti-Zionist" brigade.
It was bad enough when she expressed support for the October 7 hostages with a heartfelt message to their families: “To the families of each hostage whose life was stolen, I have thought of you every day for 11 months, but today I send you my heart."
Paltrow, whose father was Jewish (which might not make her Jewish under traditional Jewish law, but under Nazi racial laws would have been enough for her to be targeted), also mourned the death of a female hostage and called out those who kept silent in a 2024 Instagram post: "Shani Louk should have turned 23 today. Instead, her life ended with her mutilated murdered body being paraded around on the back of a truck with cheering terrorists who broadcast it for the world to see. There are still 17 women being held by Hamas. Where are the feminists?"
She got backlash for those posts, but she made them in a climate when it was still, at least somewhat, acceptable to acknowledge the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust and its victims. Now, even acknowledging Israel as a legitimate country is unforgivable.
So what did Paltrow do this week to warrant a new level of online vitriol? She appeared in a commercial for 51 Park, a luxury housing project in Herzliya, Israel.
If it's not immediately clear to you what the actress's crime is here, the Jerusalem Post has a helpful roundup of the unhinged reaction to the spot:
Paltrow began to receive online hate after the commercial aired. Most accused her of supporting genocide, and many said she deserved to be beaten, and worse.
“Gwyneth Paltrow promotes $10m. penthouses in Herzliya while Gaza burns and Lebanon bleeds,” one user wrote, while another, referencing Paltrow’s phrasing in the announcement of her divorce from Coldplay front man Chris Martin, said she was “consciously uncoupled from morality.”
Another X/Twitter user wrote: “Something deeply unspeakably sinister about this thin, wealthy, white woman looking for any possible opportunity to collaborate with a state committing genocide across at least two states.”
Others criticized Paltrow’s supposed $10 million contract for the commercial. The actress, who is active on Instagram, did not post the commercial, but many of the comments on her recent posts reiterated these accusations, calling her epithets such as “Genocide Queen.”
We haven't seen such hateful comments since last month's Sesame Street social media post honoring Jewish American Heritage Month. It's hard to deny that we've now reached a point where anti-Zionism is undoubtedly “a front for the new antisemitism,” as the late Chief Rabbi of the UK, Jonathan Sacks, called it all the way back in 2016. Paltrow may not be Jewish — even though she grew up celebrating Jewish holidays — but even accepting Israel’s right to exist is enough to earn the abusive treatment that Jews throughout the West have been experiencing since October 7.
Such treatment includes being served a kosher meal labeled “Free Palestine” on an international flight to Spain. It also includes being kicked out of a spa in Barcelona for wearing a Star of David because “Zionists are not welcome.”
Related: A Primer on What Genocide Is — and Isn’t
But aren't the luxury penthouses Paltrow is promoting on stolen land, as the "Free Palestine" commenters allege? Israeli writer Hen Mazzig gives the facts in a post on Substack, even if those who chant “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” — which is the true call for genocide — won’t ever consider them:
Gwyneth Paltrow filmed an ad for an apartment tower in Herzliya, and my feed has decided she is now complicit in genocide.
But look at what the outrage actually claims. Posts with hundreds of thousands of views call the Herzliya coastline “stolen,” as if an apartment ad there were an act of dispossession. Herzliya was founded in 1924. It sits inside the Green Line, inside the 1947 partition borders, inside every peace proposal ever drafted, including the Arab Peace Initiative. There is no map of a two-state solution, drawn by anyone, on which Herzliya is Palestine.
The people calling it stolen land are answering a question they rarely answer when asked directly: which Jewish homes do you consider legitimate? If Herzliya is illegitimate, then it’s obvious that they think no Jewish homes are.
Remember the reaction to President Donald Trump calling Gaza "incredible real estate" and the administration's plan for rebuilding it, including waterfront developments and other luxury buildings? Hamas called the idea "ridiculous and absurd," and the terrorist group's apologists in the West reacted the same way. Even when the subject is rebuilding Gaza in a way that could benefit Gazans, the project is condemned if it distracts from Hamas's true agenda — not the one Tucker Carlson claims it has. The savage reactions to luxury real estate in Israel or redevelopment in Gaza confirm that the real goal of the "anti-Zionists" is wiping Israel off the map.
