Mick Hartley

Oh dear. Gwyneth Paltrow has done an advert for luxury penthouses….in Israel! For Jews! From the Times:

Paltrow is backing one of Israel’s tallest residential developments, designed by the Israeli architect Avner Yashar. The complex is owned by Melisron, one of Israel’s founding real estate companies which owns property including Ma’ale Adumim, a shopping mall in a Jewish settlement in the occupied West Bank.

The advert went viral over the weekend, nicknamed “Gwynocide” for advertising luxury penthouses in Herzliya, an affluent city just north of Tel Aviv, at a time when Israel is at war.

Over the weekend, Livia Firth, the ex-wife of the British actor Colin Firth, joined the furore. “I just cancelled Gwyneth Paltrow,” she said in a video posted online.

“Making an ad for a luxury condo is as disgusting as it can be for someone [with] privilege. How detached are you from reality? You’re either so detached that you need to be cancelled, because you live in another world. Or you’re actually a really, really nasty person. Or you are stupid. Which are you, Gwyneth Paltrow?”

Which are you, Livia Firth? You sound demented.

Prepare to be shocked:

Zoe Strimpel in the Telegraph:

The response to this, at worst, perfectly legitimate piece of work by Paltrow, and at best, bold and righteous statement of unequivocal support, has been largely disgusting, as is most treatment of Israel in the cultural sphere. The woke New York media was full of sneering headlines about this seemingly unbelievable piece of borderline criminal activity from Paltrow.

Meanwhile, in Blighty, all the usual suspects are at it. “From Goop to ‘Gwynicide’,” runs a typically revolting Guardian headline, with the author primly and ludicrously stating that “Just a few miles away from 51 Park, Palestinians are being killed and displaced by settlers and the Israeli military at record levels as this land grab continues.” Given that Israel is hardly bigger than Wales, you could say the whole place is just “a few miles” from Gaza. Certainly, if Herzliya is illegitimate, none of Israel is. But we already know the pro-Pal lot think that….

Paltrow’s advert couldn’t have come at a better moment, a week in which Helen Mirren, formerly considered an ally, gave in to the mob and accused Israel of perpetrating a Holocaust on Palestinians – an accusation defined as anti-Semitic by the IHRA (Holocaust Remembrance) definition. Having played Golda Meir in the 2023 film Golda, about the Yom Kippur war, how, we reasoned, could Mirren not now feel in her bones the case for Israel in a world of haters? How indeed.

But there she was at the Taormina film festival last week, reflecting on being called a “Zionist b—” on the streets of east London last year. Instead of rebuffing the assumptions of the harangue, she said: “How could you possibly repeat the actions of what was done to you as people to other people?”

I wasn’t aware of that. What a disppointment from Mirren.