What Now

Last week an ad launched featuring Gwyneth Paltrow advertising for 51 Park, a luxury real estate development in Herzliya, Israel. Immediately the Internet responded with appropriate disgust at the ghoulishness of promoting high rise apartments for the ultra-wealthy only miles away from the bombed out ruins of homes and apartments in Gaza and the displacement of Palestinians from their homes by Israeli settlers. Not to mention Israeli bombing of luxury apartments in Lebanon. Arwa Mahdawi elaborates:

Deciding to advertise luxury penthouses in Israel at this particular moment is an interesting decision. Particularly when Melisron, the parent company behind 51 Park, also owns a commercial real estate project in the Israeli settlement of Ma’ale Adumim in the occupied West Bank – which was built on land inhabited by Bedouin communities, most of whom were forcibly displaced by the Israeli government. 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. More Palestinians have been killed in the last three years than in the previous 17 years combined, analysis from Oxfam has found. Masked settlers, often protected by the military, have rampaged through villages, beating women, burning property, stealing sheep, clubbing family pets, and making life for Palestinians untenable. According to the UN, over 100 West Bank villages have been fully or partially emptied between January 2023 and April 2026 and more than 7,000 Palestinians have been displaced.

“Gwynocide” is obviously not my neologism, but it’s too perfect to resist. As for the other big name in this strip, I felt it necessary to include Ben Gvir, Israel’s loathsome minister of national security. Is he the “face of Israel”? He’s certainly the face, along with Netanyahu himself, of the genocidal wrath consuming much of Israeli society and American support.