{"id":731975,"date":"2026-06-12T14:07:09","date_gmt":"2026-06-12T14:07:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/731975\/"},"modified":"2026-06-12T14:07:09","modified_gmt":"2026-06-12T14:07:09","slug":"from-goop-to-gwynocide-why-is-gwyneth-paltrow-starring-in-a-luxury-israeli-real-estate-ad-arwa-mahdawi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/731975\/","title":{"rendered":"From Goop to \u2018Gwynocide\u2019: why is Gwyneth Paltrow starring in a luxury Israeli real estate ad? | Arwa Mahdawi"},"content":{"rendered":"

Gwyneth Paltrow has built a wellness empire by encouraging people to put questionable things in their mouths and up their orifices. Over the years the Goop founder has promoted parasite-busting goat milk<\/a> cleanses, urged women to stick $66 jade eggs<\/a> into their vaginas, and waxed lyrical about the powerful benefits of rectal ozone therapy<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Now, however, it seems that Paltrow\u2019s brand is pivoting from colon cleansing to ethnic cleansing. The actor and businessperson went viral<\/a> this week for promoting a luxury real estate development in Israel. Paltrow, who has been nicknamed<\/a> \u201cGwynocide\u201d, stars in a new commercial and marketing materials for 51 Park<\/a>, two 51-story towers in Herzliya, just north of Tel Aviv. (The ad was filmed in New York.) The towers boast a swimming pool, a pilates pool, a wine room and gym, among other luxuries. It\u2019s unclear how much they cost, but similar<\/a> apartments in the area have gone for millions.<\/p>\n

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<\/a> in the Israeli settlement of Ma\u2019ale Adumim<\/a> in the occupied West Bank \u2013 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<\/a> has found. Masked settlers<\/a>, often protected by the military, have rampaged through villages, beating women<\/a>, burning property, stealing sheep, clubbing<\/a> family pets, and making life for Palestinians untenable. According to the UN, over 100 West Bank villages<\/a> have been fully or partially emptied between January 2023 and April 2026 and more than 7,000 Palestinians have been displaced.<\/p>\n

Western politicians \u2013 and large swathes of the media \u2013 like to characterize the settlers as rogue actors. However, as various rights groups have made clear<\/a>, settlers are working in tandem with the Israeli government to forcibly displace Palestinians so that more luxury real estate for Israelis can be built. On Wednesday, in a detailed 149-page report<\/a>, Amnesty International accused the Israeli government of carrying out a campaign of \u201cstate-sanctioned, state-driven and state-implemented\u201d ethnic cleansing in the occupied West Bank. \u201cSettler violence is not an aberration but an integral part of an organized state policy,\u201d they note<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I want to make very clear here that Amnesty International does not use the term \u201cethnic cleansing\u201d lightly. It states that while the term is \u201cnot recognized as an independent crime under international law\u201d, it is using it \u201cin line with the UN Commission of Experts on Former Yugoslavia\u2019s definition\u201d, which describes it as \u201ca purposeful policy designed by one ethnic or religious group to remove by violent and terror-inspiring means the civilian population of another ethnic or religious group from certain geographic areas\u201d.<\/p>\n

While the situation in the West Bank is terrible, it\u2019s even worse in Gaza \u2013 which is only 50 or so miles away from the luxury pilates room at 51 Park. Before 7 October 2023, Gaza was already one of the most densely populated places on Earth. Now Israel controls 60% of the territory (and has said it will seize 70%)<\/a>, and the population is packed even more tightly together. About 1.7 million people in Gaza are homeless and concentrated in crowded tent camps. While Paltrow advertises apartment buildings with swimming pools, there isn\u2019t a single proper toilet<\/a> in Gaza\u2019s camps and the sewage system has been decimated.<\/p>\n

Waste is not just unpleasant \u2013 it is a weapon. Crowded camps, full of rats and lice, are breeding grounds for deadly disease. Unicef USA writes that there have been<\/a> \u201cmore than 70,000 cases of rodent and ectoparasitic infestations have been reported in 2026 alone. Limited access to essential medications makes it difficult to respond to all cases.\u201d Newborn babies are being gnawed on<\/a> by rats in filthy camps in Gaza, while Paltrow shows off the wine rooms of a luxury tower development down the road. It is some real The Zone of Interest stuff<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Paltrow\u2019s advert has generated intense backlash. Still, that\u2019s nothing new for her. The Goop founder has always courted controversy and doesn\u2019t mind people yelling at her on the internet, so long as it generates headlines. \u201cI can monetize those eyeballs,\u201d she pronounced during a Harvard Business School lecture about the many viral uproars that Goop has been behind. A 2018 New York Times profile<\/a> of Paltrow notes that \u201cGoop had learned to do a special kind of dark art: to corral the vitriol of the internet and the ever-present shall we call it cultural ambivalence about GP herself and turn them into cash\u201d.<\/p>\n

While Paltrow may enjoy inciting internet uproar, going viral because you\u2019ve told women to steam their vaginas is a very different proposition than going viral because you\u2019ve got everyone talking about dead babies. Paltrow isn\u2019t stupid \u2013 she\u2019s a very savvy marketer \u2013 and I presume she predicted that advertising luxury real estate in a country whose government is currently being accused of ethnic cleansing and genocide<\/a> would generate anger. Indeed, that might be why she hasn\u2019t promoted her 51 Park advert on her personal Instagram.<\/p>\n

So why do it? Why hook your brand to luxury real estate in a country that is bulldozing entire villages in Lebanon, Gaza and the West Bank? Personal sympathies, perhaps: Paltrow has expressed support<\/a> for Israel\u2019s victims of the 7 October Hamas attack but hasn\u2019t said<\/a> anything publicly about the innocent Palestinian and Lebanese civilians who have been killed by Israel. It\u2019s possible that Paltrow believes that, in the long run, nobody will really care and this whole genocide thing will blow over. \u201cWhen you\u2019re at the forefront of something that\u2019s new, people can get really reactive: \u2018This is crazy! Why are you doing this?\u2019\u201d she once said<\/a> about her scientifically dubious ideas. \u201cThen, five years later, everyone\u2019s fine with it.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s also worth noting that the Israeli development isn\u2019t the only odd thing that Paltrow has been promoting. Last week, she had the co-founder of military tech company Anduril on her podcast. While it may seem for a wellness guru to be interviewing someone who profits from death, Mother Jones noted<\/a> that the podcast \u201ccomes amid a larger rightward turn in both Silicon Valley and American wellness culture, perhaps best exemplified by the rise of Robert F Kennedy Jr\u201d.<\/p>\n

Anyway, the good news for Paltrow is that if she wants to keep advertising new buildings in Israel, she\u2019s going to have plenty of opportunities to do so. The Israeli government recently established an agency<\/a> to facilitate the \u201cvoluntary\u201d removal of the Palestinian population in Gaza so that Donald Trump\u2019s vision of a luxury riviera can be realized. Give it a few years and we might see Paltrow doing adverts for multimillion-dollar resorts built on mass graves. I can see the tagline now: \u201cPrice so good, it feels like a steal!\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Gwyneth Paltrow has built a wellness empire by encouraging people to put questionable things in their mouths and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":731976,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[64,63,447,134],"class_list":["post-731975","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/731975","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=731975"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/731975\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/731976"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=731975"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=731975"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=731975"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}