Goopification of Geopolitics

Written By Rachele Gilman & Zoé Fourel

Celebrity cover for harder-to-sell power.

Gwyneth Paltrow is running through the streets of New York, jumping in a taxi, and asking the driver to take her to… Israel. She’s promoting Park51, a high-end real estate development in Herzliya. The viral video sparked backlash and spawned a new term: “Gwynocide.” You’ve seen the comments, some praising it, some condemning it. Who cares? Just another frivolous celebrity controversy. Except there’s more to the story.

The Protagonist

It’s only fair to start with the most recognisable name attached to this controversy: Gwyneth Paltrow, Hollywood royalty by birth, a nepobaby, some might say, daughter of producer-director Bruce Paltrow and Tony-winning actress Blythe Danner. She’s a well-established actress and singer, most recently appearing in the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the 2026 Oscar-nominated Marty Supreme, and formerly married to Coldplay’s Chris Martin, with whom she has two children.

Over the past two decades, Paltrow built a second career with Goop, the lifestyle brand that promises to “help women in the pursuit of always becoming — curious, expansive, and unapologetically themselves.” Goop is a cultural phenomenon chronicled in the six-part Netflix documentary The Goop Lab, and a magnet for scrutiny: researchers repeatedly flag the pseudoscience behind many of its products, most infamously a candle that allegedly smells like Paltrow’s vagina (it sold out, in case you were wondering).

Controversy isn’t incidental to Paltrow’s brand; it’s the business model. She once claimed she could “monetise eyeballs,” and leans into controversy rather than avoiding it. Her 2023 ski-collision trial, broadcast live and endlessly memed, sent Goop searches up 195% mid-lawsuit; Paltrow didn’t start that circus, but she turned it into a runway for the brand’s quiet-luxury aesthetic. She pulled the same move as Astronomer’s “temporary spokesperson,” tapped days after its CEO was caught in an affair with an employee on a Coldplay concert kiss-cam. Whatever you make of her output, Paltrow and her team know how to work an attention economy.

The Ad's Other Client

The company behind Paltrow’s Park51 ad is Aviv Melisron, an Israeli real estate development firm with projects across Israel and the occupied West Bank. You may, at this point, be asking the obvious question: why is an Israeli real estate firm running an English-language ad, shot in New York, to sell apartments in Israel?

Aviv Melisron's CEO, Tsahi Didi, answered in a Ynet News article, stating that "rising antisemitism worldwide" is driving a surge of foreign buyers in Israel, mostly from the US and UK. The Ynet article, titled "I stopped going to Manhattan: pressure after Mamdani's win drives Jews to buy homes in Israel," portrays New York as unsafe for Jewish people since Zohran Mamdani's election, a highly misleading narrative. Didi’s quote doesn’t say this explicitly, but the article’s message and the Paltrow ad’s framing are two sides of the same coin: Aviv Melisron is selling a commercial response to that narrative. Let’s provide some context. Since his election, a recurring cast of voices has portrayed New York as newly dangerous for Jews. This framing is closely tied to Mamdani's record on Israel and Gaza. He has repeatedly described Israel's conduct in Gaza as genocide and said during his campaign he'd honour an International Criminal Court arrest warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu. His Muslim faith has also been invoked, in ways that echo post-9/11 Islamophobic tropes about Muslim men specifically.

In July 2026, New York’s Mayor’s Office confirmed antisemitic incidents account for 55% of the city’s confirmed hate crimes, despite Jewish New Yorkers making up only 10% of the population. What the data doesn’t support is the idea that this is a new trend: antisemitic hate crimes haven’t skyrocketed in New York since Mamdani’s election, and his office is taking active steps to fight antisemitism. Antisemitism is real and serious, showing up across many countries, cities, and political contexts, not one tied to a single election result. Cardigan Collective takes it seriously as a genuine, ongoing concern; our critique targets the quality of the causal argument, not the underlying issue. 

Various actors, from state authorities to media, the private sector and influencers, have portrayed Mamdani as a threat to Jewish safety. In November 2025, Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir condemned the election of Zohran Mamdani, stating he was a “supporter of Hamas, a hater of Israel and an avowed antisemite”. Those at the forefront of portraying Mamdani as a threat to Jewish safety were often the same ones to react to and defend the Park 51 ad. New York-based influencer Lizzy Savetsky, who has a long track record of portraying Zohran Mamdani as a threat to Jewish safety in New York, reacted to the ad featuring Paltrow, conflating backlash to the ad with antisemitism.

There's no evidence that this particular message was coordinated. But there is a clear alignment in messaging, and it's worth asking who benefits from it, whether the payoff is political, financial, or social capital. Governments benefit from a stronger emigration narrative; Israeli advocacy groups and sellers benefit from a sense of urgency. None of these actors may be in contact with one another, but they are all reinforcing a viral narrative.

The Narrative It Slots Into

It's also worth situating this within a longer-running set of tensions that have little to do with New York politics. Settler expansion in the West Bank has continued for decades, drawing sustained criticism from human rights organisations and international bodies. It remains one of the more contentious and unresolved issues tied to Israeli policy. A narrative that frames emigration to Israel purely through the lens of persecuted Jewish people fleeing rising antisemitism abroad tends to leave this context out entirely, even though it shapes how many observers understand the destination itself. The same real estate, as a narrative device, shows up on a much larger scale just south of Herzliya. Israel's finance minister Bezalel Smotrich called Gaza a "real estate bonanza" and spoke of "land marketing" once demolition was complete, according to BBC reporting from September 2025. Months later, the Trump administration unveiled its own reconstruction blueprint at Davos, featuring over 100,000 housing units and 180 coastal tower blocks, with Trump describing himself as "a real estate person at heart" and adviser Jared Kushner promoting "amazing investment opportunities" to private investors, as the BBC reported in January 2026. Al Jazeera's opinion desk was blunt about the framing, running a piece headlined "Gaza is not a real estate fantasy."  But it is harder to argue that Herzliya isn’t.  The Paltrow/Herzliya ad and the Gaza plan aren't the same operation, but both flow from a moment when Israeli real estate, diaspora anxiety, and American political power are unusually entangled.  

Why Paltrow, Though

Paltrow co-founded the venture capital firm Kinship Ventures and has cultivated visible ties to Israel's tech and security sectors, including a turn fronting the launch of a Jerusalem Venture Partners (JVP) cybersecurity hub. She is allegedly set to host a private event in the Hamptons to honour OpenAI co-founder and CEO Sam Altman, in which Kinship is an investor. The clearest example of this shift is her Goop podcast episode with Trae Stephens, co-founder of Anduril, the defence-tech company building AI-directed weapons systems now in US military use, including in Iran. Paltrow opens by telling her audience they "wouldn't expect" Stephens on the show. He's introduced as an "incredible investor" and a "faith-based man." For context, Stephens is also a partner at Peter Thiel's Founders Fund, a Palantir alumnus, and someone who ran the Defense Department transition team for Trump's first administration. On the episode, Stephens describes Silicon Valley's rightward, faith-inflected turn, while situating Anduril's mission in explicitly religious moral terms.

So Goop, a lifestyle platform built on soft, therapeutic language, becomes the venue where a defence-tech founder makes his case for lethal autonomous weapons, in a register that asks nothing of the audience. Park51 is the same celebrity cover for a luxury property in Israel, marketed against the backdrop of what the UN Commission of Inquiry has found to be genocide.

Conclusion: Purplewashing underway 

Celebrity cover to make something more palatable is not an isolated incident. Kylie Jenner is the newest face of Meta's AI glasses. This product, used by pick-up artists to film women in public without their consent, is folded into a campaign that borrows a woman's star power to normalise a mass-surveillance product already facilitating gender-based violence. The through-line is not simply a woman's face on a controversial product. It is the vocabulary of female empowerment, of curiosity, expansion and unapologetic selfhood, applied to a lethal weapons system and a surveillance device. Purplewashing works because that language arrives pre-loaded with good faith, and because questioning it reads as questioning the women who speak it.

Sources: 

Rachele Gilman & Zoé Fourel
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