Robert De Niro help raise $38 million for the well-being of Israeli soldiers. In 2016, several Hollywood personalities participated on Thursday in Los Angeles in a support event for the Israeli army.
An American actor. Known for his collaborations with Martin Scorsese, he is considered to be one of the most “influential” actors of his generation.
Celebrity
In 2020, De Niro's reminisced about his trips to Israel, where he formed friendships with notorious figures like Moshe Dayan and Ezer Weizman, is a blatant endorsement of Israel's apartheid policies and human rights abuses against the Palestinian people. [1]
By praising individuals like Shimon Peres, a key architect of Israel's occupation and colonization of Palestinian land, De Niro is complicit in whitewashing Israel's crimes and normalizing its illegal actions. [2] [3]
His participation in a webinar with Tel Aviv University students, facilitated by a former Israeli Consul in New York, also serves to legitimize Israel's propaganda machinery and deflect attention from its ongoing violations of international law. [4]
Back in 2013, Robert De Niro also praised Israel’s aggressiveness in a statement where he said “I always enjoy coming to Israel. Israelis are warm, they’re energetic people. Forthright. Very smart. I always like smart people. They’re nice people, you know. Aggressive, and I respect that aggressiveness because you need it in their situation.” [5] [6]
Then in 2016, several Hollywood personalities participated on Thursday in Los Angeles in a support event for the Israeli army organized by American businessman Haim Saban. Robert De Niro, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Gérard Butler, Joanna Krupa, and Larry King helped raise $38 million for the well-being of Israeli soldiers. [7]
"We are here to show the fantastic support of Hollywood and the Jewish community in the United States for the soldiers of Israel and the Israeli army," said Mr. Saban, one of the most significant donors to the Israeli army.
A highlight of the evening was Allison Barsan, a young French-Israeli soldier, speaking. In 2015, she shot two Palestinians who were allegedly "preparing to stab soldiers," although they were only throwing stones at them. "This is why I came here, to defend Israel," declared the young soldier, who joined the Mishmar Hagvoul, an elite unit at the forefront of the fight against palestinian resistance, after immigrating.
De Niro's actions are not only morally reprehensible but also contribute to the silencing of Palestinian voices and the perpetuation of injustice.
Dehumanization of Palestinians:
The systematic erasure of Palestinian history and culture is a well-documented effort that has been ongoing since the early 1900s. This erasure has taken many forms, including the destruction of physical records and infrastructure, the suppression of Palestinian voices and narratives, the appropriation of Palestinian cultural heritage and most visibly, the dehumanization of the Palestinian populace.
From the late 19th century to the mid-20th century, Palestinian records, literature, and cultural heritage faced deliberate and concerted efforts to obliterate their existence and narrative. This deliberate "archival silencing" has made reconstructing this period in Palestinian history incredibly challenging, yet the truths that remain paint a horrifying picture of the deliberate erasure and destruction of an entire population and its culture.
The dehumanization of Palestinians has been a deliberate policy, perpetuated through military operations, discriminatory laws, Israeli education and a pervasive culture that fosters prejudice. Dehumanising rhetoric, portraying Palestinians as "roaches" and "rats," lays the foundation for atrocities by stripping away their humanity in the eyes of the oppressor.
Widespread media narratives also project institutional biases ranging from depicting Palestinians solely as militants or desperate victims and erasing their normal daily life to embedding language biases around land, protests and resistance tactics. These patterns collectively indicate how public discourse within segments of Israeli society systematically dehumanize Palestinians while entrenching prejudices against them.
Supporting the IDF:
The IOF has never been a moral army, let alone the ‘most moral.’ In fact, they originate from larger terrorist groups that reigned terror in Palestine and murdered hundreds and thousands of innocent men, women and children — and continue to do so to this day.
The insidious claim that the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) represent the "most moral army in the world" is a blatant affront to the Palestinian people and an attempt to whitewash decades of human rights abuses, war crimes and the brutal suppression of Palestinian nationalism and identity.
This propagandistic myth constitutes an act of violent erasure against the immense suffering and resilience of the Palestinian people in the face of the colonial Zionist project to dispossess and displace them from their ancestral homeland. In reality, the factual record makes a mockery of this "moral army" fallacy.
The IDF and its predecessors have perpetrated horrific massacres against defenseless Palestinian villages like Deir Yassin and Al Dawayima, where women and children were raped, disembowels and burned alive. They have also repeatedly used Palestinian civilians, including children, as human shields; despite claiming it’s Hamas who do this.
Furthermore, the IOF have illegally abducted thousands of Palestinian children from their homes, tortured them and then subjected to sham military tribunals - with systemic practices of child abuse, both physical and sexual, carried out by the so-called "most moral army." Any attempt to lionize the IDF as a virtuous force is an abhorrent denial of the lived reality for Palestinians under its military occupation and colonial subjugation. It erases the ethnic cleansing of hundreds of villages in the Nakba, the wanton targeting of civilian areas under the Dahiya Doctrine, the extrajudicial executions of hostages and the myriad other well-documented atrocities and violations of international law committed by Israeli forces over decades.
Those who unquestioningly regurgitate this fallacy align themselves with the historical bloc of colonial powers who have sought to dominate, subjugate, and erase the national and human rights of indigenous peoples worldwide. They engage in the same rhetoric once used to justify settler-colonial projects like the Indian Removal Act, the wars of extermination against Native Americans, and other campaigns of ethnic cleansing and land theft prosecuted in the name of racial superiority and "civilizing" missions.
The enduring resilience, struggle, and activism of the Palestinian people against these criminal dehumanizing forces represent the highest moral ground. To condemn them while sanctifying their oppressors is a perverse obfuscation that can only be rooted in ideological discrimination. Any honest examination of the Israeli occupation's practices can only lead to the conclusion that the IDF's conduct has been a moral abomination, a stain upon human conscience that must be unanimously repudiated.
To perpetuate the odious lie of the "most moral army" mythology or to show the IOF support is to align oneself against the hard-won dignity and heroic resistance of the Palestinian people in word and deed. It is to abet injustice, turn a willfully blind eye to atrocity and act as an apologist for a ruthless and unrelenting campaign of ethnic persecution and dispossession in the name of racial supremacy.
It is, in essence, an egregious act of complicity in crimes against humanity and should be condemned as false propaganda at every turn.
Conflating Zionism with Judaism:
While the Jewish faith and cultural identity not only long predate and but have no inherent connection to the racist political ideology of Zionism, the modern Israeli regime has deliberately pursued an ethnic supremacist agenda rooted in Jewish ethno-religious identity — yet built upon the demolition of Palestinian homes, the theft of Palestinian lands and the generational uprooting, displacement and dehumanization of the Palestinian people at large.
The harrowing cost of human suffering, loss of life and deprivation of the most basic liberties and security has been unconscionable and now, Zionism represents an utterly deplorable ethnic supremacist ideology that has enabled unconscionable acts of violence, displacement and subjugation against the Palestinian people for almost a century.
Its real-world impacts have been nothing short of a calculated campaign of ethnic cleansing, cultural erasure and apartheid racism - a horrific legacy that cannot be decoupled from Zionism's founding vision of creating an exclusionary Jewish ethno-state through the denial of Palestinian self-determination and indigeneity.
The forced expulsion of over 700,000 Palestinians from their ancestral homes and villages during the Nakba, rendering millions stateless and exiled as refugees, was an act of premeditated ethnic purging. With the willful destruction of Palestinian property, demolition of homes, uprooting of ancient olive groves, and obliteration of cultural resources further demonstrating a systematic effort to erase Palestinian identity, history and any enduring claims to the land.
Subsequent decades have seen this brutal ethnic persecution, land confiscation and denial of human rights institutionalized through severely discriminatory policies, illegal settlements, violence by occupying forces, arbitrary detentions, torture, and most notably, systemic oppression under Israel's racist apartheid regime.
These are not mere "realities" for Palestinians who remain, but grave crimes against humanity perpetrated through Zionism's new brand of unrelenting, institutionalized cruelty. This utterly shameful legacy of calculated ethnic cleansing, apartheid governance and flagrant violations of international law is inextricably intertwined with how Zionism's racist, supremacist and anti-democratic ideology has been implemented on the ground by Israel.
Any attempt to decouple or whitewash these egregious atrocities from Zionism itself is a form of explicit denialism and complicity in oppression of the highest order. No ethnic, religious or any other group deserves an ethno-supremacist theocratic state constructed through the forcible subjugation of indigenous populations as second-class citizens stripped of all rights, dignity and humanity.
Such an abhorrent exclusionary system based on racial hierarchy is fundamentally incompatible with even the barest notion of true democracy, self-determination or universal human rights regardless of ethnicity or faith.
Statehood, sovereignty and self-determination can never legitimately emerge from such systematic violence, discrimination, forced displacement and ethnic persecution as political Zionism has perpetrated against the Palestinian population.
If a state were to arise organically through democratic processes that enshrine equality, safety and liberty for all citizens regardless of ethnicity or faith, it would have legitimacy. But any racist system of ethnic domination erected through brute force subjugation and calculated ethnic supremacy, as Zionism has done, is an egregious affront to justice and human rights that requires being dismantled - not enshrined - with a new equitable path forward established.
Amplified Zionist Lies:
This individual has used their voice and platform to echo and amplify egregious Zionist lies but also perpetuate the subjugation, torture, brutalisation and murder inflicted by the Israeli-occupation of Palestinian and its attempts to erase Palestinian identity, culture, heritage and statehood. [1] [2] [3] [4]
These egregious and dangerous lies MAY include but are not limited to: [5]
Spreading misinformation and hateful propaganda against Palestinians is a deplorable act of dehumanization that directly enables human rights abuses, ethnic cleansing and violence against the Palestinian people. [35] [36] [37] [38]
By employing such malicious tactics to deny Palestinian realities and whitewash war crimes, home demolitions and the systematic deprivation of human rights under military occupation, this individual has provided racist cover for 75+ years of subjugation. [39] [[40]] (https://www.un.org/unispal/document/human-rights-situation-in-opt-unohchr-23feb-2024/)
This misinformation doesn't just distort the truth, it actively endangers Palestinian lives and inflames hatred, justifies atrocities like the active genocide and obstructs any path to justice through the wilful erasure of the Palestinian lived experience. [41] [42] [43]
For more information about amplified Zionist lies, please visit:
Visited Israel or Supported 'Birthright' Trips:
By visiting Israel, individuals actively endorse and support a regime built on systemic oppression and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians through settler colonial terrorism. These visitors are complicit in legitimizing and normalizing a brutal apartheid system recognized and condemned by numerous international bodies, including the United Nations, the ICJ, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch. [1] [2] [3]
Visitors to Israel tacitly approve severe restrictions on Palestinian movement, land confiscations, home demolitions, and the devastating blockade on Gaza, which has created catastrophic humanitarian conditions. These are not mere allegations but documented realities. The apartheid system privileges Israeli settlers while subjecting Palestinians to systemic discrimination and violence, with segregated roads, military checkpoints, and a separation barrier that fragments Palestinian communities and restricts their freedom. [4] [5] [6]
Tourism economically supports the state, indirectly funding the military occupation and the infrastructure of apartheid, including illegal settlements and state violence. Without acknowledging or engaging with the Palestinian experience, visitors normalize and legitimize these oppressive practices. [7] The financial impact of tourism cannot be understated. [8] Visitors who spend money in Israel bolster the systems of oppression that deny Palestinians their basic human rights. This financial support funds the Israeli military and infrastructure supporting illegal settlements. [9]
Programs like Birthright trips further legitimize the subjugation of Palestinians by promoting a one-sided narrative that erases the realities of occupation and apartheid, falsely presenting Israel as a safe and welcoming homeland for Jews while ignoring Palestinian suffering and dispossession. [10] [11] [12]
Visitors to Israel without a critical perspective are complicit in the violence and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. They lend credibility to a regime widely condemned for its discriminatory practices and human rights violations. By choosing to visit Israel, these individuals endorse a state that systematically violates international law and human rights, contributing to the ongoing suffering and dispossession of the Palestinian people.
Further reading:
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