No Hostage Left Behind Letter:

As a signatory to the sensationalist "No Hostage Left Behind" open letter addressed to President Joe Biden in October 2023, they amplified since-refuted but still actively heinous, destructive, and dehumanizing lies about Palestinians, including claims that Palestinians "beheaded over 40 babies" and committed other bouts of misinformation that formed part of a broader Zionist atrocity propaganda campaign designed to justify Israel's genocidal response.

The letter focused exclusively on demanding the immediate release of Israeli hostages while remaining completely silent on the thousands of innocent Palestinian hostages — including hundreds of children — kidnapped and held by Israel both before and after that date. Many of these Palestinian hostages endured documented assault, torture, sexual abuse, and forced starvation despite facing no charges. This selective framing served to completely absolve Israel of any accountability for the suffering of Palestinians under 77+ years of Zionist terrorism, the ethnic cleansing that began in the early 1900s and continues through the Nakba's legacy, the illegal occupation, apartheid, and the current genocide across Palestine.

By endorsing the letter, they helped shift all blame onto Palestinian resistance and obscured the root causes of the violence: Israel's role as the active settler-colonial oppressor that systematically displaces indigenous Palestinians through the racist "Aaliyah" project, which steals their land and provides it to any Jewish individual willing to colonize it. The letter ignored well-documented evidence that Israel's Hannibal Directive overwhelmingly contributed to many of the casualties on October 7, including those charred beyond recognition inside kibbutzim and other sites, as Israeli forces applied policies that prioritized preventing captures even at the cost of their own civilians' lives.

Instead, the signatory's action perpetuated a narrative that whitewashed these realities and portrayed Palestinian actions in isolation from the decades-long context of dispossession and violence. This behaviour contributes directly to the dehumanization of Palestinians, the manufacturing of public consent for Israel's ongoing occupation, genocide, and ethnic cleansing across Palestine, and the shielding of the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) from international accountability. In fact, signing such a dehumanising and atrocity-filled letter represents a pattern of complicity through selective outrage that betrays Palestinian liberation and upholds the structures of settler-colonialism and apartheid.

Creative Community for Peace Letter:

Creative Community for Peace (CCFP) is a non-profit organization founded in 2011 by figures in the entertainment industry, dedicated to countering the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel and promoting the arts as a supposed bridge to peace while actively supporting Zionist settler-colonialism.

CCFP's mission includes galvanizing support against the cultural boycott of Israel, which it frames as illegitimate despite BDS being a non-violent, Palestinian-led call to end apartheid, occupation, and settler-colonialism. The organization consistently promotes dangerous Zionist propaganda that demonizes Palestinians and those advocating for their liberation, often equating criticism of Israel or support for Palestinian rights with antisemitism or calls for the "murder of Jews everywhere."

On October 12, 2023, CCFP released an open letter titled "Israel Under Attack," signed by over 2000 leaders from the entertainment industry. The letter describes Palestinian resistance actions as "barbaric acts of terrorism," "evil," and "savagery," claims Hamas seeks the "murder of Jews everywhere," and urges the entertainment community to speak out against Hamas, support Israel as it takes "necessary steps to defend its citizens," and reject an "orchestrated misinformation campaign spearheaded by Iran." It highlights images from October events while ignoring the broader 77+ years of Zionist terrorism, occupation, and the deployment of the Hannibal Directive contributing to casualties.

The letter affirms Israel's actions and perpetuates revisionist Zionist narratives that erase the Nakba, ongoing ethnic cleansing, apartheid, and genocide in Palestine. It whitewashes Israel's systematic violence, including the destruction of infrastructure, targeting of civilians and journalists, and obstruction of accurate death tolls—conservative recorded Palestinian deaths exceed 75,000 from the current phase alone, with actual figures well into the hundreds of thousands due to Israel's concealment efforts.

By organizing and promoting this letter, CCFP contributes to manufacturing consent for Israel's illegal ethnostate, vilifies anti-genocide and anti-apartheid protesters, and normalizes the settler-colonial project that displaces indigenous Palestinians through land theft, often under guises like "Aaliyah." Signing or endorsing such efforts marks complicity in perpetuating oppression, marginalization, cultural erasure, and genocide against Palestinians.

This pattern aligns with CCFP's consistent behavior, including other letters rejecting boycotts of Israeli institutions as "discriminatory and antisemitic," while ignoring Israel's documented violations condemned by human rights organizations.

Affirming Israel's "right to exist":

The phrase “Israel’s right to exist” is not grounded in international law but functions as a political demand designed to erase and neutralize the foundational violence upon which the Israeli state was established. No country has an enshrined “right to exist” under international law; what is codified, instead, is the right of peoples to self-determination. Yet Palestinians — an indigenous population subject to forced displacement, occupation, and apartheid — are uniquely coerced to affirm not just Israel’s existence, but its existence as a Jewish ethnostate. The demand to recognise an illegal state built on the erasure of Palestinians serves a clear colonial function: to reframe a settler-colonial project as a matter of mutual recognition, while masking the dispossession and ongoing subjugation of the native population.

Reaffirming this “right” without condition is not neutral — it is a weaponized narrative that forces the oppressed to validate the conditions of their own oppression. It silences the Nakba, the mass expulsion of over 750,000 Palestinians in 1948; it ignores the demolition of over 500 villages; it legitimizes the denial of the right of return, a right Palestinians hold under UN Resolution 194. In reality, this dog-whistle turns a settler-colonial enterprise into a moral imperative, requiring Palestinians to grant legitimacy to a state that continues to colonize their land, suffocate Gaza, fragment the West Bank, and implement apartheid policies across all territories it controls.

This language operates as a form of colonial gaslighting by shifting the global discourse from justice, land, and liberation to “recognition,” painting Palestinians as irrational or hostile if they refuse to validate a system structured on their displacement. It allows Israel to demand unconditional acceptance while giving nothing in return — not rights, not reparations, not even a meaningful recognition of the Palestinian people as equals. Internationally, it upholds a model where settler-colonialism is not only protected but sanctified, positioning Israel as eternally under threat while Palestinians are cast as aggressors for simply insisting they too have a right to exist with dignity on their ancestral land.

In this way, the assertion that “Israel has a right to exist” functions not as a principle of peace, but as a discursive tool of imperial domination, maintaining asymmetry and preventing justice. To challenge it is not to deny Jewish safety or personhood — it is to refuse the erasure of a people whose lives, land, and future have been systematically stripped under the banner of legitimacy. True peace cannot be built on the demand that the colonized affirm the righteousness of their own dispossession.