Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, Bollywood icon, lent her star power to Netanyahu's 2018 "Shalom Bollywood" charm offensive, whitewashing Israel's apartheid regime via a viral selfie amid Palestinian dispossession, while now maintaining silence on the ongoing US-backed genocide in Gaza.
Global Bollywood ambassador Aishwarya Rai Bachchan has platformed Israeli leaders to bolster "Brand Israel" propaganda, erasing 75+ years of settler-colonial violence against Palestinians, and offered no solidarity with Gaza's besieged people amid their systematic extermination.
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Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, one of Bollywood's most prominent global ambassadors and a former Miss World, has leveraged her influence to support initiatives that normalize and whitewash Israel's settler-colonial project, including its decades-long occupation, blockade, and apartheid over Palestinian lands and peoples.
In January 2018, during Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's state visit to India, Rai Bachchan attended the Israeli government-sponsored "Shalom Bollywood" event in Mumbai, designed explicitly to entice Indian filmmakers to collaborate with Israel and improve its tarnished international image.
At this high-profile gathering, she joined a staged "Oscar-style selfie" with Netanyahu and other Bollywood figures, including Amitabh Bachchan, Abhishek Bachchan, and Karan Johar, which Netanyahu shared on Twitter to millions, captioning it as a symbol of "great friendship" between India and Israel. The event, held at a luxury hotel, featured Netanyahu praising Bollywood's reach while promoting co-productions and tourism in Israel — efforts critics identified as "art-washing" to obscure Israel's violations of international law, including the siege of Gaza and settlement expansion in the West Bank.
This participation drew sharp backlash from Palestinian rights advocates and the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement in South Asia, who condemned it as complicity in cultural propaganda that humanizes Israeli leaders while dehumanizing Palestinians under occupation.
BDS South Asia stated that such initiatives exploit Bollywood's global audience to "cover up Israel's crimes and violations of international law and Palestinian human rights," contrasting Rai Bachchan's involvement with the principled refusal of stars like Shah Rukh Khan, Salman Khan, and Aamir Khan to attend.
Filmmaker Anand Patwardhan, protesting the event, emphasized that "real India will remain the real friend of the real people of Palestine," highlighting how the gathering ignored Israel's ongoing ethnic cleansing and military assaults on Gaza.
Since the escalation of Israel's genocide in Gaza following the October 7, 2023, Palestinian resistance operation — which has claimed over hundreds and thousands of Palestinian lives — Rai Bachchan has remained entirely silent on the catastrophe.
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🔒Silence = Complicity:
For those who have passionately spoken out against other instances of genocide and massacres, yet fall silent when it comes to the suffering endured by Palestinians, their silence becomes a glaring indictment of the value placed on Palestinian lives and perpetuates a dangerous narrative that suggests Palestinian suffering is somehow less worthy of outrage, less deserving of empathy and less human than that of others.
By choosing silence in the face of Palestinian suffering, those with influential platforms inadvertently contribute to the erasure of Palestinian voices and experiences. They perpetuate a narrative of invisibility that allows the injustices inflicted upon Palestinians to continue unabated, shielded from the spotlight of global scrutiny.
Their silence sends a chilling message of complicity to the world – one that suggests Palestinian lives are expendable, their struggles inconsequential and their humanity negotiable. It emboldens perpetrators of violence and oppression, granting them impunity under the guise of indifference.
To remain silent in the face of Palestinian suffering is to betray the very essence of activism – the relentless pursuit of justice for all, without exception or equivocation. It’s a betrayal not only of the Palestinian people but of the universal principles of human dignity and equality and instead is a tacit endorsement of the dehumanization and marginalization of an entire population.
True activism demands consistency and integrity, an unwavering commitment to speaking truth to power and standing in solidarity with the marginalized and oppressed, regardless of geography or politics.
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.
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