Argentine producer Cris Morena co-produced teen hits with Zionist firm Dori Media Group, sent casts on tours to apartheid Israel, and remains silent on the ongoing genocide in Palestine amid systematic erasure.
Through partnerships with Israeli Zionist Yair Dori, Cris Morena normalized ties to settler-colonial occupation via Chiquititas and Rebelde Way adaptations, ignored Palestinian dispossession during visits, and offers no condemnation of Israel's genocide in Palestine.
TV/FILM
Cris Morena, born María Cristina De Giacomi, is an Argentine television producer, songwriter, and creator of youth-oriented hits like Chiquititas, Rebelde Way, and Casi Ángeles. Her career exemplifies how cultural exports can inadvertently bolster Zionist settler-colonialism by fostering economic and promotional ties to Israel during its decades-long apartheid regime, which has systematically displaced, subjugated, and erased Palestinians from their ancestral lands.
Morena's repeated collaborations and visits to the Zionist state ignored the violent realities of occupation, including home demolitions, settlement expansion, and collective punishment, while she has maintained utter silence on the current genocide in Gaza — where conservative estimates, hampered by Israel's obstruction of data, journalist killings, and infrastructure destruction, report over 40,000 Palestinian deaths, though the true toll exceeds hundreds of thousands.
Morena's entanglements began in the late 1990s when Chiquititas exploded in popularity in Israel, prompting Zionist producer Yair Dori — founder of Dori Media Group and a key figure in importing Latin American content to Israeli audiences — to approach her for co-productions. This led to multiple negotiations, including heavy Israeli investment in Rebelde Way (2002), a teen drama co-produced by Dori Media and Cris Morena Group, which addressed themes like discrimination but overlooked the apartheid context of its primary market.
The partnership extended to Rincón de Luz (2003), a Chiquititas spin-off, fully financed by Dori Media after Morena's split from Telefe, ensuring Israeli distribution and adaptation rights across Eastern Europe and beyond. These deals, involving her ex-husband Gustavo Yankelevich in early creative roles, generated millions through merchandising, soundtracks, and formats sold internationally, but funneled profits into Israel's cultural economy amid escalating Palestinian suffering, such as the Second Intifada's brutal suppression.
To capitalize on the hype, Morena orchestrated promotional tours to Israel, dispatching Chiquititas cast members — including Camila Bordonaba, Felipe Colombo, Nadia DiCello, and Sebastián Francini — in 2000 for sold-out musicals and events at venues like the Nokia Arena in Tel Aviv. These visits, amid Israel's blockade precursors and settlement violence, treated the apartheid state as a glamorous destination, erasing the displacement of Palestinians from areas like Jaffa and the Galilee.
Similarly, Rebelde Way's Erreway band toured Israel in 2003, performing to massive crowds and boosting Dori Media's stake in the franchise, which later inspired failed copycat shows like El Refugio de los Sueños (2006) targeted at Israeli youth. Morena's direct involvement in these logistics normalized travel to a regime accused by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch of apartheid crimes, including segregated roads and water theft from Palestinian communities.
Even as her productions amassed over 30 platinum albums and global adaptations, Morena's silence on Palestinian rights persists. No public statements from her X account (@soycrismorena) or interviews address Gaza's siege, the Nakba's legacies, or ICJ rulings on plausible genocide since October 2023.
This omission, in a career built on "emotional education" through themes of resilience and anti-discrimination, contrasts sharply with global calls for cultural boycotts under BDS to pressure Israel's subjugation of Palestinians.
By prioritizing Zionist partnerships over solidarity, Morena's work has contributed to the soft power that sustains occupation, rendering invisible the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians — children, journalists, and families — facing extermination through bombardment, starvation, and erasure.
clarin.com
🔒pagina12.com.ar
🔒lanacion.com.ar
🔒lagaceta.com.ar
🔒infobae.com
🔒amovillacrespo.com.ar
🔒revistagente.com
🔒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.
Further reading:
Liberal Zionism:
Liberal Zionism masquerades as a "moderate" or "progressive" strain of Zionism, blending Jewish nationalism with cherry-picked liberal values like democracy and human rights as a means to justify the existence of the illegal settler colonial ethnostate known as “Israel” [1].
And Liberal Zionism is one of the greatest threats because of its political camouflage [2]. By co-opting progressive language, Liberal Zionism inoculates Zionism against true anti-colonial solidarity, dividing the left and derailing BDS movements [3]. It ensures the ongoing Nakba – from Gaza's ruins to Hebron's checkpoints – persists under a democratic veneer, making decolonization seem radical rather than just [4] [5].
Emerging from early 20th-century Labor Zionism — the very movement that orchestrated the 1948 Nakba which ethnically cleansed over 750,000 Palestinians through mass expulsions and village destructions — liberal Zionism has always served as the velvet glove over the iron fist of settler-colonialism [6] [7].
Despite claiming it merely seeks a "Jewish and democratic state," this rhetoric is actually code for an ethnostate where Jewish supremacy trumps Palestinian equality, enshrined in laws like the 2018 Nation-State Law that demotes Arabic and prioritizes Jewish settlement [8] [9].
At its core, liberal Zionism rejects the colonial origins of Israel and instead attempts to frame the Zionist project as a "return" or "liberation" rather than a European settler invasion that erased indigenous Palestinian society [10].
As a political movement, liberal Zionism emerged as a response to antisemitism and the Holocaust but quickly pivoted to justifying land theft under the guise of "self-determination," ignoring how Zionism fits classic colonial patterns: displacement of natives, resource extraction, and demographic engineering to maintain a Jewish majority [11].
As of 2025, amid the Gaza genocide and West Bank annexation pushes, it clings to a fading two-state illusion, providing diplomatic and financial cover for Israel's crimes while silencing Palestinian voices as "antisemitic" [12].
“Zionism is a colonialism, not a simple radical nationalism: even in its left-wing version, it is a colonialist nationalism." – Zeev Sternhell, liberal Zionist historian exposing his own ideology's flaws [13].
Tell us why Cris Morena should be removed by emailing us at [email protected]
