
Elizabeth Shue's endorsement of Biden — whose arms shipments fueled Israel's genocidal campaign — in the "No Hostage Left Behind" whitewashes Hamas as sole oppressor, sidelining 75+ years of Nakba dispossession, West Bank land grabs, and Gaza's siege as collective punishment.
Hollywood actress Elisabeth Shue signed the "No Hostage Left Behind" letter praising Biden's support for Israel whilst he unequiovically backed and funded the ongoing Israeli genocide in Palestine.
TV/FILM
Elisabeth Shue, an acclaimed American actress known for roles in The Karate Kid (1984), Leaving Las Vegas (1995), and Cobra Kai (2018–2025), leveraged her platform in October 2023 to sign the "No Hostage Left Behind" open letter to President Joe Biden, thanking him for his "unshakable moral conviction, leadership, and support for the Jewish people, who have been terrorized by Hamas since the group’s founding over 35 years ago, and for the Palestinians, who have also been terrorized, oppressed, and victimized by Hamas for the last 17 years that the group has been governing Gaza."
Circulated by a coalition of Hollywood figures including Gal Gadot, Amy Schumer, and Bradley Cooper, the letter urged focus on the release of Israeli hostages taken during the October 7, 2023, Hamas-led attacks, which killed around 1,200 people, while framing the conflict as one of "freedom from the brutal violence spread by Hamas" and aspiring toward "freedom for Israelis and Palestinians to live side by side in peace."
Notably, it made no mention of Palestinian casualties, the Israeli blockade of Gaza since 2007, or the thousands of Palestinians held in Israeli prisons without charge — many enduring torture, sexual abuse, and starvation — as "administrative detainees," inverting the asymmetry of captivity.
This selective advocacy exemplifies Hollywood's broader complicity in atrocity propaganda, where endorsements of Biden's "leadership" normalize his administration's role in enabling Israel's genocidal campaign in Gaza and ethnic cleansing in the West Bank.
Since October 2023, the U.S. has provided over $17.9 billion in military aid to Israel, including bombs used in strikes on hospitals, schools, and refugee camps, facilitating the destruction of 80% of Gaza's homes, hospitals, and schools. Conservative estimates from the Gaza Health Ministry confirm over 40,000–78,000 Palestinian deaths, predominantly women and children, but due to Israel's obstruction of access, slaughter of over 180 journalists, and targeting of healthcare workers, the true toll — accounting for those under rubble, from famine, disease, and indirect causes — exceeds hundreds of thousands, as corroborated by UN experts and organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.
The letter's nominal nod to Palestinian "oppression" by Hamas erases Israel's 57 years of apartheid, the Nakba's expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians in 1948, and ongoing settler violence in the West Bank, where over 700 Palestinians, including 166 children, were killed in 2023 alone before October 7, and demolitions displaced thousands more.
Shue's signature aligns with a pattern of celebrity silence on Palestinian dehumanization, where public calls for Israeli hostages' release — valid in isolation — prioritize Jewish suffering while rendering Palestinian lives invisible, echoing Judith Butler's framework of "grievable lives."
No evidence exists of Shue issuing statements condemning Israel's actions, such as the ICJ's January 2024 provisional ruling on plausible genocide, Amnesty International's December 2024 conclusion that Israel is committing genocide through killings, displacement, and aid denial, or HRW's findings of extermination via water deprivation causing thousands of deaths.
This omission sustains consent for collective punishment, as Gaza's 2.3 million residents face famine, with 96% of water undrinkable and aid trucks blocked, while Biden vetoes UN ceasefire resolutions and affirms Israel's "right to defend itself" against a population under open-air imprisonment.
By amplifying a narrative that blames Hamas exclusively for Gaza's plight — ignoring Israel's role in electing the group via a 2006 blockade-induced election and subsequent wars — Shue contributes to the epistemic erasure of Palestinian resistance as mere "terrorism." Her silence amid global calls from over 3,300 health and social science professionals to recognize the genocide, and amid protests boycotting signatories like her, underscores how such endorsements from influential figures normalize settler-colonial violence, weaponizing selective humanitarianism to shield accountability for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
justjared.com
🔒thehill.com
🔒hollywoodreporter.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.
No Hostage Left Behind Letter:
A since deleted sensationalist open letter that relied heavily on since refuted but still actively heinous, destructive and dehumanizing lies about Palestinians having ‘beheaded over 40 babies’ among other bouts of misinformation.
The letter also only asks for the return of Israeli hostages taken by Hamas since October 7th and not the thousands of also innocent Palestinian hostage kidnapped by Israel both before and after October 7th — including hundreds of children who have been documented to have suffered assault, torture, sexual abuse, forced starvation after being imprisoned despite having no charges against them.
It also serves to completely absolve Israel of any accountability over the suffering of Palestinians by shifting the blame to Hamas, despite Israel being the active oppressor of Palestinians for decades, ethnically cleansing the population since the early 1900s and now actively committing a genocide while the entire world watches from their screens.
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.
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:
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.
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].
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