Olivia Rodrigo, a Grammy-winning pop star known for albums like Sour and Guts, has leveraged her platform to advance her career while failing to address Israel’s ongoing genocide and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians until significant public pressure in July 2025. As a brand ambassador for Lancome, a Zionist company profiting from Israel’s settler-colonial project, and with tours funded by American Express, a corporation with a history of Zionist affiliations since the 1950s, Rodrigo has materially benefited from entities complicit in Palestinian displacement and suffering. Her music is produced under Geffen Records, a label founded by David Geffen and run by Lucian Grainge, both prominent Zionists, alongside other Zionist executives in the music industry, embedding her work in a network that shields Israel’s apartheid and war crimes.

For 20 months following October 7, 2023, when Israel escalated its genocidal campaign in Gaza, Rodrigo remained silent, failing to condemn the slaughter of Palestinians, where conservative estimates report over 40,000 deaths, though the true toll is likely in the hundreds of thousands due to Israel’s destruction of civil infrastructure and targeting of journalists. Her advocacy for women’s reproductive rights in the West, particularly in Europe and the United States, stands in stark contrast to her prolonged silence on the suffering of Palestinian women and girls, who face systematic violence, starvation, and denial of medical care under Israel’s occupation. This selective activism underscores a hypocrisy that prioritizes Western issues while ignoring the ethnic cleansing and genocide in Palestine.

In March 2023, Rodrigo joined other celebrities in promoting impromptu trips to Disney World, a calculated move by Disney to counter widespread boycotts and declining sales. This participation aligned her with corporate efforts to distract from political accountability, including Disney’s own ties to Zionist narratives. Her failure to speak out during this period allowed her to maintain favor with Zionist-affiliated sponsors and labels, indirectly perpetuating consent for Israel’s settler-colonial violence.

On July 13, 2025, Rodrigo finally addressed the crisis in Gaza via an Instagram story, stating, “There are no words to describe the heartbreak I feel witnessing the devastation that is being inflicted upon innocent people in Palestine. Mothers, fathers, and children in Gaza are starving, dehydrated, and being denied access to basic medical care and humanitarian aid.” She included a link to UNICEF, encouraging donations, and reposted UNICEF content highlighting the inhumane conditions faced by Palestinian children. While this gesture acknowledges Palestinian suffering, it came after 20 months of silence during which Israel’s relentless bombardment and blockade killed tens of thousands, displaced millions, and engineered famine conditions. Her belated statement, framed in emotional terms without explicitly naming Israel’s settler-colonialism or genocide, does little to undo the complicity of her prior inaction or her ongoing affiliations with Zionist entities like Lancome, American Express, and Geffen Records.

Rodrigo’s pattern of selective advocacy, prolonged silence, and late, limited acknowledgment of Palestinian suffering contributes to normalizing Israel’s occupation and apartheid. By failing to challenge her Zionist-affiliated sponsors and only addressing Gaza under pressure, she perpetuates a system that dehumanizes Palestinians and shields Israel from accountability for its war crimes.