While Reneé Rapp called for a "permanent ceasefire" in Gaza at GLAAD 2024, she also collaborated with Zionist producer Alexander23 — who follows doxxing account StopAntisemitism — and Israeli Omer Fedi on her album Bite Me, before becoming the face of boycott-listed L’Oréal.
Reneé Rapp, a pop artist, engages in selective solidarity with Palestinians by publicly demanding a ceasefire amid Israel's genocide yet sustains ties with Zionist collaborators and endorses complicit brands - allowing her to profit from both oppression and resistance optics.
MUSIC
Reneé Rapp, an American pop singer and actress known for her roles in Mean Girls and albums like Snow Angel (2023) and Bite Me (2025), has positioned herself as a vocal supporter of Palestinian liberation amid Israel's ongoing genocide in Gaza.
However, her actions reveal a pattern of performative allyship that milks social justice for branding while maintaining lucrative collaborations with individuals and entities complicit in Israel's settler-colonial violence and apartheid regime.
On March 14, 2024, during her acceptance speech for the Outstanding Music Artist award at the GLAAD Media Awards, Rapp declared, "I want to use this moment to call for an immediate and permanent ceasefire in Gaza," urging attendees to "amplify Palestinian voices" and donate to relief efforts.
This public stance garnered praise from pro-Palestine advocates, framing her as a rare voice in mainstream music challenging the industry's silence on the Nakba's continuation. Yet, this solidarity coexists uneasily with her professional entanglements that normalize and fund Zionist networks.
Central to these ties is her close collaboration with Alexander Glantz, known professionally as Alexander23, a singer-songwriter and producer whom Rapp has described as her "BFF" in Instagram stories and who served as executive producer and songwriter on Snow Angel, as well as opening act for her 2023 Snow Hard Feelings Tour.
Alexander23 follows @stop_antisemitism on Instagram, an account notorious for doxxing Palestinian activists, journalists, and their allies under the pretext of combating antisemitism, thereby weaponizing Jewish identity to suppress criticism of Israel's occupation and genocide.
He has also shown no public sympathy for Palestinians before or after October 7, 2023, and is openly identified as a Zionist who supports the theft of Palestinian land and the erasure of their history and culture.
By centering him in her creative output, Rapp funnels resources and visibility to someone aligned with structures that dehumanize Palestinians as inherent threats.
Similarly, her sophomore album Bite Me, released August 1, 2025, features production credits from Omer Fedi, an Israeli musician from Tel Aviv who identifies as a citizen of the settler-colonial state and has publicly expressed pro-IDF sentiments, downplaying the Gaza genocide while praising Israeli forces.
Fedi's involvement extends across multiple tracks, embedding Zionist labor into Rapp's work that reaches millions, thus normalizing Israeli complicity in the subjugation of Palestinians without any counterbalancing acknowledgment or divestment.
Then in February 2025, Rapp was announced as L'Oréal Paris's newest global ambassador, starring in campaigns like Lumi Le Glow Tint starting January 2025 — a role that promotes a corporation long targeted by the BDS movement for its "warm friendship" with Israel, including providing data on subsidiaries to evade Arab boycotts in the 1980s and ongoing investments in illegal settlements.
L'Oréal's complicity in apartheid economies directly funds the infrastructure of occupation, yet Rapp's endorsement amplifies its global reach. And in response to backlash, Rapp announced on February 5, 2025, that she would donate $100,000 from her L'Oréal earnings to Save the Children, an organization providing aid in Gaza, Congo, Sudan, and beyond.
While this gesture supports humanitarian relief in occupied Palestine, it appears calibrated for damage control, allowing her to retain the partnership while gesturing toward accountability — echoing broader celebrity tactics that prioritize brand rehabilitation over substantive divestment from genocidal systems.
Rapp's navigation of these contradictions exemplifies liberal co-optation of decolonial struggles: leveraging Palestinian suffering for personal branding as a "woke" icon, while her choices sustain the very networks of oppression.
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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.
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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