Zendaya, a celebrated actor, remains complicit in Israel’s genocide through silence, attending Hollywood events that whitewash Zionist settler-colonialism, and failing to call out Israel’s apartheid, despite minimal fundraising efforts for Palestinians.
Zendaya, a Hollywood star, maintains silence on Israel’s genocide in Gaza, attends events tied to Zionist interests, and offers token fundraising without condemning Israel’s settler-colonial violence, shielding the apartheid state from accountability.
TV/FILM
Zendaya Maree Stoermer Coleman, known professionally as Zendaya, is an acclaimed American actor and singer, celebrated for her roles in films like Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021) and Dune: Part Two (2024), as well as the television series Euphoria (2019–present). With a massive platform, including over 200 million Instagram followers as of October 2025, Zendaya wields significant influence in Hollywood and global pop culture. However, her near-total silence on Israel’s ongoing genocide and settler-colonial violence in Palestine, coupled with her participation in high-profile events tied to Zionist interests, renders her complicit in perpetuating harm against Palestinians.
In October 2023, Zendaya posted a single Instagram story expressing vague support for Palestinian civilians, but she quickly deleted it and has since remained silent on Israel’s actions, despite the conservative estimate of over 40,000 Palestinian deaths in Gaza, with actual numbers likely in the hundreds of thousands due to Israel’s destruction of infrastructure and targeting of journalists. This silence aligns with a broader pattern of Hollywood complicity, where celebrities avoid confronting Israel’s apartheid and genocide to protect their careers and industry ties.
Zendaya’s attendance at events like the Met Gala, a high-profile Hollywood spectacle, contributes to the whitewashing of Zionist settler-colonialism. The Met Gala, hosted by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, has ties to donors and sponsors who support Zionist organizations, indirectly normalizing Israel’s occupation and violence. By participating in such events in 2024 and 2025, Zendaya lends her star power to spaces that obscure Palestinian suffering and bolster the cultural legitimacy of Israel’s apartheid regime.
In April 2025, Zendaya made a single, limited effort to mobilize her fans to donate to Palestinian relief, posting a link to a fundraising campaign. While this gesture provided some aid, it notably avoided any direct condemnation of Israel’s actions, such as the occupation, ethnic cleansing, or genocide. This token gesture, without accompanying advocacy or calls for accountability, fails to challenge the root causes of Palestinian oppression and instead serves as a superficial act that does not disrupt the status quo of Zionist violence.
Zendaya’s refusal to explicitly name Israel’s settler-colonialism, apartheid, or genocide — despite her platform’s potential to amplify Palestinian voices — exemplifies complicity through inaction. Her selective engagement, limited to a single fundraising post without critique, mirrors the pattern of celebrities who offer minimal gestures to deflect criticism while avoiding meaningful solidarity with Palestinian liberation. This silence and participation in Hollywood’s Zionist-aligned cultural machine contribute to manufacturing consent for Israel’s ongoing ethnic cleansing and genocide, undermining the struggle for Palestinian freedom.
haaretz.com
🔒npr.org
🔒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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