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“Waking up for a morning run can be brutal,” says Gwyneth Paltrow.
Try waking up to the sound of your apartment collapsing on top of you.
Try digging your child out of concrete with your bare hands.
Try spending years wondering whether the bodies of your family members are still buried somewhere beneath the rubble.
That is the reality for millions of Palestinians while luxury developers in Israel are busy selling penthouse views and infinity pools.
The agency behind this campaign says it aims to show “the future of luxury living in Herzliya.”
An hour down the coast from this abhorrent project, Gaza is being turned into a graveyard.
The centerpiece of this project is a pair of 51-story luxury towers overlooking Herzliya Park. They're being built by Aviv Melisron, an Israeli real estate giant that also operates a shopping mall in an illegal settlement in occupied East Jerusalem.
Herzliya, which is named after the father of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, was stolen by Zionist settlers in the 1920s, with financial backing from American Zionist organizations. Palestinian communities that had lived on the land for generations were gradually displaced as the settlement expanded.
The overseas marketing of real estate in Israel, including on land stolen from Palestinians is not new. New York City regularly hosts Israeli real estate events. Protesters regularly show up outside them.
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On June 14, another event is scheduled in London, where developers will market properties in Israeli cities alongside projects in illegal settlements deep inside the occupied West Bank.
At the very same time, Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank are attacking and displacing Palestinian families from their homes while Israeli politicians approve wave after wave of new settlement construction.
The latest announcement alone included more than 2,000 new housing units for settlers in the occupied West Bank.
Many people are calling this advertisement tone-deaf.
Tone-deaf is accidentally making a joke at the wrong moment.
Selling luxury high-rises while an entire population is being bombed, displaced, starved, and pushed off its land is something else entirely.
Call it what you want. I call it complicity.
And if there is any justice left in this world, the images of the people whose lives were destroyed while this glossy marketing campaign was being filmed will haunt every smiling celebrity and every executive involved for the rest of their lives.
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