 On a previous show, we talked about how the Palestinian American supermodel Bella Hadid was smeared by the state of Israel for supporting Palestinian rights. Well, it's happened again. Only now, Bella is joined by her sister, Gigi, and the pop star, Dua Lipa. All have recently made Instagram posts supportive of the Palestinian cause and all appeared in this full page advert in the New York Times. So in this advert, there's a full page spread in the New York Times. So you can see Bella, Gigi, and Dua, and they are superimposed over an image of Hamas rockets. And the text says, Hamas calls for a second holocaust, condemn them now. Then on the right, you can see it is quoting some anti-Semitic lines from the Hamas Charter. So it's saying because they've supported the Palestinian cause, they now have to condemn Hamas. None of them, by the way, have ever said anything supportive of Hamas. Never. What they have said is being supported the Palestinian cause and now they're being smeared as supporters of Hamas who have a responsibility to condemn them. And not only this, you know, this isn't just a reply guy on Twitter. This is a full page ad in the United States paper of record from, you know, the most established newspaper in the world. Now, the ad was placed by the World Values Network, which is run by a right-wing American rabbi. And below the image was a lengthy bit of text. I'm a real essay there. And it includes the complaints the World Values Network have about what the women have written on social media. I'm just going to go to what I think are some of the key bits. Bella Hadid and Dewar Leeper even went so far as including the disgusting libel that Israel, a country with two million Muslim Arab citizens, is engaging in ethnic cleansing. These people are adjacent to Hamas responsible for antisemitism. And it's because they have the temerity to accuse Israel of what they call a disgusting libel and that it's engaging in ethnic cleansing. Now, what they were referencing in their Instagram posts was the expulsions, the evictions in Sheikh Jarrah. Now, these expulsions are kicking out people from their homes who are Palestinian and they're moving in people who are Jewish. And that's not a coincidence. That's how the law works. If you're a Jewish person, then you can say, oh, before 1948, we held this claim to this bit of land and we can essentially override anyone who currently lives there and kick them out. The same law doesn't apply for Palestinians. So there is a law which is allowing Jews to kick out Palestinians because they're Jews and because they're Palestinians. Now, that is kind of ethnic cleansing, isn't it? Now, their point is that it can't be ethnic cleansing because there are lots of what he says Muslim Arab citizens just the word is Palestinian citizens of Israel because not all Palestinians are Muslim. He's saying is unless you're killing everyone, it can't be ethnic cleansing. Now, that's not really how the legal definition works. So that one falls down. Another complaint. Let's go to this one. This one is more ridiculous. So this is of Bella Hadid and they write. She also maligned Israel as apartheid, even as it is the only country in world history to airlift Africans into freedom and sets the standard for multiracial coexistence. Now, the airlifting question is a reference to charter flights in 1991, which took Ethiopian Jews to Israel to escape a civil war. It's kind of cool fair play. It's somewhat overshadowed by Israel's military support for apartheid South Africa. But we don't need to look to history to fact check Bella Hadid's claim that Israel is an apartheid state. No, we just need to look to reports from human rights, watch reports from Israeli human rights organizations such as Betsalem. And they argue that because Israel has occupied a people for 54 years because it kicks people out of their homes for not being Jewish and because it controls where Palestinians can and cannot live. Then the phrase apartheid counts, right? And he's now essentially libeling Aaron saying this is ridiculous because they once airlifted people out of Ethiopia. Very terrible argument. Still, you can pay for it to be full page ad in the New York Times. One final quote I'm going to get from this advert. And this is the one that I find particularly disgusting. Bella, Gigi and Jewer should be aware that six million Jews were annihilated in the Holocaust just 75 years ago and the Hamas Genocidal Charter openly calls for the murder of Jews. Is the ongoing vilification of Jews and Israel on social media perhaps the reason we see Jews being beaten up in Times Square? It's a really horrible thing to say anyway, to say that someone standing up for Palestinian rights is essentially responsible for anti-Semitic attacks, which they have nothing to do with. But to say that in a full page ad in the world's most famous established newspaper, I think it's completely disgusting. It's completely disgusting. The New York Times allowed this ad to be placed. And I mean, the whole thing is gross. Ash, I want to bring you in on this. And particularly, I mean, I've read the text there, but obviously the thing that stands out when you originally see that advert is the call to condemn Hamas. The picture of these three celebrities in front of images of Hamas Rockets. I mean, it is really disgusting, isn't it? To say because these people have spoken out in favor of Palestinian rights and against Israeli war crimes, essentially, they have to condemn this organization. They have absolutely nothing to do with. So I actually think this ad works on two levels and there's a aspect of plausible deniability to the whole thing. So the first level is exactly what you described, which is setting up tenuous connections of responsibility and trying to box these three women into a point where they are implored to condemn Hamas despite having never offered words of support for Hamas in the first place. And it's trying to set up connections between expressing support for Palestinian humanity, the civil rights for Israel to abide by international law, connecting it to support of Hamas and then, of course, to anti-Semitic racist attacks on Jewish people who live in the diaspora, whether that is in Times Square or in London. All right, so that is the first level that this ad is working on. But the second, when you look at the image and the text placement, what it does is invoke the reader to condemn Gigi, Bella and Dua now, right? So when you look at the image, it makes this connection between the three women to Hamas. And it's almost in conversation with the reader saying condemn these three women now. And that's why the image, the picture is so prominent and the text is broken up the way that it is. Because grammatically, it has the first meaning you're talking about, but the instant impact and the gloss is the second meaning. So I think that one of these things that the ad is doing is that it's a tacit form of incitement. And I think that it picks on three women deliberately because it plays on these tropes of women being treacherous, of being aligned with terrorism and the jihadist force. And it's a way of inviting a particular kind of hatred and backlash, which I think is inherently gendered. There's a reason why they chose these three women for the image. There have been plenty of male celebrities who have spoken out during this period of conflict with the bombardment of Gaza. Why isn't Mark Ruffalo on there? All right, he's been a prominent and outspoken voice. Well, it's because I think having three very beautiful, very young women plays a certain role of activating, I think, quite a violent and hateful backlash. And because it's intended to be intimidating, right? So if you can evoke a violent backlash, then that's job done. Because what this ad is intending to do is to disincentivise other celebrities from speaking out, and especially other celebrities who might feel like having threats towards them seem more credible. I imagine if you're someone like Dua Lipi, you get a lot more threats than if you're someone like Mark Ruffalo, which is why the cause and effect of this ad might be how the people who placed it potentially want it to be. I think absolutely what this is is a punishment. It's not a debate of political difference, right, which is entirely legitimate to have. I'm a completely disagree with the point of view of this organisation, but it's fun to open up a conversation. You're right, this is about incitement and about intimidation and about inviting enough of a backlash that three young women in the public eye think twice about speaking out in this way again. So Dua Lipi, this was a post she put on her social media accounts. I utterly reject the false and appalling allegations that were published today. This is the price you pay for defending Palestinian human rights against an Israeli government whose actions in Palestine, both Human Rights Watch and the Israeli Human Rights Group, Betsalem, accuse of persecution and discrimination. The World Values Network are shamelessly using my name to advance their ugly campaign with falsehoods and blatant misrepresentations of who I am and what I stand for. I stand in solidarity with all oppressed people and reject all forms of racism. Very strong statement, very difficult to argue with anything she said there. She could have gone further, she could have said Human Rights Watch and Betsalem say not only are they guilty of persecution and discrimination, but apartheid, but I've got no complaints. This wasn't the first time the not very convincingly named World Values Network has taken out a full page ad in a US newspaper after celebrities have come out in support of Palestinian rights. So in 2018, Lord canceled a concert in Tel Aviv and in response, the World Values Network ran this ad in the Washington Post. Now, in this ad, again, it's very visual. Here you can see Lord's face superimposed over a picture of men running through rubble, cradling babies and then the text of the ad says Lord joined a global anti-Semitic boycott of Israel, but will perform in Russia despite Putin's support for Assad's genocide in Syria on the right. Twenty one is young to become a bigot. A really horrible, horrible advert place about 21 year old because she stood in support of Human Rights of the Palestinian people together. As Ash said, a common thread you've got here is that this is attacking young women in the press. Also, what you see in those two adverts is all of the arguments used against advocates for Palestinians, you know, completely, you know, crystallized, concentrated against the Hadithis and Dua Lipa. You've got if you oppose apartheid, you support Hamas. And if you criticize Israel, you support anti-Semitism against Lord. You can't criticize the actions of Israel until you criticize every other bad thing happening in the world. And if you criticize Israel without criticizing every other bad thing happening in the world, that means you're anti-Semitic. That's the argument they put out in the Washington Post. Obviously, neither the Washington Post nor the New York Times should have allowed these adverts to happen. And I hope that, you know, Dua and the Hadithis and Lord boycott anything that those papers do in future because of what they've what they've done to them. Now, Ash, I want to bring you in on these arguments that are always used against supporters of Palestinian rights. Because as you said, I think these adverts work on a level which is to incite threats against these people. At the same time, you are seeing the same arguments they throw out against everyone. If you oppose apartheid, you support Hamas. If you criticize Israel, you support anti-Semitism. You can't criticize Israel unless you criticize every other human rights abuse that is going on in the world. It's all incredibly predictable. I do feel like this time around it's potentially not working as well as it had in the past for people who are, you know, viciously supporting the Israeli government in everything they do. Oh, yeah, the shine's coming off the apple for sure. But let's talk about some of these tactics. Obviously, the specific nature of how Israel was formed as a state and by who presents problems for when you want to talk about it as a settler colonial endeavor, which I personally believe it is, you also have to take into account the historic violent persecution and attempted extermination of the Jewish people. And so what the ideology of Zionism does is that it treats as one in the same. The belief in the humanity of Jewish people, a belief in their right to living in safety wherever it is they live and self-determination as a people, it says that those things can only be expressed in an ethno-state that is Israel, right? And so that's how you get the slippage between criticizing an ideology, the ideology of a state, its actions as a settler colonial state, and then this notion that it is anti-Semitic at all to talk about the ideology, the action and the colonial project. So that's one tactic which has been used again and again and I think is more difficult to maintain in the face of these images being broadcast around the world where we can really see what's happening. And then you've got this debate, this rhetorical flourish that you see, which is unless you speak out about X, Y and Z, whether it's the Uyghurs or Syria or Boko Haram, then you are morally inconsistent and therefore you cannot, you must not talk about Israel and Palestine. And if you do, you must be implicitly motivated by a kind of anti-Semitism and that's why you're talking about this and not other things. Now one, that's a ridiculous argument. It's a completely ridiculous argument because one, when people do speak out about these other things, often it doesn't go on a very much attention and not as much. And two, well, there is something different about the Israel and Palestine conflict and that's because we as Britain or they as America have sold millions and billions worth of weapons to this country which are now being used against the civilian occupation in maintaining the world's longest running occupation. That is what is different about this conflict. But these lines and arguments actually, they had a life before and you actually saw them being mobilized in defense of apartheid South Africa. So one of the things that was often said in response to people who are saying apartheid is a moral abomination, it is stain on our collective humanity and we must not only call it out but participate in a movement of boycott, divestment and sanctions. You've often had people go, oh well, you don't care about the human rights abuses in other African countries. So why are you singling out South Africa? Again, this is an old move, an old rhetorical gesture and it's being used once more in support of an apartheid state, the state of Israel. And I think that this is something which again is harder to maintain because you can't have it both ways. You can't have what I believe is true which is that it is anti-Semitic to align all Jewish people with the state of Israel, hold one collectively responsible for the other and say that that is anti-Semitic, that's racism and it's wrong and also at the same time say but any attempt to criticize the state of Israel, how it was founded, what it does, the continuing occupation, the projects of ethnic cleansing, the maintaining and deepening of an apartheid system within the borders of Israel itself that that is also anti-Semitic because then in order to hold that line, one, it requires you to deny the evidence before your very eyes to reject out of hand the judgment of human rights watch in Bethlehem. But two, it forces you into a position of doing an anti-Semitism yourself where you go, oh, I can't criticize Israel because that means I'm criticizing all Jewish people that I'm partaking in an act of racism against them. So I can't have it both ways and I think more and more people are beginning to see that.