Gwyneth Paltrow has built a wellness empire by encouraging people to put questionable things in their mouths and up their orifices. Over the years the Goop founder has promoted parasite-busting goat milk cleanses, urged women to stick $66 jade eggs into their vaginas, and waxed lyrical about the powerful benefits of rectal ozone therapy.

Now, however, it seems that Paltrow’s brand is pivoting from colon cleansing to ethnic cleansing. The actor and businessperson went viral this week for promoting a luxury real estate development in Israel. Paltrow, who has been nicknamed “Gwynocide”, stars in a new commercial and marketing materials for 51 Park, two 51-story towers in Herzliya, just north of Tel Aviv. (The ad was filmed in New York.) The towers boast a swimming pool, a pilates pool, a wine room and gym, among other luxuries. It’s unclear how much they cost, but similar apartments in the area have gone for millions.

Deciding to advertise luxury penthouses in Israel at this particular moment is an interesting decision. Particularly when Melisron, the parent company behind 51 Park, also owns a commercial real estate project in the Israeli settlement of Ma’ale Adumim in the occupied West Bank – which was built on land inhabited by Bedouin communities, most of whom were forcibly displaced by the Israeli government. Just a few miles away from 51 Park, Palestinians are being killed and displaced by settlers and the Israeli military at record levels as this land grab continues. More Palestinians have been killed in the last three years than in the previous 17 years combined, analysis from Oxfam has found. Masked settlers, often protected by the military, have rampaged through villages, beating women, burning property, stealing sheep, clubbing family pets, and making life for Palestinians untenable. According to the UN, over 100 West Bank villages have been fully or partially emptied between January 2023 and April 2026 and more than 7,000 Palestinians have been displaced.

Western politicians – and large swathes of the media – like to characterize the settlers as rogue actors. However, as various rights groups have made clear, settlers are working in tandem with the Israeli government to forcibly displace Palestinians so that more luxury real estate for Israelis can be built. On Wednesday, in a detailed 149-page report, Amnesty International accused the Israeli government of carrying out a campaign of “state-sanctioned, state-driven and state-implemented” ethnic cleansing in the occupied West Bank. “Settler violence is not an aberration but an integral part of an organized state policy,” they note.

I want to make very clear here that Amnesty International does not use the term “ethnic cleansing” lightly. It states that while the term is “not recognized as an independent crime under international law”, it is using it “in line with the UN Commission of Experts on Former Yugoslavia’s definition”, which describes it as “a purposeful policy designed by one ethnic or religious group to remove by violent and terror-inspiring means the civilian population of another ethnic or religious group from certain geographic areas”.

While the situation in the West Bank is terrible, it’s even worse in Gaza – which is only 50 or so miles away from the luxury pilates room at 51 Park. Before 7 October 2023, Gaza was already one of the most densely populated places on Earth. Now Israel controls 60% of the territory (and has said it will seize 70%), and the population is packed even more tightly together. About 1.7 million people in Gaza are homeless and concentrated in crowded tent camps. While Paltrow advertises apartment buildings with swimming pools, there isn’t a single proper toilet in Gaza’s camps and the sewage system has been decimated.

Waste is not just unpleasant – it is a weapon. Crowded camps, full of rats and lice, are breeding grounds for deadly disease. Unicef USA writes that there have been “more than 70,000 cases of rodent and ectoparasitic infestations have been reported in 2026 alone. Limited access to essential medications makes it difficult to respond to all cases.” Newborn babies are being gnawed on by rats in filthy camps in Gaza, while Paltrow shows off the wine rooms of a luxury tower development down the road. It is some real The Zone of Interest stuff.

Paltrow’s advert has generated intense backlash. Still, that’s nothing new for her. The Goop founder has always courted controversy and doesn’t mind people yelling at her on the internet, so long as it generates headlines. “I can monetize those eyeballs,” she pronounced during a Harvard Business School lecture about the many viral uproars that Goop has been behind. A 2018 New York Times profile of Paltrow notes that “Goop had learned to do a special kind of dark art: to corral the vitriol of the internet and the ever-present shall we call it cultural ambivalence about GP herself and turn them into cash”.

While Paltrow may enjoy inciting internet uproar, going viral because you’ve told women to steam their vaginas is a very different proposition than going viral because you’ve got everyone talking about dead babies. Paltrow isn’t stupid – she’s a very savvy marketer – and I presume she predicted that advertising luxury real estate in a country whose government is currently being accused of ethnic cleansing and genocide would generate anger. Indeed, that might be why she hasn’t promoted her 51 Park advert on her personal Instagram.

So why do it? Why hook your brand to luxury real estate in a country that is bulldozing entire villages in Lebanon, Gaza and the West Bank? Personal sympathies, perhaps: Paltrow has expressed support for Israel’s victims of the 7 October Hamas attack but hasn’t said anything publicly about the innocent Palestinian and Lebanese civilians who have been killed by Israel. It’s possible that Paltrow believes that, in the long run, nobody will really care and this whole genocide thing will blow over. “When you’re at the forefront of something that’s new, people can get really reactive: ‘This is crazy! Why are you doing this?’” she once said about her scientifically dubious ideas. “Then, five years later, everyone’s fine with it.”

It’s also worth noting that the Israeli development isn’t the only odd thing that Paltrow has been promoting. Last week, she had the co-founder of military tech company Anduril on her podcast. While it may seem for a wellness guru to be interviewing someone who profits from death, Mother Jones noted that the podcast “comes amid a larger rightward turn in both Silicon Valley and American wellness culture, perhaps best exemplified by the rise of Robert F Kennedy Jr”.

Anyway, the good news for Paltrow is that if she wants to keep advertising new buildings in Israel, she’s going to have plenty of opportunities to do so. The Israeli government recently established an agency to facilitate the “voluntary” removal of the Palestinian population in Gaza so that Donald Trump’s vision of a luxury riviera can be realized. Give it a few years and we might see Paltrow doing adverts for multimillion-dollar resorts built on mass graves. I can see the tagline now: “Price so good, it feels like a steal!”