Like Ivanka Trump, Gwyneth Paltrow loves foreign real estate with troubled histories. She is now the face in the marketing of a wartime Israeli luxury flat. That has a shock factor of a chilli desiring curry

Gwnyneth Paltrow in an Israeli real estate commercial

We occasionally harbour the naive hope that extreme wealth and moral bearing are not like oil and water. We are, quite routinely, corrected. When one fair-haired woman of immense means and nonexistent boundaries publicly bankrupts her reputation, only for another to rush in to make a duet, it is, in financial circles, called the contagion effect. Nine days after Ivanka Trump revealed how she discovered an Albanian island and planned to develop it, Gweneth Paltrow came forth as the face of a pair of luxury flats being built in Israel. Although born nine years apart, both women share strikingly similar frequencies. They speak in that airy, low register, detailing sybaritic lives that show so many of us how their relationship with reality is purely historical. Both appearances managed to be breathtakingly shallow without ever actually touching bottom.

The commerical, shot in New York, seemingly featured Ms Paltrow as herself. She woke up in a plush, neutral-hued apartment that faced a park, New York’s very own green lungs Central Park. She roused, and still in her bed, wondering “who decided mornings should be so early”. Rising was so hard for her that “even my coffee needs a coffee.” Then it was off for her morning run, but still refused to embrace the morning: “waking up for [it] can be brutal”. We’ve seen deeper puddles in Central Park during New York’s summer drought. Virgina ‘Pepper‘ Potts got better lines than that. This is truly evocative of Ms Trump’s first contact with Sazan: “We went on a hike barefoot all the way to the top, and we were just captivated”. You see, mornings are hard, just as hills are steep. Surely you know celebrities suffer too; they have luxury credentials.

Pondering her morning run as she downs the “coffee that needs coffee”

The aggressive shallowness refuses to fade away. She finished her run, returned to her apartment, smiled conspiratorially at the doorway, disappeared and then reappeared in beige to match the ultimate sell: “There’s a reason the world’s most iconic buildings are by a park”, just as Ms Trump’s destined-to-be iconic resort is by a nature reserve. There was no attempt by either to play down how obscene the rhetoric is in its erasure. We know that Sazan is a former military base now riddled with bunkers and mines. Ms Paltrow made no reference to Herzliya as a former agricultural town turned affluent tech hub, but with a hidden military past and episodes of violence. When her car arrived just in time, she told the doorman 51 Park, and he asked her “New York?” And she replied with that absolute, unearned satisfaction so unique to the thoroughly mediocre: “Herzliya, Israel.”

All of that flaccid scaffolding primes the viewer for Manhattan park-side prestige. Then the twist came: not Park Avenue, but 51 Park in Herzliya. The pun between ‘Park Avenue’ and ‘51 Park’ is popiah-skin‑thin. It’s not clever wordplay, but a lazy swap of proper nouns. The ad invests in a verdant New York, then discards the city without building a bridge. There’s no thematic resonance between Central Park and Herzliya Park (which the luxury flats supposedly face)—just a blunt substitution. What is uniquely repulsive is the depressing reality that Herzliya sits within an hour’s drive of Gaza, where bombardment, hunger, and displacement define daily life, not reluctant morning runs in the park. Can contested geography be seamlessly rebranded as cosmopolitan chic? There is truly deplorable blindness in morphing from vagina candles to wartime penthouses. When Gwyneth Paltrow looks at Herzliya, or when Ivanka Trump looks at Albania, they see what Jared Kushner saw in Gaza: luxury real estate. It is grotesquely dissonant when you realise that luxury has never stepped foot in Gaza—only death has. It continues to call it home.

Screen shots: popbase/Thread