Hollywood Legend Richard Gere: ‘I have a Special Place in my Heart for Palestinians’

June 15, 2021 Blog, News
Hollywood icon Richard Gere reiterates his support to the Palestinian people. (Photo: video Grab)

Hollywood legend Richard Gere had some deeply touching words to say about Palestinians and their plight under Israel’s brutal military occupation.

The 71-year-old, whose solidarity with the Palestinian people is well-publicized, spoke about the special place Palestinians occupy in his heart and the important role of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA).

Gere’s latest comments on Palestine were tweeted by the US branch of UNRWA, as the agency faces monetary challenges to meet the needs of more than five million refugees and attacks from Israel which for decades has campaigned to defund the UN body and undermined its work.

“I have a special place in my heart for Palestinians, and what you’re going through right now is unimaginable,” Gere said while speaking about the hope, resilience of Palestinians, and the importance of UNRWA to the besieged population of Gaza.

More than half of Gaza’s two million population are refugees who were ethnically cleansed from territories in Israel. They are heavily dependent on UNRWA for basic needs including health, housing, and education.

Gere’s comments came as Palestinians in Gaza, who have been subjected to a 14-year Israeli siege, try to recover from the occupation state’s latest aggression which killed more than 250 people including women and children.

The 71-year-old is known for his humanitarian stance and for his support of the Palestinian people. In 2017 Gere likened the situation in occupied Hebron to segregation in the Jim Crow-era American South when black Americans were subjected to apartheid-like structural discrimination.

“It’s exactly what the Old South was in America. Blacks knew where they could go: they could drink from that fountain, they couldn’t go over there, they couldn’t eat in that place,” he told an Israeli TV station during a tour of the segregated West Bank city.

Gere has also denounced Israeli settlements as “an absurd provocation” and claimed that the “occupation is destroying everyone” while insisting that “there is no defense of this occupation.”

(MEMO, PC, Social Media)

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4 Comments

  1. Unlike so many other American celebrities, Richard Gere did not allow himself to be threatened by these Zionist reptiles who control the American media and who automatically begin to shout “anti-Semite” (an absurd term, invented by a Zionist, with the objective of suppressing criticism against Jewish supremacism/terrorism) at anyone who dares to show support for the Palestinian people and rightfully criticize the morally bankrupt Zionist state of Israel for its brutally savage genocidal campaign against the Palestinians.

  2. Israel is a full liberal democratic country. The West Bank was never a part of Israel when it was created. But it was acquired during wars and to this day the Palestinians have no elections.

    • Where are the Constitution and borders of this “democratic country” you proclaim? All I see is an illegal, Apartheid rogue state.

  3. Just because Israel holds elections, does not in any particular way make it the slightest bit democratic. Any country, whether democratic or extremely undemocratic, is capable of holding elections. As for being a “democracy”, Israel is the exact opposite of that. It’s a genocidal, apartheid state, where Jewish supremacy is the law of the land.

    In terms of the West Bank, it was 19 years after the illegal creation of Israel, that it again started another war in order to steal away more Palestinian lands (which included the West Bank).

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