Emma Watson, Israel's former ambassador to the United Nations, has been accused of antisemitism after she posted a message of support for the Palestinian cause.
Watson, best known for playing Hermione Granger in the Harry Potter films, posted a picture of a pro-Palestinian protest with the slogan Solidarity has a verb written across it. The intersectional feminist scholar Sara Ahmed was accompanied by a quote about the meaning of solidarity.
The post drew strong criticism from Israeli officials because it drew widespread support from Palestinian activists. Danny Danon was the most combative of the science minister in Binyamin Netanyahu's government and Israeli ambassador to the UN. Dannon shared Watson's post on Twitter, saying: 10 points from Gryffindor for being an antisemite. Israel s current ambassador to the UN, Gilad Erdan, was critical. The fiction may work in Harry Potter but it does not work in reality, Erdan wrote. If it did, the magic used in the wizarding world could eliminate the evils of Hamas that oppresses women and seeks the annihilation of Israel and the PA that supports terror. I would be in favor of that! PA refers to the Palestinian Authority.
Danon's comments were met with a backlash, including from Leah Greenberg, a co-executive director of Indivisible Project, a non-profit organisation founded in 2016 in response to the election of Donald Trump. She wrote that it was a perfect demonstration of the utterly cynical and bad-faith weaponization of antisemitism to shut down basic expressions of solidarity with the Palestinian people.
She said that Danon's comments were appalling and that all support for Palestinians must be called out by the Tory peer Sayeeda Warsi.
Watson, 31, is an outspoken feminist who has supported a number of high-profile causes, earning her a spot in Time magazine's 2015 list of the 100 most influential people in the world.
In 2014 she was appointed UN women's goodwill ambassador and delivered an address at UN headquarters in New York to launch HeForShe, a campaign that urges men to advocate for women's equality. A year later, Malala Yousafzai told Watson she had decided to call herself a feminist after hearing her speech.
Watson was appointed to a G 7 advisory body for women's rights in 2019, consulting with leaders on foreign policy.
During Cop 26 in Glasgow last year, Watson gave climate activists access to her Instagram account. Her bio still states that the account has been taken over by an anonymous femiist collective. The image posted by Watson's account was originally created by the Bad Activist Collective during clashes last year in which Israeli jets bombed Gaza in response to rocket attacks. At the time, other celebrities including Susan Sarandon, Dua Lipa and Bella Hadid expressed their solidarity with the Palestinian cause.
In part, Ahmed cited by Watson, said that Solidarity does not assume that our struggles are the same, or that our pain is the same, or that our hope is for the same future. Solidarity involves commitment and work, as well as recognition that even if we do not have the same feelings, or the same lives, or the same bodies, we do live on common ground. Watson's post has been liked by more than a million users and attracted more than 100,000 comments, many of which include Palestinian or Israeli flags.