Hannah Einbinder, star of HBO’s Hacks, expressed outrage that fellow Hollywood celebrities will not join her in calling Israel’s conflict in Gaza a “genocide.”
Einbinder revealed her dismay on the activism front during an interview with Zeteo’s Beyond Israelism podcast while sitting alongside Algerian-Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil.
“It pisses me off. Because I’m sitting here with Mahmoud, who has so much to risk and who has risked so much who has sacrificed so much and we are all familiar with the details of that,” she said. “And I look at these people who have absolutely every privilege imaginable to mankind and they cannot utter a single word and it just, I guess it makes me naive, but I cannot understand it.”
“I really can’t understand it. And I hear people say that they don’t know enough and I — I don’t, it’s like, OK, so what do you do all day? Are you just literally walking around like this?” she added.
Einbinder said that more celebrities will speak out the more “Israel ramps up its genocide,” adding that the “reality is harder and harder to ignore for a lot of people.” She also felt that more celebrities would speak out once the free speech issue affected “a white person.”
“I think also people in Hollywood unfortunately need these issues to affect a white person for them to see it as relating to them,” she said. “Like, they see Jimmy Kimmel getting taken off the air suddenly, they see Stephen Colbert’s show being canceled by CBS, which is owned by the Ellisons, and they go, ‘How could this possibly happen?’”
“And it’s like, we know how because we saw students and professors and journalists and authors and Palestinian folks be silenced and fired and expelled and imprisoned,” she added. “So we tried to say, ‘This is going to set the precedent for this whole thing to explode,’ and it took it happening to these white men for people to be like, ‘Oh my god.’