Dolly Parton has done genuinely extraordinary things. Her Imagination Library has put over 200 million books in kids’ hands. Her funding helped make the Moderna vaccine possible. That generosity is real, and it’s earned.
Which is part of why her silence on Gaza is hard to sit with.
Back at the 2022 ACM Awards, Dolly spoke up for Ukraine. Warmly, publicly, calling for peace and dedicating the show to “our brothers and sisters” overseas. In the same breath, she joked she’d rather pass a kidney stone than get political.
– Insert –
Video from Illesha Marie Instagram
Dolly Parton’s silence on Gaza
When Israel started killing Palestinian civilians at a scale human rights groups have called one of the highest concentrations of child casualties in modern conflict- something like 30 percent of the dead in Gaza are children, higher than in Ukraine- Dolly didn’t say anything. Nothing at all.
She’s not really the exception here. She’s the pattern. A lot of American public figures have learned that standing with Ukraine is safe, even celebrated. Standing with Palestinian children isn’t treated the same way. So most people just don’t.
That calculation is itself a kind of politics, even when it’s dressed up as staying above the fray. Silence in the face of something this documented isn’t neutral. It’s a choice, and it ends up protecting the people doing the killing more than anyone else.
You can still admire what Dolly’s built. You can also say, plainly, that she looked away at a moment when looking away had a body count.
Both things can be true at the same time.
Somewhere in Gaza, a child who loved ‘Jolene’ just as much as any kid in Tennessee is being buried today. Rest in peace.
Source Hani Almadhoun | Vice President of Philanthropy at UNRWA USA
Related
Dolly Parton’s Wikipedia page vandalised with swastika hours after her death
The secret Jewish history of Dolly Parton