Does Madonna Support Israel?

Noa Cohen Feb 19, 2025 Updated Jul 30, 2026 4 min read

Short answer: As of July 2026, Madonna has a long, warm, and public relationship with Israel and Jewish spiritual life, but she has never framed it as a political endorsement of Israeli policy. She launched her 2012 MDNA world tour in Tel Aviv as a self-described "concert for peace," performed at Eurovision 2019 in Tel Aviv (where she smuggled Israeli and Palestinian flags into the closing number), rebuffed BDS pressure to boycott Israel, and posted support for Israeli victims within a day of the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack. She has also, especially since 2024-2025, paired that with "everyone is suffering" and pro-humanitarian-aid-to-Gaza language, and her decades-long devotion to the Kabbalah Centre has drawn criticism from Orthodox Jewish leaders as commercialized and inauthentic. Net: consistently pro-Israel-visit and anti-boycott, but deliberately even-handed rather than a partisan Israel advocate.

What Madonna has actually said and done

September 15, 2007: In Israel for a Kabbalah Centre conference, Madonna met Israeli President Shimon Peres at his Jerusalem residence. The two exchanged gifts, he gave her a Hebrew Bible, she gave him a volume of the Zohar, and she told him "I am an ambassador for Judaism," according to CBS News.
May 31, 2012: Madonna opened her MDNA world tour with a sold-out "concert for peace" at Ramat Gan Stadium in Tel Aviv, drawing 32,000 fans. She donated 600 tickets to Israeli and Palestinian peace activists and told the crowd that conflict in the Middle East "has to stop," per the Times of Israel.
Mid-May 2019: Facing BDS pressure to cancel, Madonna confirmed she would perform at Eurovision in Tel Aviv days later, saying she would "never stop playing music to suit someone's political agenda" and that her heart "breaks every time I hear about the innocent lives that are lost in this region," reported by Fox News.
May 18, 2019: At the Eurovision Song Contest in Tel Aviv, Madonna closed her performance with two dancers wearing Israeli and Palestinian flags who embraced on stage. The European Broadcasting Union said the segment had not been cleared in rehearsal and violated the contest's non-political rule, and Israel's culture minister, Miri Regev, separately called the flag display "an error," saying "politics and a cultural event should not be mixed, with all due respect to Madonna," as documented by the Times of Israel, Al Jazeera, and Fox News.
October 8, 2023: One day after the Hamas attack on Israel, Madonna posted on Instagram and X: "What is Happening in Israel is Devastating... Watching all of these families and especially children being herded, assaulted and murdered in the streets is Heartbreaking," adding that "conflicts can never be resolved with violence," per her verified X account.
January 2024: During her Celebration Tour stop at TD Garden in Boston on January 8-9, Madonna referenced children being killed and kidnapped amid the war, saying "it's so hard to be a mother these days when you see what's happening in the Middle East" and that she felt "devastated on a regular basis watching innocent children be killed, murdered, kidnapped, tortured," without naming Israel or Gaza directly, according to Ynetnews.
In late 2025: Madonna publicly appealed to Pope Leo XIV to visit Gaza, writing "I am not pointing fingers, placing blame or taking sides. Everyone is suffering," a more even-handed, humanitarian-aid-focused tone as the Gaza war continued, reported by The National.

Kabbalah devotion versus direct support for Israel

Madonna's connection to Israel runs through two separate channels worth keeping distinct: her spiritual devotion to Kabbalah, a Jewish mystical tradition she has studied since the 1990s through the Los Angeles-based Kabbalah Centre, and her direct engagements with the state of Israel itself (concerts, Eurovision, public statements). On the spiritual side, Orthodox rabbis and Jewish organizations, including Agudath Israel of America, have criticized the Kabbalah Centre for years as a commercialized, watered-down version of authentic Kabbalah rather than genuine religious scholarship. That criticism targets the Centre's business practices more than Madonna's stance on Israel itself.

On the political side, Madonna has consistently chosen to perform in Israel when others boycotted, opening her 2012 tour there and headlining Eurovision in Tel Aviv in 2019. She has publicly rejected BDS boycott calls and responded to the October 7, 2023 attack with unambiguous sympathy for Israeli victims. At the same time, she has never endorsed a specific Israeli government or policy position. She has repeatedly called attention to Palestinian civilian suffering alongside Israeli suffering, and by late 2025 was using explicitly "both sides" language about Gaza. This fits her decades-long public posture: pro-peace, pro-visiting-and-performing-in-Israel, anti-boycott, but not a partisan political advocate for Israel in the way some other public figures have become.

The bottom line

Madonna supports Israel in the sense that she has repeatedly performed there against boycott pressure, expressed clear sympathy for Israeli victims after October 7, and maintained decades of personal and spiritual ties to Jewish tradition and Israeli leaders. She does not support Israel in a narrow partisan or political-endorsement sense. Her public statements consistently frame the conflict as a shared tragedy calling for peace and humanitarian relief on both sides, and by late 2025 that framing had shifted further toward "everyone is suffering" language. The 2012 Tel Aviv tour opener and the 2019 Eurovision flag moment remain the two clearest, best-documented data points, and both fit a peace advocate who chooses to show up in Israel, rather than an Israel political advocate.

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Last updated July 2026. We update these profiles as the record changes.