A joke about Palestine has turned into a two-front pile-on, with Saif Ali Khan and Anupama Chopra both being accused of the same thing: laughing when they shouldn’t have.
Saif Ali Khan had a question for Anupama Chopra before she could finish hers.
In an interview, Chopra told Khan that she wants to bring up a quote about acting from Hollywood star Javier Bardem, one she says she uses often in interviews.
Khan cuts her off: “Is it ‘Free Palestine,'” he asked in reference to the Spanish actor’s firm stance in favour of Palestine. Chopra laughed and said, “No!” Khan laughed too. “Sorry, I was just wondering. That is a quote of his as well.” Chopra, still laughing, said, “It is, it is. No, no, this is but I am talking about another one.”
The line traces back to the 98th Academy Awards, where Bardem opened his remarks with, “No to war, and free Palestine,” drawing applause from the audience inside the venue. He wore two pins on his tuxedo lapel during the broadcast, one reading “No to War,” the other in support of Palestine.
Clipped and circulated, the exchange between Khan and Chopra turned into a fight over who was worse.
One camp went after Khan directly, accusing him of mistaking a political slogan for a celebrity soundbite. “Free Palestine’ is not a Javier Bardem quote. It’s a slogan calling for an end to Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestinian territories and for the freedom and rights of Palestinians,” one user wrote, asking whether Khan was “always this insensitive and tone deaf.”
Several comments held Bardem up as the standard Khan failed to meet. “He has more spine than all of Bollywood put together,” one user wrote, calling him “such a gentleman” for staying vocal on the Palestinian cause for years.
A similar comment dismissed Bollywood actors as “jellyfish like celebrities, who speak for none except their own selfish interests,” adding that Bardem alone was “worth more than the entire chamcha Bollywood industry together.”
One person called Indian actors “all fluff” who “can neither speak up or stand up for a cause.” One comment was of just four words: “Tone deaf and brain dead!”
A different set of replies framed the laughter as ignorance rather than malice, arguing that Khan and Chopra likely did not grasp what the phrase stood for and that this made the moment “come across as tone-deaf and deeply insensitive.”
One user wrote, “Yeh kya behudapan hai,” asking if the pair understood “what Palestine is going through” before calling the laugh “just disgusting.”
The response was called “genuinely despicable” by one user, while another wrote without restraint: “Thousands of women and children murdered and all you can muster is a fucking smirk. F*ck you, shehzaade.”
A second camp, however, argued Khan was not the one at fault and that Chopra’s laughter was the real problem. “The fact that ‘Free Palestine’ was the first thing that came into Saif’s mind speaks volumes about where his heart is,” one user wrote, adding that he “didn’t expect it to be laughed off like this.”
A second comment agreed almost word for word, calling it “great” that the phrase came to Khan’s mind first and suggesting he “didn’t expect her to laugh at it like that.”
A third user was less forgiving of Bollywood as a whole, writing that its stars “will only say ‘free Palestine’ when it is in the form of a joke, cowards!”
