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Let’s compare two news stories from the past few days. On Saturday, Bobby Vylan, the frontman of the rap-punk duo Bob Vylan, chanted “death, death to the IDF” – referring to the Israel Defense Forces – from the West Holts stage at Glastonbury, and members of the crowd joined in. The performance was livestreamed by the BBC.
A day earlier, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz revealed that Israeli soldiers and officers had confessed that they had been ordered to shoot at unarmed Palestinians as they queued for aid. This month, about 600 desperately hungry Palestinians, including many children, have been killed this way.
Five words on one hand. Six hundred killed on the other. Which story is dominating the front pages of British newspapers, leading news bulletins, provoking relentless push notifications by the BBC and causing the prime minister and an endless parade of frontbenchers to condemn such an outrage? It is, of course, more than anything else Vylan said, those five words. How morally lost is a society in which a chant against a genocidal foreign army provokes a political and media firestorm, but the intentionally starved, unarmed human beings being mowed down on the orders of the IDF high command do not?
There is a genocide happening in Gaza: that is the consensus of genocide scholars, including those in Israel. This one word, genocide, can only go so far in conveying what is happening in Gaza. Genocide means wiping out the pillars of civilisation – from homes to schools to agriculture – and forcibly driving people from their land. It means food, water and healthcare being denied. It means entire families being wiped out by indiscriminate bombing. It means babies being burned alive and suffocating under rubble.
If we must focus our fury at words, look to the genocidal statements proudly delivered by Israeli politicians. The Israeli finance minister declaring in May that “Gaza will be entirely destroyed”. Or this weekend, Israel’s national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, demanding a permanent end to all aid to Gaza, which in practice means death to Palestinian civilians. These statements are underpinned by firepower and they mean actual fatalities. Britain continues to provide crucial parts to the Israeli military, which acts on these words.
And that’s what this is really about: a campaign of deflection from Britain’s complicity in the crime of the century. Facilitators of genocide are presented as the morally upstanding moderates, while opponents of genocide are labelled as hateful, dangerous extremists. That’s why British citizens serving in the IDF are not under criminal investigation for war crimes committed in Gaza, while the government has begun the process of proscribing Palestine Action, which would place it in the same legal bracket as Islamic State and violent neo-Nazis, after its activists threw paint at military planes.
Avon and Somerset police have announced a criminal investigation into the Glastonbury performances of Bob Vylan and Kneecap. Welcome to Britain in 2025, where musicians angry at genocide are dragged through the justice system, while politicians facilitating genocide walk free. Meanwhile, the government minister Lisa Nandy delivered an outraged statement to the House of Commons about Bob Vylan and the BBC’s decision to livestream their set – deemed a better use of parliamentary time than how the people of Gaza can be saved from what the head of the Red Cross has called “worse than hell on Earth”.
The BBC and Glastonbury have issued statements declaring Vylan’s chant to be antisemitic. It seems to me far more offensive to conflate Jewish people as a whole with an army whose actions have led the international criminal court to issue arrest warrants for Netanyahu and his former defence minister for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Bobby Vylan has just released a statement making clear he is opposed to “the death of Jews, Arabs or any other race or group of people”. Instead, he makes clear “death to the IDF” means “the dismantling of a violent military machine”. Amen: the IDF should be dismantled. An army that commits genocide has forfeited its right to exist. It should be replaced with a force capable of protecting the security of all people who live between the river and the sea, whatever their ethnicity or religion, which probably means an international peacekeeping force.
I also believe people shouldn’t die. The war in Gaza, which has led to the murder of tens of thousands of Palestinians, has also resulted in hundreds of IDF soldiers being killed. Ask those who joined in with Vylan’s chant if they supported sending the IDF into Gaza, and you will hear a unanimous “no”. If they had been listened to, as well as preventing genocide, those Israeli soldiers would still be alive.
Millions of people have watched the livestreaming of obscenities in Gaza. They expect, quite rationally, their politicians to share their outrage: instead, they note that their politicians continue to arm the perpetrators. They expect their media to hold power to account, at home and abroad: instead, they see the whitewashing of horrors. What underpinned the chant was revulsion at crimes against humanity and frustration at politicians.
You really can only turn the world on its head for so long. In the end this crime is too obscene, too documented, too unapologetic to get away with. One day there will be a reckoning, and those who facilitated the annihilation of Gaza will find themselves being made to account for what they said and did, rather than those who stood against it.
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Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist
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