Shameless plug: I’m moderating a panel co-hosted by The Nation and Palestine Legal this afternoon. It’s at 5 PM ET, it’s about anti-Palestinian repression and pro-Palestinian solidarity, and anyone can tune in—maybe even…you? Details here!
There are many, many, many problems in the United Kingdom, but to look at the British press right now, you’d think that there was only one: what punk duo Bob Vylan did at the Glastonbury music festival over the weekend.
What they did, specifically, was lead the crowd in chants of “Death, death to the IDF” and “free Palestine.”
I would probably not chant “death, death to the IDF,” because I probably wouldn’t chant about “death” to anything. But I find it hard to muster up too much outrage for a chant opposing an abstract military entity. And that is why I don’t work for the UK media. Here’s the measured reaction of the Daily Mail:
Putting aside the very pertinent fact that Bob Vylan did not lead chants of “death to Israelis,” but rather a chant about ending the Israeli military, calling for anyone’s arrest over this is crazy stuff. But that’s the tenor everywhere in the UK right now: these people are evil monsters. The BBC has apologized for airing the comments. Prime Minister Keir Starmer has denounced the chants as “appalling hate speech.” And some overheated pundits even called it “a modern version of the Nuremberg Rallies.”
Left unmentioned in any of this freakout is the context in which it is taking place. Why was Bob Vylan talking about Palestine right now? Why was a giant crowd of people so receptive to these comments? Why has this become such a totemic issue?
The answer will not shock you. It’s because Israel has been committing genocide in Gaza for nearly two years.
That’s it! That’s why. People don’t like genocide, and when they see a country committing genocide, they stop liking that country so much. If the genocide ended, a lot of people would be less mad at Israel than they are right now.
This isn’t rocket science. But—and this is the crucial thing—because our world’s leading politicians and media outlets fundamentally don’t see opposition to the genocide as a legitimate viewpoint to hold, they can’t quite comprehend what is happening all around them.
You can see that in the dazed reaction to Zohran Mamdani’s crushing mayoral primary victory in New York City last week.
“Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani’s success in the city with the largest Jewish population in the world offered the starkest evidence yet that outspoken opposition to Israel and its government — and even questioning its existence as a Jewish state — is increasingly acceptable to broader swaths of the party, even in areas where pro-Israel Jews have long been a bedrock part of the Democratic coalition,” Katie Glueck and Lisa Lerer wrote in The New York Times.
Well, yeah, because Israel is committing genocide! It’s starving people and then deliberately slaughtering them when they try to get food. It’s massacring hundreds of people a week. It’s committing every possible war crime imaginable. And it’s doing this with the military and political support of governments around the world, including the United States and the United Kingdom. We all know this! People have eyes, and they are horrified by what they’re seeing. That is literally the whole explanation for why opposition to Israel has become so much more mainstream.
Look at this chart from Gallup on Democratic voter support for Israel. Sure, it’s trending downward before 2023, but then it just falls off a cliff—y’know, because that’s when the genocide started.
This isn’t just an American thing. Support for Israel has plummeted across the Western world. Why? Must I repeat myself? OK, I guess I must. BECAUSE ISRAEL IS COMMITTING GENOCIDE AND PEOPLE DON’T LIKE THAT.
Mamdani’s win should have been a wake-up call. Just dismissing this opposition to crimes against humanity as mass antisemitism is not gonna fly. It’s so obviously not what’s going on! And if people want to prevent actual mass antisemitism from taking root, they should be doing two things: demanding that the linkage between Israel and all Jews that Zionism falsely insists upon be broken, and putting as much pressure as they can on Israel to end genocide and apartheid. Instead, Israel’s supporters want it both ways—for the genocide and apartheid to continue unabated, and for their continuation to have absolutely no political or cultural ramifications for Israel. But that’s not how it works. Actions have consequences, and no amount of disingenuous outrage can change that.
Can't help but notice that the real sharp drop in Democrats who support Israel comes in 2025, not 2023 or 2024. There are a lot of rank and file Democrats who currently are mad at Israel because it harmed their favorite voteball team, not necessarily because of the genocide. Let's just see if that position actually holds when Democrats begin winning back power.
Well said. We all have to keep saying it, over and over. The Zionists have been promoting the idea that supporting Israel unconditionally is pan essential aspect of being Jewish at least since the Nakba in 1948. That equation is falling apart under the continual impacts of the genocide in Gaza on public opinion around the world. As governments in the global Notth continue to support mass murder, they are losing their legitimacy with their own people. As those governments also go on supporting ecocide by giant corporations, they are further delegitimizing the entire global system. That’s the only (bloodstained) “silver lining” of this monstrous crime. Time to get organized, not just for piecemeal defense and increasingly brittle reforms but for fundamental transformation.