Is a Glastonbury chant the real problem, or Israel's genocidal violence in Gaza?
Israel, Starmer's government and the media are fomenting a moral panic about words 'glorifying violence' towards the IDF, while glorifying the IDF's all-too-real violence towards Palestinians
Keir Starmer expressed predictable outrage at the weekend that the BBC had inadvertently broadcast punk band Bob Vylan leading crowds at Glastonbury in a chant of “Death to the IDF” – the so-called “Israel Defence Forces” that have been responsible for slaughtering many tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza over the past 21 months.
He called the chant “appalling hate speech” – apparently unaware that there are far worse crimes than hating soldiers carrying out the mass slaughter of children. Those worse things, of course, include slaughtering children en masse.
The BBC apologised, calling the band’s comments “deeply offensive” – more offensive, apparently, than Israel bombing and starving the children of Gaza.
Glastonbury’s organisers condemned the chant, saying there was no space for “hate speech or antisemitism” – apparently assuming, wrongly, that all Jews identify not just with the state of Israel but with an Israeli military widely accused by genocide experts of committing genocidal violence in Gaza.
Police are investigating Bob Vylan, a musical duo, to see whether they have committed a criminal offence, or possibly a terrorist one. As far as we know, the same police are doing nothing to investigate some 10 British citizens known to have travelled abroad to join the Israeli military, the IDF, committing the Gaza genocide.
On Sunday, the BBC’s Victoria Derbyshire grilled Starmer’s health secretary, Wes Streeting, on remarks from the Israeli embassy in London condemning what it termed “the normalisation of extremist language” and the “glorification of violence” at Glastonbury.
Unexpectedly, Streeting avoided jumping whole-heartedly on the media outrage band-wagon, led by the Mail on Sunday, whose front page demanded the arrest of the two band members for what the paper wrongly described as a chant demanding “Death to Israelis”. The Mail, apparently, believes that all Israelis, presumably including the country’s children, are currently serving in the Israeli military.
There are four important points to make about the interview between Derbyshire and Streeting:
1. The Israeli embassy in London, like the Israeli government it represents, has precisely no concerns about the “glorification of violence” when Israel is doing either the glorifying or the violence. Israel is currently celebrating its “success” in slaughtering and maiming hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza, including huge numbers of children; attacks by its soldiers and state-backed Jewish settler militias on Palestinian civilians in the West Bank; its eradication of whole communities in Lebanon; and its bombing of residential tower blocks across Tehran, killing many hundreds.
Violence has been Israel’s signature policy for the past 21 months – and long before that. Israel has revelled in the carnage it has inflicted on populations across the region.
In a post on social media, the Israeli embassy additionally argued of Bob Vylan’s chant: “When speech crosses into incitement, hatred, and advocacy of ethnic cleansing, it must be called out – especially when amplified by public figures on prominent platforms.”
And yet public figures from Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to British prime minister Keir Starmer have incited against the Palestinians, with Netanyahu comparing them to “Amalek”, a people the Israelites were commanded by God to exterminate, and Starmer terming the wholesale starvation of the people of Gaza “self-defence”.
Israeli officials from Netanyahu down have advocated the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. And, even more seriously, Israel has not just threatened but repeatedly carried out the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians under its belligerent rule.
2. It is beyond ridiculous for the BBC to echo the Israeli government in prioritising a harsh crackdown on words at Glastonbury "glorifying violence" towards Israeli soldiers ahead of the actual violence of genocide being committed by those Israel soldiers.
The BBC has avoided criticising the Israeli government for its actual violence – its bombing and active starvation of Palestinian civilians – and the Starmer government for colluding in that violence, or what the International Court of Justice termed more than a year ago a “plausible” genocide by Israel.
As a recent report by the Centre for Media Monitoring confirmed, the BBC has dramatically skewed its language to present Israel, the aggressor, in a more favourable light than the victim, the Palestinians of Gaza. The BBC’s own whistleblowing journalists have warned that the state broadcaster has all but banned the use of the word “genocide”, even by experts on the matter.
By arming Israel, by organising spy flights over Gaza from RAF base Akrotiri on Cyprus, and by providing diplomatic cover, Starmer has effectively glorified Israel’s slaughter of Palestinian children in the enclave. Bob Vylan’s chants of “Death to the IDF” have a far more dangerous counterpart in Starmer’s recital of Israel’s “right to defend itself” when that “defence” involves Israel mercilessly starving Gaza’s population of food, water and power.
Bob Vylan are a punk band; Starmer is the British prime minister, the man who directs Britain’s foreign policy and directs its army.
No one, least of all the BBC, has held Israeli or British officials accountable not just for glorifying violence but for actually carrying it out on an industrial scale for nearly two years.
But the BBC is suddenly interested in holding to account two punk musicians for leading a chant – one that made a symbolic, hypothetical threat of violence – against an Israeli military carrying out the ultimate form of violence, an actual genocide. In a serious media, Israel’s supposed “concerns” about the glorification of violence and extremist language would be laughed off the stage rather than respectfully aired.
3. Wes Streeting is being congratulated and condemned in equal measure on social media for refusing to be drawn into the Mail and BBC’s confected outrage. “I’d say to the Israeli embassy, get your own house in order,” he responded to Derbyshire. But hang on a minute. Streeting’s resistance to Derbyshire’s line of questioning was perhaps unexpected. But it also, let us not forget, serves the interests of both the Starmer and Israeli governments.
Streeting’s insistence that Israel “get its house in order” had, as he made clear, nothing to do with its 21-month slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza. Starmer is still defining the Gaza genocide as Israel’s supposed “right to defend itself”. In responding to Derbyshire, Streeting expressed concern only at what he called violent “settler attacks” in the West Bank. He said the Israeli embassy needed to “get your own house in order in terms of the conduct of your own citizens and the settlers in the West Bank”.
This was intended purely as deflection, designed to serve Starmer and Israel, the West’s key client state in the oil-rich Middle East. It benefits the UK government to make an issue of West Bank settler attacks – and present them as disorganised, random violence by individual extremists that the Israeli government is not responsible for but needs to get a firmer grip on.
By highlighting problems in the West Bank, the Starmer government can avoid addressing the genocide in Gaza and the Israeli state’s clear responsibility for that genocide. Which is precisely why in recent weeks Britain has made so much noise about imposing feeble penalties on a handful of extremist settlers and two fascist ministers in Benjamin Netanyahu’s government that represent those settlers.
Starmer and Streeting’s prioritising of Israel’s West Bank violence over Israel’s Gaza violence is a switch and bait twice over.
Most of the violence in the West Bank is not coming from settler extremists, even though they are the ones being punished by the UK. It is coming from the Israeli military, which has bulldozed thousands of homes there over the past year, driving 40,000 Palestinians off their lands.
Further, settler violence is not random. It is coordinated with Israeli field commanders, many of them settlers themselves, to uproot Palestinians so that Israel can move in Jewish settlers to colonise the land – or, in the words of successive Israeli governments, “Judaise” it.
None of this is new either. Israel has engineered and imposed a violent, apartheid system on Palestinians for decades to make life unbearable and encourage them to leave their homeland.
Second, Glastonbury’s anger-fuelled chant against the IDF was not primarily motivated by Israel’s violent actions in the West Bank. It was against the Israeli military for committing a genocide in Gaza, which the British government has been supporting. Streeting’s aim was to drag the debate on to safer territory for him and Starmer: that Britain needs to deal not with a genocide in Gaza but with a handful of violent loons in the West Bank.
Even in criticising the Israeli government for not doing enough to tackle settler violence, Streeting is still operating within the confines of a public discourse dictated by Israel, which prefers any criticism to be directed at individuals not at the Israeli state behind those individuals.
4. The BBC, the Starmer government and the Israel lobby are all delighted to play their part in this game of deflection and deception because these kinds of moral panics obscure the real issue: that all these parties are actively colluding in Israel's genocide in Gaza. While the media and government can now have a long backwards and forwards about whether criticism of Israel's genocidal army needs to be defined in law as a criminal offence or "terrorism", Israel will get a free pass to continue with the real terrorism: a genocide in Gaza.
Famously, the black civil rights fighter Malcolm X observed of the role of the media: “They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that’s power. … If you're not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.” Sixty years on, nothing has changed.
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A person might argue (well, I'm going to give it a go) that chanting 'death to the IDF' simply expresses a desire to see an end to a military organisation which murders children (amongst others). Another e.g could be 'Kill the Bill' (recently used in the UK re the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill - which does not mean that anyone using the slogan wants to kill any actual people.
The unhinged absurdity rages on. Western politicians would have you believe that Zionist savages have never, ever been heard chanting "Death to Arabs" as they march through East Jerusalem, Hebron and other parts of the West Bank.
Of course, the more important story that completely gets obfuscated due to this nonsensical outrage are the killing fields in Gaza, where emaciated Palestinians desperately searching for food are systematically shot at by the Zionist Genocide Machine.