So, Bob Vylan. The death-chant rap followed by Bobby V doubling down on defending ‘Death to the IDF’. Said he regretted only that the rap became the story. The apocalypse that is daily life and mass killing in Gaza got lost amidst immediate near-hysterical political condemnations and BBC panic attacks. BBC Director General Tim Davie’s reaction is the title of this post.
Allow me to be blunt: I’ve lived in Israel, and in Gaza – where I worked as a human rights investigator. I’ve no time for Bob Vylan and his shouty IDF death threats from the comfy bubble of a Glastonbury stage. This kind of punk activism changes nothing for Palestinians; it’s egotistic weaponising of a devastating war on an entire people.
Bob Vylan could have done something useful: shared the stage with a Palestinian woman or man, read a message from a Palestinian young person; asked people to donate to Medical Aid for Palestinians. But he decided to chant hatred and he became the headline.
The real story here is how our government and media – and in this case I am talking specifically about the BBC – talk (or not) about the war on Gaza. Their language: for example, the Israeli Defence Force’s masse killing of Gazans day and night is not ‘a conflict’. As defined by highly qualified international lawyers, this is an ongoing genocide. Children are not ‘starving to death’ in Gaza, they are being deliberately starved to death by the government of Israel and its armed forces. This is not a humanitarian crisis; it is the Israeli government’s strategy to cleanse Gaza of its people.
One of the people most dedicated to saving lives in Gaza was Doctor Marwan al-Sultan, one of only two cardiologists left in Gaza. He worked day and night at the Indonesian hospital, despite the massive risks of being targeted by the IDF. And now he is dead. Dr. al-Sultan was killed by an Israeli airstrike on his apartment that also killed his wife, his daughter and his sister on 2nd July.
The al-Sultan family apartment was the only building destroyed in an entire block, adding to the chilling evidence of Israel systematically crushing what remains of Gaza’s healthcare system. Dr. Sultan’s killing also means that every director of a hospital in northern Gaza has now been either killed or detained by the IDF.
The BBC has condemned Bob Vylan’s hate-speech. It was right to remove it from BBC streaming services – though that doesn’t stop anyone listening to it on other platforms; and whilst it is offensive – on what grounds is it actually anti-semitic? The Israeli government has consistently weaponised any criticism of its war machine cabinet or armed forces, which inevitably erodes condemnation of anti-semitism when it erupts.
Hamas’s bloody attack in Israel in October 2023 devastated families across the country. Fifty Israeli hostages remain alive inside Gaza, according to Hamas, which, after 21 months of relentless Israeli bombardments, is weakened but not defeated by the IDF. Israeli fury is understandable and the plight of hostages almost unimaginable; the toll of collective punishment unleashed across Gaza for almost two years since that attack is persuading more public figures, like Baroness Helena Kennedy, that Israel’s actions now represent ‘a genocide taking place before our eyes‘.
The Israeli/Palestinian magazine +972 is clear about UK government and BBC reactions to Bob Vylan’s ‘caustic’ chant, calling it ‘performative rage’ – before going on to condemn the Starmer government, ‘[who] can excuse genocide but draws the line at festival chants’. Do read the article here. And every single one of us needs to watch the Channel 4 documentary Gaza; doctors under attack, a well-evidenced documentary laying bare the systematic killing of doctors and heath workers trapped in Gaza.
This devastating film speaks to horrific truths of the IDF targeting Palestinian civilians whose work is saving the lives of other Palestinian civilians. But the BBC refused to screen it, stating that to do so risked ‘creating a perception of partiality’ – about a war the Israeli government has refused to allow international journalists and human rights investigators to witness. Is this BBC refusal not equally deeply offensive and totally unacceptable?
We are living in upside-down times. The UN has just urged our increasingly draconian government not to ‘miss-use terrorism laws against protest group Palestine Action‘. Our BBC (most of us we pay license fees) will not broadcast a documentary on abuses by Israel that we have every right to know about. Meanwhile the UN reports that British firms, including BP and Barclays are profiting from Israel’s war on the people of Gaza, and may be ’embedded in an economy of genocide’. This is not only deeply offensive, it is morally corrupt.
And the killing of civilians across the ruins of Gaza goes on and on and on. Two days ago I received a message from a woman friend in southern Gaza trying to keep her two young sons alive. ‘Every day dead bodies, every day death’ she wrote me. ‘Can you imagine that the Gaza you knew is now this?’
