The British punk-rap band Bob Vylan did something unexpected in the often hollow and debauched world of corporate music festivals at the end of June 2025. They used their Glastonbury Festival stage to name and condemn an ongoing genocide. They led the crowd in chanting, “Death to the IDF.” This threw a spotlight on the Israeli military machine responsible for one of the most ruthless campaigns of mass killing and starvation in the 21st century. It is a campaign that meets every measure of genocidal intent under international law.
For that moment of speaking the truth, the British state and its ideological enforcers pounced on the band. Right-wing politicians, centrist careerists, and the mainstream media called the chant “antisemitic,” erasing the fact that it targeted a military force, and an occupying one at that, but not a people or a religion. The BBC rushed to apologise, the festival organisers distanced themselves and reports emerged of U.S. travel visa bans against the band. The British ruling class worked itself into a moral frenzy over a few words shouted at a music festival, yet these same people have not expressed a modicum of comparable outrage at the wholesale destruction of Gaza by the Zionist Israeli regime.
This reaction is not about defending Jewish people from hatred. It is about shielding a key imperial ally from political damage. The IDF is not an abstract military body. It is the armed fist of a settler-colonial project that has dispossessed, expelled, and massacred the Palestinian people in order to secure and expand an ethno-nationalist state for almost eight decades. Since October 2023, Israel’s political and military leadership has waged a campaign of annihilation against Gaza. They have carried out large-scale bombings of civilian infrastructure, killed sixty thousand people – most of whom are women and children -, razed entire neighbourhoods, and are now engineering famine conditions that threaten to kill thousands more by hunger and disease. These are not “excesses or “unfortunate collateral damage”. They are the logical and open policies of the Israeli state. Its government officials have declared an entire population of people as “human animals” and called for their removal or destruction. This is ethnic cleansing and genocide in the plain meaning of the term.
Starvation as a Weapon
According to several United Nations humanitarian agencies, Gaza’s hunger crisis has crossed famine thresholds. Over 80% of households have reported inadequate food, and acute malnutrition is rampant among children. Aid is routinely blocked, restricted, or bombed. The Israeli regime’s blockade is total. Water, fuel, electricity, and medical supplies are withheld as a ruthless war strategy. In the face of this, the hypocritical response from London, Washington, and Brussels is nauseating. Western leaders stand before cameras and send messages on social media to “call for more aid”. Meanwhile, they send weapons, ammunition, and diplomatic cover to the Israeli government, which is preventing that aid from arriving. Their rhetoric is an insult to the dead and the starving. They are not neutral mediators but co-architects of the slaughter.
Britain has played an exceptionally villainous role. It continues to supply military components, intelligence information, and trade preferences to Israel while pretending to“urge restraint.” At the same time, the British government has escalated domestic repression of those who are resisting. The proscription of Palestine Action under anti-terrorism legislation marks a new phase where direct-action tactics that once targeted arms factories, government buildings, and corporate enablers of Israeli apartheid are now criminalised on par with violent extremism. This is not about “public safety.” It is about protecting the flow of arms and money that makes the genocide possible.
The State’s Censorship Machine
The backlash against Bob Vylan must be understood as part of the same apparatus. The state and its hegemonic ideological allies use accusations of antisemitism to sidestep confrontation with the real bigotry, while smearing and attempting to neutralise political opposition to Zionism and imperialism. By conflating all Jewish people with the abominable settler colony that is Isreal and its IDF death machine, they aim to undermine the political space in which genuine solidarity can exist. The effect is meant to be chilling. They want workers, artists, and activists to learn that resisting a military genocide may cost them their careers, their freedom, or their ability to travel.
Meanwhile, Britain’s anti-terror laws are being weaponized against peaceful protest. People are routinely arrested for simply holding placards in solidarity with Palestine. Direct action against arms manufacturers and suppliers are branded as “terrorism.” Meanwhile, this is the same tactic that was used by suffragettes, anti-apartheid activists, and anti-fascists throughout history. This is political policing in service of imperialism. It is designed to isolate the Palestinian struggle from the global working class and to frighten the public away from participating in resistance.
All Resistance is Necessary
Revolutionaries have long understood that in the face of genocide, neutrality is complicity. There is no “balanced” position between a people fighting for survival and the military machine that seeks their eradication. Armed struggle in the occupied territories, international boycott campaigns, disruptive direct action against the economic and logistical networks that enable Israeli apartheid and all other forms of resistance are not only legitimate but necessary, without prejudice to the centrality of mass action led by the working-class, to winning and sustaining both national liberation and the social emancipation of the people.
In this context, Bob Vylan’s actions were laudable. They used a platform to name and shame the enemy, and to puncture the wall of polite silence that so often surrounds imperial violence. Their chant was confrontational as resistance to genocide demands. Any e call for “civility” is a demand for passivity. It would be a call to watch the slaughter from a comfortable distance while doing nothing to stop it.
Western Imperialism’s Culpability
The British state, the United States, the European Union, and other imperial powers are not simply “failing” to stop the genocide in Gaza. They are actively facilitating it. They provide the bombs, the fighter jet components, the satellite and airborne intelligence, and diplomatic immunity at the UN that keep the Israeli war machine running. They criminalise the movements, protests, and organisations within their territories that interfere with that machinery. This is not a matter of “bad policy.” It is the structural logic of imperialism to defend allies who secure Western imperialist interests, no matter the human cost.
To discuss famine, mass killing, and destruction without naming the political and economic systems that cause them is to miss the point and end up with a shallow political analysis. The genocide in Gaza is not an aberration. It is the product of a world order built on exploitation, racial hierarchy, and capitalist accumulation. Settler-colonial projects like Israel’s exist because they serve imperialist needs, as military outposts, arms markets, and ideological bulwarks in strategic regions of commodity extraction.
The Need for Revolutionary Change
The parliamentary “opposition” and human rights NGOs alone will not stop this. Appeals to the “better nature” of ruling-class politicians will not stop this. What is required is the dismantling of the economic and political structures that sustain imperialism. And this will take sustained resistance and revolutionary struggle. That means organizing across borders, building working-class solidarity that overcomes efforts to divide us with racism, religion, or nationalist propaganda, and directly confronting the systems of production and exchange that make war profitable.
The fight against genocide must not be separated from the fight against the capitalist system that breeds it. Gaza is not only a humanitarian tragedy; it is also a frontline in the global class struggle.
Bob Vylan chose a side. Palestine Action chose a side. Every worker, artist, and activist will face that choice.
We must not stand aside or retreat to the “both-sides” rhetoric of certain embarrassed factions of the ruling classes who pretend not to have full-throated support for Israel while the machinery of death grinds on. The moral imperative is clear: all resistance to genocide is necessary. The Palestinian people have the right to survive, and the world’s working class has the duty to help them win.
In the words of Che Guevara, “if you tremble with indignation at every injustice, you are a comrade of mine.”
by Victor OSARENTIN
