In 21 months of genocide in Gaza, the worst imaginable atrocities have already happened, and their frequency has robbed the story of its novelty. In the media, Gaza often has to fight for attention with other world events. These days, it rarely wins. The last weekend of June was therefore unusual, since a story related to Gaza was on every broadcast and the front pages of Britain’s most widely read newspapers for the first time since October 2023.
A day earlier, the Israeli daily Haaretz had published a detailed report on the 549 people killed and over 4,000 injured, in less than a month, as they tried to collect aid from the distribution points set up by the Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF). Based on the testimonies of members of the Israeli military, the Israel Defence Forces (IDF), the report revealed that soldiers had been ordered to shoot directly at masses of desperate civilians as a method of crowd control. Drones, snipers, tanks and artillery were used to kill people at least 19 times as starving Palestinians made the perilous journey to the four GHF distribution points for the one-hour window in which they could receive aid. Conditions have since worsened, with a Sky News investigation revealing that, as the number of GHF distribution points has increased, so have the deaths. Two American contractors provided footage to The Associated Press in which American mercenaries working for the GHF can be heard shooting at unarmed Palestinians and celebrating the kills. But this was not front-page news.
Two days earlier, Haaretz had published another report revealing that, while the latest 1,227-page chart published by the Gaza Ministry of Health listed the names of 55,202 people killed by Israel, including 17,121 children and 9,126 women, two independent studies found that the ministry’s figures were undercounting total deaths by at least 40%. Research led by Michael Spagat of Royal Holloway, University of London, reached this conclusion by surveying 2,000 households in Gaza and comparing their numbers to prewar levels to calculate excess mortality. These conclusions reinforced the findings of an earlier study by researchers at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, published in The Lancet, which also concluded that the Ministry of Health numbers undercounted total deaths by 41%. Haaretz noted that if one added the number of people dying from indirect effects of war, including hunger, cold and diseases that were treatable before the destruction of Gaza’s health system, then total deaths might be higher than 100,000. This, too, didn’t make Britain’s front pages.
On the same weekend, the U.K. High Court rejected a case by the Global Legal Action Network and the Palestinian human rights group Al-Haq that tried to stop the transfer of British-made spare parts for Israel’s F-35 jets, even though the government had suspended 30 other arms export licenses to Israel for fear of being implicated in war crimes. In a tribute to Orwell, the government argued that it could not suspend these transfers without jeopardizing “international peace.” This was not front-page news either. Nor was the revelation, made two days earlier, that the documentary “Gaza: Doctors Under Attack,” which the BBC had commissioned and approved, and then suppressed under Israel lobby pressure (to avoid “a perception of partiality”), had been finally acquired by Channel 4. The public broadcaster had been forced to relinquish its rights to the film after a campaign from over 600 notable industry figures and after the doctors and whistleblowers featured in the film threatened to withdraw consent. Two weeks earlier, the Centre for Media Monitoring, a Muslim advocacy group, had published a report backed by substantial data that showed that the BBC’s coverage was quantitatively and qualitatively skewed in favor of Israel in particular ways: Israeli deaths received 33 times more coverage, even though Palestinians were killed 34 times more often; emotive language was used more often for Israeli victims than for Palestinian victims; presenters shut down references to “genocide” while also avoiding mention of genocidal statements by Israeli leaders; and Israelis were platformed over twice as many times as Palestinians (2,350 versus 1,085).
The front pages instead had the British media and political class apoplectic over the punk-rap duo Bob Vylan, who had concluded their performance at the Glastonbury music festival with a statement of solidarity with Gaza that ended in the chant “Death, death to the IDF” — that is, the force murdering and starving Gazans. The politicians and journalists who were hitherto untroubled by the industrial-scale killing of Gazans suddenly discovered a faith in the sanctity of life, and their imaginations took flight. The Bob Vylan chant underwent a metamorphosis. The front page of the Daily Mail mentioned the Israeli government’s official complaint before blaring: “Now Arrest Punk Band Who Led ‘Death To Israelis’ Chants At Glastonbury.” The Telegraph’s front page instructed: “Hate rapper ‘must be treated like [Lucy] Connolly,’” quoting Chris Philp, a Conservative shadow minister, comparing rappers denouncing a genocide to a racist who was tried and convicted for exhorting her followers to burn refugee shelters at the height of an anti-immigrant riot. Even The Guardian got in on the game, with columnist Marina Hyde mocking Philp’s call for the arrest of Bob Vylan but, in the miasma of vaporous snark, echoing Philp and putting the “two nasty idiots from Bob Vylan” with their “repulsive chants” in the same category as the xenophobic pyromaniac.
Britain’s culture secretary Lisa Nandy denounced the “appalling and unacceptable” scenes at Glastonbury and boasted about using her influence to pressure the BBC, the festival organizers and the Home Office, before announcing that the police had opened a “criminal investigation” of the band. She promised to “ensure the safety and security of Jewish communities,” on which she claimed the chants had had an “enormous impact.” Prime Minister Keir Starmer took time away from his attempts to cut benefits for disabled people to denounce the “appalling hate speech” against the Israeli military and said that platforms should be denied to any “performers making threats or inciting violence.” But threats and incitement to violence soon had a national platform when, untouched by irony, the former Conservative minister Priti Patel called for “heads to roll” at the BBC. There were no howls of protest either when Rod Liddle, an associate editor at The Spectator, published his wish to “bomb Glastonbury” with a “small yield nuclear weapon,” blamed the BBC’s lapse on “almost certainly someone called ‘Johnny’ or ‘Ayesha’” and capped it with a conspiracy theory that the BBC was trying to cover up the controversy by following its every mention with “a report of Israeli ‘atrocities’ in Gaza. Every single time. Do you think that is an accident?” The idiocy reached a higher pitch when former Sunday Times editor and BBC veteran Andrew Neil declared that the Bob Vylan chants were “tantamount to advocating a second Holocaust” and that the two Black musicians from Ipswich were worse than the Nazis because, “even the Nazis didn’t chant ‘Death to the Jews.’”
British politicians and pundits had turned “Death to the IDF” into “Death to Israelis” before inflating it into “Death to the Jews.” Of course, Bob Vylan had not chanted either “Death to Israelis” or “Death to the Jews.” But in their effort to paint the musicians as antisemitic, the bloviators were making the Israeli military stand in for all Jews, thus implicating all Jews in the IDF’s crimes — which is certainly antisemitic, since not all Israelis, let alone all Jews, support the genocide in Gaza. Indeed, Israeli dissidents, including families of hostages, have protested the war at great personal risk. Organizations like Breaking the Silence have done much to expose the Israeli military’s crimes, publications like +972 Magazine and Haaretz shine a constant light on the atrocities and B’Tselem’s role in documenting war crimes is incomparable. Overseas, organizations like Jewish Voice for Peace have played a leading role in anti-war organizing.
But such distinctions are immaterial to the calumniators. The intimidation worked. The BBC, which was already suppressing news from Gaza, has since pledged to avoid broadcasting “high-risk” performances. British audiences will not only be spared images of the atrocities being perpetrated by combat aircraft serviced with British spare parts, they will also be protected from expressions of discomfort over this complicity. With impressive zeal, Britain’s fractious political class had set aside its differences to unite in an existential battle against … Bob Vylan. The band was quickly dropped by its talent agency, had its U.S. visa revoked and was deplatformed from upcoming festivals in Manchester and France. The establishment won the Battle of Glastonbury.
And yet, no manufactured controversy can exorcise Gaza, which haunts Britain’s guilty conscience like a persistent ghost. Ninety-two people were killed in Gaza on the day Glastonbury kicked off. On the day Bob Vylan took the stage, the death count was 72, including displaced children burned to death in a tent shelter. In total, at least 454 Gazans were killed during the five days of the festival. And the attacks have since intensified, with B’Tselem reporting 398 deaths in the three days after the festival. Among other things, the Israeli military dropped a 500-pound bomb on a popular seaside cafe, a gathering place for Gaza’s writers and artists, while it was teeming with families enjoying moments of reprieve from the genocide. It claimed it had targeted a Hamas operative as he took a table at the cafe dressed as a civilian; why it waited to target him until he entered the crowded cafe is a question only an antisemite would ask.
For all the government and media’s attempts to control Gaza’s representation, its reality fails to oblige. Even as the BBC bosses try to smother the truth, and the IDF tries to murder its tellers with a targeted campaign against journalists that has turned Gaza into the deadliest conflict for the press in history, every cellphone in Gaza has become a witness and every video an indictment. For all their shortcomings, platforms like X and apps like Telegram, TikTok and Instagram are a lifeline in Gaza (Bluesky never took off, since its zealous policing of images of violence and injury inadvertently favors the perpetrator by suppressing evidence of war crimes). Israel has tried to disrupt this with communications blackouts that the United Nations has decried, because they also affect “lifelines to emergency services, humanitarian coordination, and critical information for civilians.” With Israel withholding power as part of its campaign to make Gaza uninhabitable, citizens and journalists have been using car batteries and solar panels to charge their phones. Israel targets these, too. Just last April, Israel bombed a media tent in the yard of the Nasser hospital, killing 10. In early June, it bombed the media tent at the Al Ahli hospital, killing five (this was the seventh airstrike on the hospital).
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has so far avoided a ceasefire, because it would end his government and expose him to prosecution at home; but he also fears an end to hostilities because the day the war ends, international journalists will be able to access Gaza and witness the horrors with their own eyes. All the concrete in the world won’t dam the deluge of stories that will flow from Gaza once journalists are able to walk its scorched earth and speak to survivors — of lives shattered, dreams stolen, promises foreclosed. Revulsion and scorn will follow the perpetrators and their enablers for the rest of their lives. A small taste of this is already found in the French historian of Gaza Jean-Pierre Filiu’s account of the month he spent in Gaza last winter. His book “Un Historien à Gaza” provides vivid testimony of the complete disintegration of a society once known for its resilience and the strength of its social fabric. Among other things, it has been robbed even of the space for mourning.
The link between representation and reality is already so strained that younger generations, who get their news directly from the source via social media, see the BBC or The New York Times the same way Soviet youth once saw Pravda and Izvestia — as systems of thought control that require you to discount the evidence of your own eyes. No amount of interpretation can convince a college kid that withholding baby formula from a starving population enhances the security of a nuclear power. No one with a soul believes that a defensive war is one in which the group that is killed at the highest rate is between the ages of five and nine. No army fighting a just war executes 15 medics, buries them along with their ambulances and then blames them for their own deaths. After a video leaked in July 2024 showing 10 Israeli soldiers gang raping a prisoner at the notorious Sde Teiman prison, two ministers in the government of “our ally Israel” gave full-throated support to the rapists and threatened to prosecute the leaker. No young person is so morally addled as to confuse them for the “good guys.”
But British politicians and pundits have concluded that words are more lethal than actions, however atrocious — that wishing death on a perpetrator in a genocide is worse than the genocide itself. After all, few of them have raised any complaints about Britain’s material support for Israel, which includes, according to Action on Armed Violence, 577 intelligence-gathering flights over Gaza by the Royal Air Force to assist Israeli operations.
This taboo on harmful words also seems to be selectively activated. Last November, when a mob of Israeli football ultras marched through Amsterdam chanting “Death to Arabs,” “May your village burn” and “Let the IDF fuck the Arabs,” ripped down Palestine flags and attacked locals, it all went unnoticed by the media. But as some Arab youth organized and chased away the football ultras, injuring five of them, the media shed its torpor and sensationalized the story into an “antisemitic pogrom.” In their eagerness, they literally inverted reality by using Dutch photographer Annet de Graaf’s footage of the Israeli hooligans attacking locals and describing the scene as an “antisemitic attack on Israeli football fans.” In lining up to condemn this “pogrom,” Western politicians made no mention of the genocidal chants or the violence. No one seemed troubled, either, when a “war anthem” by Israeli rappers Ness and Stilla, which topped the charts in Israel, celebrated Israeli airstrikes on Gaza, threatened genocide against the “sons of Amalek” (in the Hebrew Bible, God commands the Israelite King Saul to “go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass”), and called for the killing of pro-Palestine celebrities Bella Hadid, Dua Lipa and Mia Khalifa. “Every dog will get what’s coming to them,” the song promised.
Traditional media might try to assimilate every incongruent detail into a story of Israeli innocence and victimhood. But on social media the images obtrude, and the fissure between reality and representation is pried open. Social media certainly has a dark side, but it is this resistance to narrative control that the elites resent most. For all its toxicity, and for all the attempts at algorithmic manipulation, it still remains a relatively free space that has the potential to challenge authority.
Social media has also changed the nature of protest: It is edgier and direct and more honest. That radical acts like Bob Vylan or Kneecap should make statements about Gaza is hardly a surprise. Politics is part of their identity, as it was for Rage Against the Machine. But their interventions are more urgent: It is performance as political action. In defying censors, such acts create a community, a space to congregate for young people alienated by the compromised media and politics. Two days after Glastonbury, Bob Vylan performed in Athens, and predictably drew an audience of all ages outraged by the genocide in Gaza, who knew they would be among kindred spirits. But the defiance also has a secondary effect: It creates a virtual picket line and forces others to reckon with the issue. The attacks on Bob Vylan had the paradoxical effect of encouraging others to speak out. By the end, at least 25 acts at Glastonbury had made statements in solidarity with Gaza. And even as lobbyists and politicians declared Bob Vylan’s career over, streams of their songs and their social media following surged.
By exposing more people to images of injustice and cruelty, social media has also radicalized the otherwise apolitical. No one exemplifies this better than Ms. Rachel, a popular children’s YouTuber, who has become a steadfast advocate for Gaza’s unconsoled children, in the face of predictable hostility and defamation. (So mystified was The New York Times by her concern for Gaza’s children that it actually asked her if she was “paid by Hamas.”) Similarly, while one isn’t surprised by politically conscious actors like Brian Cox, Javier Bardem or Mark Ruffalo speaking out, the war in Gaza has stirred unexpected figures into political activism — from Guy Pierce to Rachel Zegler, Charles Dance, Melissa Barrera and Hunter Schaeffer. Director Jonathan Glazer delivered not only one of the most powerful speeches in Oscars history, while accepting the award for best international feature film for “The Zone of Interest,” he also created an enduring metaphor for the perennial cohabitation of cruelty and comfort, pain and apathy. Ditto the world of music: From Chappell Roan to Dua Lipa, Dave Matthews, Bryan Adams, Paloma Faith, Wolf Alice, Imagine Dragons and Green Day, artists not known for political activism are speaking out with a sense of urgency and the willingness to take risks. The most stirring song about Gaza was produced by Macklemore, who in “Hind’s Hall” put a tribute to both a martyred child and student protesters in its very title. Even staid conservatives like Eric Clapton and Rod Stewart are horrified, with Clapton putting the Palestine flag on his Stratocaster. Paul Weller features it on all his sets.
Gaza is a turning point. Lisa Nandy and Keir Starmer might have won the round by mobilizing the power and resources of the state to intimidate media institutions, event managers and venues — whose livelihoods depend on their businesses — into avoiding political acts. But they hold no power over the artists and their imaginations, which have only been inflamed by these ham-handed attempts at silencing, just as they hold no power over their audiences’ conscience, which has been stirred by the unfiltered images from Gaza’s killing fields. They have lost an entire generation of young idealists without whose support they face electoral oblivion.
It is unlikely that anyone leaving Glastonbury was going to be inspired by Bob Vylan’s chants to invade Israel and fight the IDF any more than Bob Dylan’s “Masters of War” encouraged anti-war youth to invade the Pentagon and lynch Robert McNamara. Everyone understood that, when Dylan wrote, “And I hope that you die / And your death will come soon … And I’ll stand over your grave / ‘Til I’m sure that you’re dead,” he was making an anti-war statement, not an exhortation to murder. Such distinctions were also clear when Taras Borovok’s song “Bayraktar,” which became popular in the early days of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, celebrated the killing of Russian invaders. No one mistook that for an exhortation to genocide. There were no protests either when Meta changed its policies in March 2022 to allow calls for violence against the Russian military on its platforms. Meta recognised this as “political speech,” distinct from “credible calls for violence against Russian civilians.” It was rightly understood that Ukrainians have a right to defend themselves against invaders and occupiers. Palestinians, too, have the same right.
For contrast, consider the IDF chants promising to “wipe off the seed of Amalek.” It is an unambiguous exhortation to murder, since the Israeli military has the capacity and a demonstrable willingness to act on it. The chants have been used by Israeli commanders to rally troops for operations in Gaza. They have direct and fatal consequences. In October 2024, 65 American doctors, nurses and paramedics recounted to The New York Times their experience of volunteering in Gaza. They described the number of children they had received with sniper bullets to their heads while serving in different hospitals and at different times during the conflict. This was not one IDF sadist, they asserted. This was systematic.
On June 23, 2025, the Gaza Ministry of Health published its latest dataset of fatalities, revealing the names of the 17,121 children killed since the start of the war. Even by this undercount, Israel has killed 27 children, on average, every day for 625 days. The whole of Gaza is one-quarter of the size of Greater London, and almost half its population is children. You don’t kill that many children unintentionally. You don’t shoot 335 bullets from your 70-ton Merkava tank into a flimsy Kia Picanto passenger car to kill a 6-year-old, as the IDF did to Hind Rajab, unless you mean to. The child had sat terrified for hours among the bodies of her dead relatives, waiting to be rescued, before the IDF killed her along with the two medics sent to retrieve her. You don’t blow off a child’s leg and kill her family, as the IDF did to 12-year-old Dunia Abu Mohsen, and then kill her with a tank shell fired directly into her hospital room unless the cruelty is the point. You don’t force medical staff to abandon babies in incubators, left to die and decompose in neglect, as the IDF did at the al-Nasr hospital, unless infanticide is part of your revenge.
But the dead have seen the end of the war. The living must still face Gaza’s horrors — with fewer limbs and fewer family members, and without shelter, water or food. According to UNICEF, Gaza now has “the highest number of child amputees per capita anywhere in the world.” And you don’t have to use your imagination to know what that means. Just hear the story British surgeon Goher Rahbour told Haaretz about a 15-year-old who had been left paralyzed in an Israeli military strike that also killed his family: “He has shrapnel going through the spinal cord, so he is paraplegic, which means he’s got no sensation below the waist or the belly button. He’s lived in Gaza for 15 years, he knows what’s coming next, what’s waiting in Gaza for a 15-year-old boy in a wheelchair. No family, no physiotherapy, all these things that we take for granted. So he goes around in the hospital and says to us, ‘Can I die, please?'”
Perhaps Bob Vylan should have wished death upon this boy, since it would have troubled no one in Britain and saved the boy from the life of lonely struggle that he dreads.
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