Glastonbury, genocide and manufactured outrage

If there is still a debate over whether the British press is largely captured by elite interests disconnected from the vast majority of the public, these past few days should settle it. Between Wednesday 25th and Sunday 29th June 2025, hundreds of thousands of people flocked to the UK’s biggest festival, Glastonbury, an event that, if you read most outlets, was apparently one long, hellish orgy of hate.

While the festival has long been associated with progressive politics and counter-cultures, most famously through its association with the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, this year’s festival has already been described as its most political in a generation. The reason for that is simple: Palestine. Reflecting the growing opposition to the normalisation of Israeli atrocities in the British media and political landscape, many performers were joined by the loud crowds in chanting for a free Palestine. 

As a Palestinian-Lebanese migrant in the UK, it brought me joy to see so many Palestinian flags at Glastonbury. I watched some of the concerts on BBC iPlayer, a channel that put itself in the middle of controversy. 

The controversy over nothing

Which controversy you’re thinking of will likely depend on your media consumption. If you read most of the British press, you may conclude that the biggest outrage was the BBC letting Bobby Vylan, frontman of London punk-rap band Bob Vylan, lead the crowds chanting “death to the IDF”, which the UK Chief Rabbi described as “vile Jew hatred,” a deeply problematic framing that I’ll get into further below. 

If you’re like me and many others, the real controversy ought to have been how dishonest so much of the coverage has been, including from the BBC, and how much of it is clearly designed to distract from the fact that the UK government remains directly connected to Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza.

The framing is crucial here, not merely what is talked about but also, and perhaps most importantly, what is not. Bobby Vylan’s chants are important, and refreshing to see, but they are just one part of what the group has repeatedly said about Palestine. 

 

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On stage, the group said that: “anybody with any kind of moral compass can surely tell that what is happening over there, in Gaza, is a tragedy.” Afterwards, the group released another statement which states that: “We are not for the death of Jews, Arabs, or any other race or group of people. We are for the dismantling of a violent military machine. A machine whose own soldiers were told to use ‘unnecessary lethal force’ against innocent civilians waiting for aid. A machine that has destroyed much of Gaza.” Neither this statement, nor the content it brings up, is part of the ‘controversy’, nor are the threats that Bob Vylan have received since. 

Again, the framing is crucial, and what is still rarely said by the outrage machine which is the British mediascape is that the only violence committed in the past week has been by the Israeli state. 

Neither Bob Vylan, nor Kneecap (whose set, notably, was not featured on the BBC coverage, but helpfully live-streamed in full by “Helen from Wales”), nor any of the other Glastonbury performers (Nilüfer Yanya, Nadine Shah, Amyl and the Sniffers, Jade Thirlwall, CMAT, Jordan Stephens and Inhaler) have committed war crimes, crimes against humanity or genocide. 

All they have done is talk about what Israel is doing with the UK’s complicity: in the past week alone, the IDF has committed multiple massacres, including with a 500lb (230kg) bomb dropped on a crowded seaside café on 30th June, a day that also saw the Israelis drop bombs on a school and food distribution sites. 

Among the dead are artist Frans Amina Al-Salmi and photojournalist Ismail Abu Hattab. Another massacre was committed on 3rd July while I was writing this piece when the IDF hit a shelter for the displaced. The daily images and videos of tiny corpses wrapped in white shrouds are not part of the ‘controversy’ because dead Palestinian civilians are simply not controversial in much of the British mediascape. The controversy has nothing to do with free speech and everything to do with creating a hierarchy of worthy and unworthy lives.

Criminalising non-violence

The same mediascape that saturates us with claims of free speech has largely endorsed the Labour government leading the charge to proscribe a non-violent activist group, Palestine Action (PA), as sharing the same legal status of terrorist as groups like ISIS after PA sprayed RAF planes to bring attention to the fact that the British arms industry remains directly complicity in the ongoing genocide. 

Only 26 MPs opposed the motion; 382 MPs agreed despite opposition by human rights groups and UN experts. Among those that would legally be considered supporters of terrorism, with prison sentences of up to 14 years, are 59 year old Andrea Needham who was once represented by Starmer himself, Labour’s own MP Zarah Sultana and the thousands of others in the UK who have said “we are all Palestine Action.” This is now a precedent that can be used by more rightwing parties like Reform should they ever gain power, courtesy of the Labour Party.

To find anything resembling political courage, we must unfortunately leave the UK and go to New York, where Zohran Mamdani became the democratic nominee for Mayor of New York despite months of smears by pro-Israel apologists. Against the accusations of anti-Semitism, Mamdani pointed out that he was merely repeating the consensus reached by multiple genocide scholars, including two from Israel, Amos Goldberg and Daniel Blatman. As with the ‘controversy’ over Bob Vylan, the outraged crowd are not able to point to anything Mamdani has ever said about Jews.

Instead, Mamdani’s comments have only ever been about Israel – not even the people, but the entire state. As his response indicates, not all Israeli Jews are equal to those invested in this narrative. People like Goldberg and Blatman are rarely, if ever, platformed. Doing so would turn this ‘controversy’ into a debate of substance, one which those decrying anti-Semitism could not win. They can only maintain the façade of a debate by strictly limiting the boundaries of what is acceptable speech and what is not. 

They can not be platforming international NGOs like Amnesty International, who concluded that it is a genocide in December 2024, or even Israeli NGOs such as B’Tselem, which described Israel’s prison system as “hell” and Israeli policies towards Palestinians throughout Israel-Palestine (including Palestinian citizens of Israel) as “the crime of Apartheid.” 

As someone who has interviewed Goldberg on my podcast, I’ve already done more due diligence than the vast majority of the British press, and I’m just one guy with a very small budget doing this in my free time. This is how low the standards are in the UK.

Weaponised identities

The more indefensible the position is, the more they seem to be doubling down. The BBC’s director general, Tim Davie, who censored the BBC commissioned “Gaza: Doctors Under Fire” documentary – which is now available on Channel4 instead – claimed he was “deeply appalled” by Bobby Vylan’s anti-IDF chant, a sentiment he has never expressed for the murdered Palestinian doctors and nurses whose stories were going to be on the BBC. This is made worse by the fact that the BBC claimed it was censoring their own award-winning documentary because it would threaten the corporation’s “impartiality.” 

This concern does not seem to extend to the fact that the BBC’s editorial board includes Robbie Gibb, Theresa May’s pro-Israel former director of communications. Gibb was the sole director of Jewish Chronicle Media, the parent company of Jewish Chronicles, a rightwing paper that saw many of its own columnists resign after one of its writers was proven to have fabricated multiple Gaza-related stories. Meanwhile, British Jewish voices, including Miriam Margolyes and Mike Leigh, are among those calling on Gibb to be removed from the BBC board. They are among 400 prominent figures from the arts and media world, including 111 BBC journalists who chose to remain anonymous for fear of backlash by their “impartial” employer. 

Joining the Chief Rabbi, Davie conflated British citizens opposing a foreign army, the IDF, with British Jews. He offered to meet Jewish staff over Bobby Vylan’s comments, despite them having nothing to do with Jews. This heavily implies that such figures are comfortable linking all Jews, and certainly British Jews, with the actions of that foreign army. For the life of me, I cannot think of other examples where this is still considered normal. British Jews who are critical of Israel and/or who call themselves anti/non/post-Zionist are simply written out of this story, their inconvenient positionalities and politics treated as irrelevant to a discourse that insists on linking the Israeli state with British Jews. 

This inherently assigns the status of an ‘alien people’ to British Jews, a tactic usually favoured by anti-Semites. There are, of course, British Jews who do support Israel, but the majority of pro-Israel support, whether in the US or indeed in the UK, comes from the demographic majorities, which are certainly not Jewish. In fact, we have more often seen non-Jews speaking on behalf of Jews in the mainstream press, or indeed in parliament, than British Jews themselves being platformed, and certainly not anti/non/post-Zionist Jews. 

Most British Jews polled overwhelmingly oppose Israel’s far right government, a diversity hardly embodied by the Chief Rabbi who repeatedly insists that Zionism and Israel must be “central to Jewish identity.” This is a position vehemently rejected by anti/non/post-Zionist Jews such as those belonging to the growing Jewish Bloc coalition which includes the Black Jewish Alliance, Jewish Voice for Labour, Jewish Socialist Group, Jews for Justice for Palestinians, among others.

It’s one thing to acknowledge the ongoing identification with Israel among large parts of British Jewry, and quite another to pretend that this equals uncritical support, let alone uncritical support for its army. 

And yet, unlike Mamdani’s campaign in NYC, all signs in the UK seem to indicate that the ostensibly center-left Labour Party is learning all the wrong lessons about how to deal with the threat of far right ‘populism.’ Indeed, the only consistent tactic seems to be to try and out-Farage Farage, from their mindlessly cruel anti-immigrant politics a year after the anti-immigrant pogroms, to their obsession with making disabled people and the broader working class poorer instead of taxing the obscenely rich. 

Witnessing this has been a surreal experience. As an academic who researches the far right, I can confidently say that UK universities contain within them some of the world’s leading scholars on the far right and fascism. One of the first lessons we learn – pretty much the 101 of it all – is that you cannot defeat the far right by adopting its slogans, as Starmer did when he echoed Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech (which he now says he “deeply regrets”, after doubling and tripling down on it for months) and especially not its politics. 

Again, I’m just one guy, but I’m pretty sure that I’ve platformed more UK-based experts on the far right – just one so far, Aurelien Mondon – than are being consulted by Keir Starmer’s Labour Party, which as far as I’m aware is zero.

Alienating their own base

These Glastonbury crowds chanting ‘fuck Keir Starmer’ are part of the people that Starmer’s Labour Party is alienating – to the benefit of the Green Party of England and Wales, whose membership has grown by at least 8% in the past two months alone. Labour’s strategy of taking such a wide demographic of the British public for granted hardly seems to be doing it any favours. 

It feels banal to even point it out, but in 2017 Jeremy Corbyn, then leader of the Labour Party, was invited to speak at Glastonbury. It surely doesn’t bode well for Labour that the main mention Keir Starmer has had at this year’s Glastonbury is when a massive crowd chanted ‘Fuck Keir Starmer’ on three separate occasions during the Kneecap concert. This isn’t to say that there weren’t legitimate criticisms of Corbyn’s politics, or that Glastonbury represents all of the UK, but it cannot be ignored that this past week represents yet another sign that the current Labour leadership is risking the party’s own demise.

As of the time of writing, we’ve yet to see whether the growing challenge to Starmer’s leadership will yield someone more in tune with Labour’s progressive core. One thing’s for certain, however, and that is that no amount of censorship can stop the growing consensus over the fact that the Israeli state is committing genocide in Gaza. Labour has thus far only doubled down in its criminalisation of free speech in the UK, but the bigger crime will remain the fact that they took over a Tory government complicit in Israeli crimes against Palestinian civilians and made the decision to maintain that relationship with Israel despite the majority of its own voter base opposing it. 

Besides making some private contractors happy and appeasing Donald Trump’s fascist regime, it is unclear what they will even get out of this commitment to Israeli impunity. It’s up to us to make sure that they do not get away with it.