Britain’s political and media class are currently seething with performative rage over a slogan chanted at a music festival last weekend. After rap duo Bob Vylan led the Glastonbury crowd in a chorus of “Death, death to the IDF,” the incident was almost universally decried as a carnival of antisemitism — from national newspapers to the UK culture minister, the chief rabbi and Jewish organizations, the director of Glastonbury, and even the BBC, which was broadcasting the festival live.

These knee-jerk responses to a musician’s chants reflect an alarming escalation in the repression of Palestine solidarity in the UK, coming in the wake of several other high profile attempts to criminalize public figures who spoke out for Palestine. But the incident also represents a microcosm of the growing chasm between those in power, who continue to actively support or enable Israel’s onslaught on Gaza, and the broader public, who are increasingly horrified by that violence. 

First, let’s be clear: however caustic it may be, “Death to the IDF” is not an antisemitic slogan. The IDF is a military, which for nearly two years has been carrying out the Israeli government’s genocidal designs in Gaza, and has been oppressing Palestinians as an occupying force for more than half a century. Vylan’s words were a response to this, and attempting to portray justifiable public ire toward the Israeli army’s war crimes as an irrational hatred of Jewish people is both intellectually dishonest and morally bankrupt. 

Moreover, when pro-Israel advocates and their allies in government and the media have spent the last 21 months declaring any and all slogans in support of Palestine to be antisemitic — be it “Free Palestine,” “From the river to the sea,” or “Globalize the intifada” — it is inevitable that this will only result in a further radicalization of rhetoric. 

There have been some reasonable critiques of Bob Vylan’s slogan: that calls for political violence reflect a nihilistic powerlessness, or that dehumanization only serves the aims of our political opponents. But these critiques are ultimately better channelled toward those in power, who have allowed violence wrought against Palestinians to become the background music to our day-to-day lives, and who act as handmaidens for Israel’s war crimes abroad while making us all collectively less safe at home. 

It should go without saying that much of the furor over this incident has to do with feeding a machine of distraction. We are living in a theater of the absurd, where the prime minister and the media commentariat dedicate more energy and column inches to condemning a chant at a music festival than the unconscionable violence that Israel perpetrates against Palestinians every single day. It is a case study in anti-Palestinian racism that this generates more outrage than the continuous obliteration of Palestinian lives — including those killed during the very time the Glastonbury festival took place.

It is hard not to conclude that Israel’s strategy of prolonging its assault on Gaza until it simply becomes part of our new normal has succeeded. Just yesterday, the UK Supreme Court declared it lawful for the government to continue exporting parts of F-35 warplanes to Israel that are used to drop bombs on Gaza, right as the police launched a criminal investigation into Bob Vylan.

The antisemitism cudgel

We are at a critical crossroads in the movement for Palestinian liberation. On the one hand, public support is stronger than ever, from incumbent New York mayors and celebrities to ordinary voters. Demands for a free Palestine have entered mainstream discourse in a manner that felt impossible just three years ago. New polling shows that majorities across Europe and the United States view Israel in a negative light. 

Simultaneously, the reactionary backlash to this support is rearing its head in increasingly draconian ways, as governments target those who speak out with criminal charges and deportation, and outlaw nonviolent direct action as terrorism, alongside longstanding tactics of reputational damage. 

While most obvious in the United States, this tactic is being deployed at an alarming rate in Europe as well. In the UK, the Labour government is using its position as a supposedly center-left, progressive party to restrict the right to protest via anti-terror legislation and beefed up police powers. And the charge of antisemitism remains the most effective cudgel to enact these repressive policies. 

The use of state power — including police, immigration enforcement, and surveillance — as part of this repression strategy, while present prior to this current war on Gaza, has significantly escalated in the last 21 months. It cannot be separated from the broader authoritarian swing, in which we’ve seen governments across the Global North weaponize alleged care for Jewish people to further an anti-democratic, anti-migrant, and anti-Palestinian agenda.

That counterterrorism has become a primary mode to “combat antisemitism” is alarming, if not surprising; the controversial Prevent program has been surveilling supporters of Palestine — from high school students to university professors — for years, ramping up further post-October 7. In this way, “protecting the Jewish community” is becoming synonymous with shielding the government from accountability for its ongoing complicity in the genocide in Gaza. And rather than resisting this conflation, Jewish communal institutions are cheering it on, prioritizing support for Israel’s death machine over the wellbeing and security of the very communities they claim to represent.

Distorting antisemitism in this manner in order to repress advocacy for Palestine is unquestionably dangerous for Jewish people: it makes Jews the face of authoritarian politics, and it also positions the fight against antisemitism as being at odds with broader human rights struggles, thus dividing Jews from progressive movements.

Furthermore, the failure of the international community to hold Israel accountable for its genocidal destruction in Gaza is not only making a mockery of international law and fuelling mistrust in democracy; it provides a ripe breeding ground for conspiratorial thinking — which is particularly pernicious given antisemitic ideas about Jewish power and influence. At a time where antisemitism, like Islamophobia, is increasing, and political violence is already erupting against Jews, the conflation of Palestine advocacy with antisemitism will inevitably make Jews around the world less safe. 

It is essential that we challenge these efforts to criminalize our right to protest, especially as Israel continues to inflict catastrophic levels of violence across the region. The Israeli government and its allies abroad know they’ve lost the moral high ground; it is common organizing lore that when our movements gain ground, our opposition pushes back even harder. 

But progressives and the movement for Palestine must also be alert to the new and shifting conditions we find ourselves in. We have a responsibility to be strategic and reflexive to ensure that our political messaging and actions do not become a distraction from genocide in Gaza, but rather work to bring more people into a contest for power that will ultimately create material change on the ground. These crackdowns may reflect the last gasp attempts of a failing pro-Israel political project, but only if we are prepared to beat them at their own game.