This year, Glastonbury Festival offered a disturbing new performance— not art, not music, but a chant: “Death to the IDF.”
Broadcast to millions by the BBC, it crossed a line that should never be blurred.
For Jews, for survivors of antisemitic violence and for anyone with a modicum of historical awareness, this wasn’t protest music. It was a chilling echo of a hatred as old as Europe itself.
Some will say it’s just a slogan, just theatre. But history has taught us- at unbearable cost – that these words are never “just words”.
No one is blind to the suffering in Gaza. The scale of loss and destruction this year has been appalling, and I mourn Palestinian lives lost as deeply as any.
My argument is not that Israel’s military is above criticism, nor that Palestinian grief is less real than Jewish grief. Quite the opposite: anyone who cares about justice must reckon with the horrors faced by civilians on all sides.
But if this were simply about opposing military excess, about holding armies to account for harming innocents, where are the chants for “Death to the US Army” for Iraq and Afghanistan, or “Death to the British Army” for the legacy of empire and more recent wars?
No one at Glastonbury, or any British festival, would ever dream of it. The armies of these countries have killed far more civilians, yet are not reduced to symbols of existential evil in polite society. This rage, this fury, is reserved only for the world’s only Jewish army.
There is a dangerous trend taking root in Britain, where hatred towards Israel, often poorly disguised as activism, is morphing into open hostility towards Jews, their rights and their very safety.
This is not hyperbole. On November 9 1938, Kristallnacht erupted in Nazi Germany. Young Germans, fuelled by propaganda, marched through the streets chanting “Tod den Juden!” (“Death to the Jews!”). Within months, the leap from rhetoric to mass murder became official policy.
No, I am not suggesting Glastonbury is Nazi Germany. But the sentiment, the delight in dehumanisation, the targeting of Jews under the guise of politics, is hauntingly familiar.
The chant “death to the IDF” might sound to some like an attack on a military. But for Jews, especially Holocaust survivors, or those forced to leave their homes in Paris because they are Jewish – there is no mistaking its meaning.
The IDF is not just another army; it is the world’s only Jewish state-security force, the fragile buffer between Jews and the abyss of history. Strip us of that, and you strip us of the most basic safeguard against a return to powerlessness, against the ever-present threat of another Holocaust.
We are not paranoid, the world has turn a blind eye to our genocide in living memory, and remind us today they would do it again.
This is not an abstract fear. On October 7 2023, Hamas terrorists massacred hundreds at the Nova music festival in Israel while simultaneously targeting Jewish families in their homes.
The IDF, caught off guard, was all that stood between my family and absolute annihilation planned by Hamas. To demand the end of Israel’s army is, for many Jews, to demand a return to vulnerability.
And Glastonbury’s platforming of this rhetoric is not isolated. Across Britain, Jewish communities are finding themselves marginalised, even at events once synonymous with inclusion. London Pride, a celebration of queer identity, will go ahead this year without the participation of Jewish LGBT groups, who have pulled out – again - because they no longer feel safe.
The progressive spaces where we once sought solidarity are now spaces where Jewish grief and Jewish safety are too politically inconvenient to acknowledge.
Even the artists leading these chants are, for the most part, unknowns. Their fame is not earned through music but through provocation.
Bob Vylan, for example, who I never heard of until yesterday; performed a set where he declared, “You can’t have your country back” – a message to Britain’s right-wing, anti-immigrant crowd, arguing that those who build and belong to a country have every right to call it home.
Yet, in the very next breath, he implies Jews do not have a claim to the State of Israel, denying us the same right he demands for himself. By his own logic, Israel is ours; we have built it, defended it, lived in it, and bled for it.
This intellectual incoherence is now presented as activism. Jewish indigeneity is erased, our history repackaged as someone else’s grievance. And in every corner, there is the same hypocrisy: crowds who claim to care deeply about human life, cheering as an artist calls for the death of Jewish soldiers – the children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors, of refugees from Iraq, Egypt, Tunisia, Ethiopia, and Morocco.
Indeed, there is never justification for calling for the death of anyone. Least of all from a crowd pretending to care about human rights. That’s not resistance. It’s not justice. It’s a death cult with a public relations strategy.
Meanwhile, Israel’s Minister of Diaspora Affairs, Amichai Chikli, responded by calling on British Jews to leave the UK entirely.
It’s a diagnosis rooted in truth but delivered as farce. Jews have always been told to leave when things get tough. But the solution is not for us to disappear; it’s for our supposed allies to stop making excuses for those who hate us.
And ultimately, what does any of this achieve? What do these protests, these chants, these attacks really do? Netanyahu doesn’t care what Bob Vylan says. Trump certainly doesn’t.
If anything, it emboldens the Israeli far-right. It makes Israelis feel like the entire world is against them, that any concession towards peace will inevitably come at the expense of their security, because the world will never support them. The message is unmistakable: you are alone, so you must fend for yourself. And so we will.
This is not just about Glastonbury. It’s about the Britain we are becoming – a place where hatred is given a stage, where moral clarity is sacrificed for political theatre and where the lessons of history are quietly ignored.
The chants will fade, but their echoes will linger. And history has shown us, time and again, where silence leads.
