Culture shift: pro-Palestine rappers say what everyone is thinking
Mo Chara, aka Liam Óg Ó hAnnaidh, is facing terrorism charges in the UK for the supposed crime of supporting Palestine. Part of the rap trio Kneecap, Mo Chara is one of a new wave of musicians and artists who are using their work to protest the genocide in Gaza, risking their careers in the process.
Speaking to the Guardian, Mo Chara said of his stand: “Maybe visas get revoked, you’re not allowed in America again, it’s not ideal—but Jesus Christ, there’s people being bombed from the fucking skies, and people being starved to death”.
This defiant attitude has captured the attention of young people everywhere. Thirty thousand flocked to Kneecap’s set at the Glastonbury festival, waving Palestinian and Irish flags and chanting “Free Palestine” and “Free Mo Chara”. When the BBC refused to stream the set online, “Helen from Wales” stepped in, streaming the entire thing via TikTok. Explaining why she did it, Helen said, “Anyone who was in that field for that Kneecap gig knows that there was something very special happening there, that people outside of Glastonbury festival have a right to see”.
In a twist of fate, the BBC instead streamed Bob Vylan’s set. The punk rap duo was not the safest bet. Tens of thousands of people watching were treated to chants of “Free Palestine” and “Death, death to the IDF”, led enthusiastically by Bobby Vylan.
The response of governments and the media has been hysterical. A torrent of denunciations has followed, along with calls for Bob Vylan’s shows to be cancelled, accusations that they’re inciting hate and violence and calls for sanctions against them. Their US visas have also been revoked. “Foreigners who glorify violence and hatred are not welcome visitors to our country”, wrote Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau. Unless, of course, you’re a violent, hateful foreigner from Israel, like Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Kneecap has been attacked as “not appropriate” by UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer, while the leader of the right-wing Democratic Unionist Party in Ireland, Gavin Robinson, said, “These gentlemen don't need to be on a stage; they need to be in a courtroom because it is a hate crime what they are doing”.
Artists like Kneecap and Bob Vylan who are speaking up for Palestine are a bright spot in a dark two years of Israeli genocide carried out under the approving eye of the Western establishment. They’ve linked up with a protest movement that has persisted despite appalling repression and slander, and a broader mood of disgust with a society in which this could happen.
Fuelling this has been Western governments’ determination to justify the unjustifiable, treating anyone who demurs as a bigot, terrorist or worse. Here in Australia, simply posting a report from a reputable human rights organisation on social media was enough to get journalist Antoinette Latouff fired from the ABC, the broadcaster aggressively defending its actions in court.
Media outlets everywhere refuse to use words like “genocide” that Israel objects to, while Palestinians are dehumanised routinely. Students have been disciplined by universities for protesting for Palestine. Pianist Jayson Gillham had his performance cancelled by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra after dedicating a piece to journalists killed in Gaza.
Celebrities, musicians and actors have the ability to give expression to what masses of other people are feeling. This challenges the consensus pro-Israel governments are trying to establish that it is legitimate to do nothing in the face of a genocide. Posting on social media, lead singer of Amyl and the Sniffers, Amy Taylor, pointed out that the repression of Kneecap and Bob Vylan is about “trying to make it look like a couple of isolated incidents and a couple of ‘bad bands’ so that it appears the public isn’t as anti-genocide as it is, and trying to make it look like Bob and Kneecap are one offs, instead of that the status quo has shifted majorly and that people are concerned and desperate for our gov[ernment]s to listen”.
Artists played a similar role in the movement against the war in Vietnam, as they have in most anti-war and civil rights movements. In the 1960s, actors such as Jane Fonda and Don Sutherland organised anti-war speaking tours across the US and Canada, and even went to Vietnam to speak to US troops. Fonda was targeted by the FBI and arrested on trumped-up drug charges, an order that reportedly came directly from the Nixon White House.
Their treatment was similar to that of pro-Palestine activists today. Fonda’s phone was tapped, American politicians called her activism treasonous, her films were banned, and William Burkhead, a Democrat, said, “I wouldn’t want to kill her, but I wouldn’t mind if you cut her tongue off”. This all mirrors the outrage directed towards modern pro-Palestinian artists.
Young people today are again at the forefront of challenging the inhuman policies and practices of their rulers, most prominently through the university encampments in solidarity with Palestine. And they are increasingly making connections between forms of oppression, and demanding a different type of society altogether, one in which innocent people aren’t murdered by powerful militaries and, closer to home, billionaires aren’t prioritised over the rest of us.
Kneecap reflect this: when they visited Melbourne, they made connections with Aretha Brown, an Indigenous artist whose father was in the left-wing rock band Painters and Dockers. Brown painted a mural for the band to take on stage in her striking black and white style reading “Blak and Irish solidarity”.
Another expression of this is the victory of Zohran Mamdani in the New York Democratic primary race for mayor. Young people voted in the primary in record numbers, helping to deliver Mamdani a resounding victory. It wasn’t lost on many of these people that Mamdani spoke up for Palestine and pledged, if elected mayor, to arrest Netanyahu if he came to New York.
While it’s not enough to stop the genocide in Gaza or other injustices of capitalism, the fact that young people are increasingly challenging the ideological hegemony of the ruling class is a hopeful sign for the future, and clearly of concern to the authorities. It highlights why taking a stand and attempting to cohere opposition are important, even if you are in a minority. The alternative is resignation to a morally intolerable status quo.
As Mo Chara has put it, “we knew that the Israeli lobbyists and the American government weren’t going to stand by idly while we spoke to thousands of young Americans who agree with us. They don’t want us coming to the American festivals, because they don’t want videos of young Americans chanting ‘free Palestine’ [even though] that is the actual belief in America. They just want to suppress it”.
