Apart from the attack on the Nova music festival on October 7th, which felt like it happened while U2 were on stage at Sphere Las Vegas, I have generally tried to stay out of the politics of the Middle East… this was not humility, more uncertainty in the face of obvious complexity… I have over recent months written about the war in Gaza in The Atlantic and spoken about it in The Observer, but I circled the subject.
As a cofounder of the ONE campaign, which tackles AIDS and extreme poverty in Africa, I felt my experience should be on the catastrophes facing that work and that part of the world. The hemorrhaging of human life in Sudan or Ethiopia hardly makes the news. Sudan alone is beyond comprehension, with a civil war that has left 150,000 dead and 2 million people facing famine.
And that was before the dismantling of USAID in march and the gutting of PEPFAR, life-saving programs for the poorest of the poor that ONE has fought for decades to protect… the cuts to which will likely lead to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children over the next few years.
But but but… there is no hierarchy to such things.
The images of starving children on the Gaza Strip brought me back to a working trip to a food station in Ethiopia my wife Ali and I made 40 years ago next month following U2’s participation in Live Aid 1985. Another man-made famine.
To witness chronic malnutrition up close would make it personal for any family, especially as it affects children. Because when the loss of non-combatant life en masse appears so calculated… especially the deaths of children, then ‘evil’ is not a hyperbolic adjective… in the sacred text of Jew, Christian, and Muslim it is an evil that must be resisted.
The rape, murder, and abduction of Israelis at the Nova music festival was evil.
On that awful Saturday night/Sunday morning of October 7/8 2023, I wasn’t thinking about politics. On stage in the Nevada desert, I just couldn’t help but express the pain everyone in the room was feeling and is still feeling for other music lovers and fans like us — hiding under a stage in Kibbutz Re’im then butchered to set a diabolical trap for Israel and to get a war going that might just redraw the map from ‘The river to the sea’… a gamble Hamas’ leadership were willing to play with the lives of two million Palestinians… to sow the seeds for a global intifada that U2 had glimpsed at work in Paris during the Bataclan attack in 2015… but only if Israel’s leaders fell for the trap that Hamas set for them.
Yahya Sinwar didn’t mind if he lost the battle or even the war if he could destroy Israel as a moral as well as an economic force. Over the next months as Israel’s revenge for the Hamas attack appeared more and more disproportionate and disinterested in the equally innocent civilian lives in Gaza… I felt as nauseous as everyone, but reminded myself Hamas had deliberately positioned themselves under civilian targets, having tunneled their way from school to mosque to hospital. I hoped Israel would return to reason. I was making excuses for a people seared and shaped by the experience of Holocaust… who understood the threat of extermination is not simply a fear but a fact… I re-read Hamas’ charter of 1988… it’s an evil read (Article Seven!)
But I also understood that Hamas are not the Palestinian people… a people who have for decades endured and continue to endure marginalization, oppression, occupation, and the systematic stealing of the land that is rightfully theirs. Given our own historic experience of oppression and occupation, it’s little wonder so many here in Ireland have campaigned for decades for justice for the Palestinian people.
We know Hamas are using starvation as a weapon in the war, but now so too is Israel and I feel revulsion for the moral failure. The Government of Israel is not the nation of Israel, but the Government of Israel led by Benjamin Netanyahu today deserves our categorical and unequivocal condemnation. There is no justification for the brutality he and his far right government have inflicted on the Palestinian people… in Gaza… in the West Bank. And not just since October 7, well before it too… though the level of depravity and lawlessness we are seeing now feels like uncharted territory.
Curiously those who say these reports are not true are not demanding access for journalists and seem deaf to the revealing rhetoric. Examples that sharpen my pen include: Israel’s Heritage Minister claiming that the government is racing to wipe out Gaza… his Defense Minister and Security Minister arguing no aid should be let into the territory. “Not one grain of wheat.” And now Netanyahu announces a military takeover of Gaza City… which most informed commentators understand as a euphemism for the colonization of Gaza. We know the rest of the Gaza Strip… and the West Bank are next. What century are we in?
Is the world not done with this far, far right thinking? We know where it ends… world war… millenarianism… Might the world deserve to know where this once promising bright-minded democratic nation is headed unless there is a dramatic change of course? Is what was once an oasis of innovation and free-thinking now in hock to a fundamentalism as blunt as a machete? Are Israelis really ready to let Benjamin Netanyahu do to Israel what its enemies failed to achieve over the last 77 years? And disappear it from membership in a community of nations built around even a flawed decency?
As someone who has long believed in Israel’s right to exist and supported a two-state solution, I want to make clear to anyone who cares to listen our band’s condemnation of Netanyahu’s immoral actions and join all who have called for a cessation of hostilities on both sides.
If not Irish voices, please please please stop and listen to Jewish ones – from the high mindedness of Rabbi Sharon Brous, to the tearful comedy of the Grody-Patinkin family – who fear the damage to Judaism, as well as Israel’s neighbours. Listen to the more than 100,000 Israelis who this week protested for an end to the war.
Our band stands in solidarity with the people of Palestine who truly seek a path to peace and coexistence with Israel and with their rightful and legitimate demand for statehood. We stand in solidarity with the remaining hostages and plead that someone rational negotiate their release. Could it be Marwan Barghouthi who the former head of Mossad Efraim Halevy described as “probably the most sane and the most qualified person” to lead the Palestinians?
Wiser heads than mine will have a view, but surely the hostages deserve a different approach — and quick.
We urge more good people in Israel to demand unfettered access by professionals to deliver the critical care needed throughout Gaza and the West Bank that they best know how to distribute… and to let the correct number of trucks through. It will take more than 100 trucks a day to take seriously the need – more like 600 – but the flooding of humanitarian aid will also undercut the black marketing that has been happening to benefit Hamas.
The band is pledged to contribute our support by donating to Medical Aid For Palestinians.
