Longtime activists U2 weigh in on Gaza

Indeed, many young Irish artists have spoken up on behalf of Palestine, including Kneecap, Fontaines DC, CMAT, and even Bono’s own son Elijah Hewson (frontman of Inhaler). But unlike Kneecap, who have unreservedly called for a free Palestine, the members of U2 seem almost as concerned with the soul of Israel as they do with the suffering of Palestine. “When did a just war to defend the country turn into an unjust land grab? I hoped Israel would return to reason,” Bono frets. “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.”

Similarly, The Edge questions Netanyahu directly: “Do you truly believe that such devastation—inflicted so intentionally and relentlessly on a civilian population—can happen without heaping generational shame upon those responsible? Do you not see that the longer this continues, the more Israel risks becoming isolated, mistrusted, and remembered not as a haven from persecution, but as a state that, when provoked, systematically persecuted a neighbouring civilian population?” He wonders that “if this apartheid state transpires don’t you destroy the very argument for Israel’s existence as a moral response to the horrors of the Holocaust? For if Israel comes to be seen as a state that systematically denies another people their rights, then the world will inevitably ask whether the only just and sustainable future, the only tolerable future, is a shared state—one where Jews and Palestinians live together as equals under the law.”

Though each member of U2 highlights the horrors of the forced starvation and blockage of aid to Palestinians, the word “genocide” is only used once across the four individual statements. The Edge mentions it in terms of the hypothetical end result of Netanyahu’s proposed occupation of Gaza, if not the decades of oppression, segregation, and forced removal from homes that came before. He writes that Ireland serves as an example to prove that injustice “is never the path to security: it breeds resentment, it hardens hearts, and it guarantees that future generations will inherit conflict rather than peace. The oppressed do not forget. How can this course of action possibly make your people safer?”

“We know from our own experience in Ireland that peace is not made through dominance. Peace is made when people sit down with their opponents—when they recognise the equal dignity of all, even those they once feared or despised,” The Edge argues. “There can be no peace without justice. No reconciliation without recognition. And no future unless we refuse to let the past be repeated.” You can read the U2’s full thoughts here.