(RNS) — I am getting tired of the rock-and-roll intifada.
Here is what I am talking about.
In April 2025 at Coachella in California, the Irish hip-hop trio Kneecap projected statements such as “Fuck Israel. Free Palestine,” and led the crowd in chants of “Free Palestine.”
At Glastonbury in the UK, one of the world’s most storied music festivals, Bob Vylan took the stage and led the audience in chanting “Free, free Palestine” and “Death, death to the IDF.” Festival organizers reminded everyone that “there is no place at Glastonbury for antisemitism, hate speech or incitement to violence,” and UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer criticized the “appalling hate speech.”
According to a friend who attended the Newport Folk Festival, an emcee held up a Palestinian flag, and the crowd roared its approval. Again, according to friends who attended, this past summer, at Tanglewood, in the quiet Jewish Berkshires, Graham Nash stopped his music in the middle of his set to declare that what is happening in Gaza is a genocide — again, to widespread applause.
And now there is Bono.
Oh, no. U2?
No contemporary rock artist has Bono’s resume of activism. He has championed debt relief for African nations; co-founded campaigns like ONE and DATA to fight poverty and disease; and has spoken before political leaders.
That is how we should interpret his recent criticism of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in an interview published in U2’s fanzine, Propaganda, alongside the band’s new EP, “Days of Ash.”
Days of Ash is a martyrology. It features songs about the killing of Sarina Esmailzadeh by Iranian security forces in 2022, the fatal shooting of Renee Good by an ICE agent and a song that memorializes Palestinian activist Awdah Hathaleen, who was killed by an Israeli settler in the West Bank in July.
After Oct. 7, Bono described the massacre as “evil.” He paid tribute to the hundreds of “beautiful kids” murdered at the Nova music festival during a performance. But as it all unfolded, Bono came to believe Netanyahu’s response to Oct. 7 and the ensuing war in Gaza was one of “sweeping brutality.”
He has gone further than the typical condemnation of the Gaza war. He has looked at the right wing manifestations in Israel and, in the recent interview, laments that Judaism was “being slandered by far-right fundamentalists from within its own community.”
“While I’m someone who is a student of, and certainly reveres, the teachings in many of the great faiths, I come from the Judeo-Christian tradition and so I feel on safe ground when I suggest: There has never been a moment where we needed the moral force of Judaism more than right now, and yet, it has rarely in modern times been under such siege.”
This is not the first time Bono has turned his gaze toward the Middle East. At the 2025 Ivor Novello Awards, he said: “Hamas, release the hostages, stop the war. Israel, be released from Benjamin Netanyahu and the far-right fundamentalists that twist your sacred texts.”
You might resent such criticism coming from an Irish gentile rock star. You might resent the unrelenting chorus of hectoring that comes from the cultural left, from oh-so-enlightened celebrities who somehow forget to include Hamas in their moral laundry list.
But, Bono’s voice is not the voice of an enemy. It is the voice of someone who believes Judaism possesses moral power — and fears what is happening to that moral power.
Because consider that there are many Jews who would join Bono in this chorus — Israelis and diaspora figures alike. There are many Orthodox rabbis who have blown the shofar on this outrage against Judaism. Leaders across the Jewish world have described the influence of figures like Smotrich and Ben-Gvir as a hillul ha-shem, a desecration of God’s name.
Notice, please, what Bono is not doing. He is not demonizing Israel or Zionism. He is not casting aspersions on the Jewish people. Quite the opposite. He speaks as someone who has great sympathy for Judaism and the Jewish state, but balanced with his passion for peace.
One of the songs on the album, “The Tears of Things,” contains a striking lyric referencing the Holocaust: “Six million voices silenced in just four years, the silent song of Christendom, so loud everybody hears.”
Finally, let us give Bono credit where it’s due. One track on his new EP features Nigerian singer Adeola Fayehun reciting the anti-war poem “Wildpeace,” by Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai. In today’s climate, that is an act of courage — not least because I love Amichai’s work.
Here is the poem “Wildpeace,” on which the song is based:
Not the peace of a cease-fire
not even the vision of the wolf and the lamb,
but rather
as in the heart when the excitement is over
and you can talk only about a great weariness…
The poem asks a simple yet profound question: What does real peace look like?
Amichai teaches us that peace is not merely a ceasefire, not an idyllic vision of enemies curled up together without conflict, nor a noisy parade of slogans and politics. He imagines a peace born of weariness, of bodies and hearts grown tired of war — a peace like relief, like something earned.
There is that line that moves me most — and I would adopt it into my prayers:
“And the howl of the orphans is passed from one generation to the next, as in a relay race: the baton never falls.”
Like memory itself — passed down through centuries and sorrows.
The U2 song that has always moved me most is “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For.” Like the band, I still haven’t found what I’m looking for — a world in which music festivals are once again places of shared humanity rather than tribal divides; a world in which political anguish does not become an invitation to erase the humanity of others; a world in which Jews and Palestinians — and all who long for dignity — can at last lay down their batons.
Until then, I will keep listening, keep arguing, keep loving Israel enough to criticize it and loving Judaism enough to demand better of it.
