Apart from mourning the attack on the Nova music festival on October 7, 2023, which felt like it happened while U2 was onstage 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. In recent months, I have written about the war in Gaza in The Atlantic and spoken about it in The Observer, but I circled the subject.
As a co-founder of the ONE Campaign, which tackles AIDS and extreme poverty in Africa, I felt my experience should be focused 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. The civil war in Sudan alone is beyond comprehension, leaving 150,000 dead and 2 million people facing famine
And that was before the dismantling of USAID in March and the gutting of PEPFAR, lifesaving programs for the poorest of the poor that ONE has fought for decades to protect. Those cuts will likely lead to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children over the next few years.
But there is no hierarchy to such things.
The images of starving children in the Gaza Strip brought me back to a working trip that my wife, Ali, and I made 40 years ago next month to a food station in Ethiopia following U2’s participation in Live Aid 1985, amid another man-made famine. To witness chronic malnutrition up close would make it personal for any family, especially as it affects children. When the loss of noncombatant 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 and elsewhere in southern Israel was evil. On the awful Saturday night and Sunday morning of October 7–8, I wasn’t thinking about politics. Onstage 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. Hamas’s leadership was willing to gamble with the lives of 2 million Palestinians. It wanted to sow the seeds for a global intifada of the sort that U2 had glimpsed at work in Paris during the Bataclan attack in 2015, but it could succeed only if Israel’s leaders fell into 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 months that followed, 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 anyone, but reminded myself that Hamas had deliberately positioned itself under civilian targets, having tunneled its way from school to mosque to hospital. When did a just war to defend the country turn into an unjust land grab? 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 not simply as a fear but as a fact. I reread Hamas’s charter of 1988; it’s an evil read. (Article Seven!)
But I also understood that Hamas is not the Palestinian people. Palestinians 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 in Ireland, it’s little wonder so many here have campaigned for decades for justice for the Palestinian people.
We know Hamas is using starvation as a weapon in the war, but now so too is Israel, and I feel revulsion for that moral failure. The government of Israel is not the nation of Israel, but the government of Israel, led by Prime Minister 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 or 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 to Gaza for journalists, and they seem deaf to the revealing rhetoric. Examples that sharpen my pen include: Israel’s heritage minister claiming that the government “is racing ahead for Gaza to be wiped out”; its defense minister and security minister arguing that no aid should be let into the territory; its finance minister vowing that “not even a grain of wheat will enter the Strip.” And now Netanyahu has announced 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, flawed, but only democratic nation in the region, is headed unless there is a dramatic change of course? Is what was once an oasis of innovation and freethinking 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 past 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 to join all who have called for a cessation of hostilities on both sides.
If you will not listen to Irish voices, then 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 to Israel’s neighbors. Listen to the more than 100,000 Israelis who protested in Tel Aviv this week for an end to the war. Listen to the hundreds of retired Israeli generals and intelligence leaders who say that Netanyahu has gone too far.
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 Israeli hostages and plead that someone rational negotiate their release—maybe someone like the imprisoned Marwan Barghouti, whom a former head of the Mossad, Efraim Halevy, described as “probably the most sane and the most qualified person” to lead the Palestinians
Our band is pledged to contribute our support by donating to Medical Aid for Palestinians. We urge Israelis, the majority of whom did not vote for Netanyahu, to demand unfettered access by professionals to deliver the crucial care needed throughout Gaza and the West Bank that they best know how to distribute, and to let enough trucks through. It will take more than 100 trucks a day to seriously address the need—more like 600—but the flooding of humanitarian aid will also undercut the black marketeering that has benefited Hamas.
Wiser heads than mine will have a view of how best to accomplish this, but surely the hostages and Gazans alike deserve a different approach—and quick.
