At first glance, the images from Glastonbury look almost joyful—sunlit fields filled with music and movement, flags raised high in the summer breeze, tens of thousands dancing to the beat of a festival that claims to celebrate art, peace, and resistance. But beneath the surface, something darker unfolded.
“Death, death to the IDF,” chanted the crowd, led by the punk duo Bob Vylan, whose words rang out not from a fringe stage, but from one of the festival’s main platforms. It was broadcast live on the BBC. That same night, the band’s lead singer posted a selfie online, grinning smugly, a spoonful of vegan ice cream in hand. “While Zionists are crying on socials,” he wrote, “I’ve just had a late night (vegan) ice cream.”
What was this? Not protest. Not performance. This was a ritual humiliation—one of those public spectacles that history remembers not for its artistry, but for its hatred. And it did not end with Bob Vylan. Next came “Kneecap,” an Irish rap group named for a form of paramilitary punishment, whose members, just weeks earlier, had waved the Hezbollah flag on stage and shouted praises of Hamas. They, too, were welcomed to the Glastonbury stage, cheered by a crowd that, in other contexts, prides itself on “anti-racism.”
This is not a protest gone too far. It is a movement returning to form. What we saw at Glastonbury was not criticism of a government or resistance to an occupation. It was something far older, far deeper, and far more dangerous: the ritualized performance of antisemitism, now reborn in the language of liberation.
Let us say this clearly: the target that night was not the Israeli government. It was not the IDF. It was the Jew. Not a specific Jew, but the archetypal Jew—the imagined enemy who lives in the minds of those who need someone to blame for the world’s brokenness.
We have seen this play before. We saw it in medieval Europe, where Jews were blamed for plagues they did not cause. We saw it in the beer halls of Weimar Germany, where cries of Jewish conspiracies rose in tandem with economic desperation. We saw it in Soviet Russia, where “Zionists” became code for all manner of national enemies.
We are told that these chants are not about Jews. That “Free Palestine” is a movement for justice, not for erasure. But if that were true, why are the chants not directed at Hamas when it slaughters civilians? Why do they not mourn the Palestinian children whose deaths are exploited by the very regimes that caused them? Why are Jews, thousands of miles from the battlefield—students, artists, shop owners—being confronted in the streets of London, Paris, New York and LA and asked to explain themselves under the threat of violence?
The answer is chilling in its clarity: because this is not about Palestine. Not anymore.
What we are witnessing is the convergence of two ideological forces—each dangerous in its own right, but fused into something far more volatile. On one side is Islamism, an absolutist theocratic worldview that sacralizes violence, glorifies martyrdom, and has long nurtured a virulent hatred of Jews that predates the State of Israel by centuries. On the other is a new secular fundamentalism, a kind of cultural Maoism, which divides the world into the oppressed and the oppressor, deems moral nuance a form of betrayal, and insists that history must be purged of impurity to create a utopian future.
Together, they form a moral insurgency against Jewish existence.
Let us not misunderstand the goals. This movement is not trying to change Israeli policy. It is not trying to promote Palestinian self-determination. If it were, it would denounce Hamas for using Palestinian children as shields. It would grieve for Israeli victims, too. It would embrace coexistence, not exclusion. Instead, it aims to break the Jewish spine—to render us so exhausted by accusations, so afraid of confrontation, so desperate to be accepted, that we eventually shrink into silence.
This is not protest. This is pogrom. And it comes not in boots, but in memes. Not in pamphlets, but in playlists.
And here, the contrast is unbearable.
When Hamas attacked Israel on October 7th, they stormed a music festival. The Nova Festival was everything Glastonbury pretends to be: a celebration of peace, music, coexistence. Young Israelis and international guests danced to trance music under desert skies, many of them secular, many of them left-wing, many of them peace activists. They were not armed. They were not occupying. They were dancing. They were singing. They were alive.
And then they were hunted.
Some were executed in their tents. Others were gunned down while fleeing. Dozens were kidnapped. A few were raped and burned. A music festival—intended to gather joy, healing, and community—was transformed into a slaughter.
Glastonbury, meanwhile, has become a staging ground not for peace, but for performance rage—for chanting mobs and ideological cosplay, where terror is aestheticized and antisemitism is euphemized.
Compare the two.
At Nova: music, gathering, unity, then massacre.
At Glastonbury: music, gathering, incitement, then applause.
That is the world turned upside down.
So what do we do?
Yes, we stand. Yes, we speak. But we also must see. We must see what this moment is showing us about the age we live in: that even the most sacred human impulses—creativity, beauty, celebration—can be corrupted when the story is poisoned. That even a song can become a sword when it is wielded in hatred.
As Jews, we have always known this. We are a people of song and silence, of mourning and resilience. Our response must be not just defiance, but sanctification.
Let the world chant. We will build.
Let them shout death. We will choose life.
Let them desecrate festivals. We will redeem them—with joy, with memory, with Jewish pride that no stage can erase and no hashtag can silence.