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News - 11 August 2025

Bono fools no one with his ‘pompous, insincere’ message on Israel

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Ed Sykes

@ed_sykes


U2 singer Bono says that “uncertainty in the face of obvious complexity” long held him back from commenting on Israel’s crimes in Palestine. (It didn’t stop him taking Israel’s side, apparently.) But as more and more experts call the apartheid state’s assault on Gaza genocide, a ‘pompous, insincere’ message from Bono has impressed few.

Back in 2023, human rights expert Craig Mokhiber called Gaza the “most clear-cut case of genocide I have seen in my career”. Legal expert Francesca Albanese, meanwhile, has set out just how straightforward the ‘Israel-Palestine conflict’ is, saying:

There is an unlawful occupier [Israel], and an occupied people in perpetuity [Palestinians]. There is a state [Israel] that continues to advance what has the hallmark of settler-colonial practices, and it’s committing international crimes.

And there were some good bits in Bono’s statement. They were just sprinkled lightly into a sandwich of Israeli propaganda.

Bono: ‘calculated, man-made evil’

Bono’s 10 August statement said:

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.

He added:

when the loss of non-combatant life en masse appears so calculated… especially the deaths of children, then ‘evil’ is not a hyperbolic adjective

While he didn’t explicitly say ‘Israeli forces have manufactured famine and murdered civilians in a calculated manner’, his message implied that.

He also clarified that Palestinian people:

have for decades endured and continue to endure marginalization, oppression, occupation, and the systematic stealing of the land that is rightfully theirs.

And he called out wanted war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu, stressing that:

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.

Finally, he promised U2 would donate to Medical Aid For Palestinians.

If he’d left it at that, it would have been a decent statement, recognising Israel’s brutality and depravity against Palestinians in a context of decades of oppression. But he didn’t. And it all went downhill from there.

The propaganda sandwich

Bono consistently treated Israelis as somehow more important than Palestinians. For example, he started his statement with a focus on 7 October 2023, and only got around to mentioning Israel starving Palestinian children in paragraph *five*. He also failed to mention the vast number of children Israel has slaughtered (over 18,000 – or around one child per hour for the last 22 months.)

The singer then dropped in the controversial allegation of rape on 7 October, while failing to highlight the evidence of Israel systematically using rape as a weapon of war. And he said Palestinian fighters had “butchered” Israelis (a word he didn’t use for Israel’s murder of Palestinians) in order to “set a diabolical trap for Israel”. A trap. What about Israel’s brutal blockade of Gaza for many years before 2023? Or Israel’s longstanding general oppression of Palestinians? Or the gradual destruction of the peace process and ‘two-state solution’? Would they be traps too, pushing Palestinians to act? For Bono, apparently not.

Perhaps most ridiculously and insultingly, Bono said 7 October sought to “sow the seeds for a global intifada that U2 had glimpsed at work in Paris during the Bataclan attack in 2015”. With the latter, he was referring to a terrorist attack that had little to do with Palestine and which Palestinian resistance leaders had openly condemned; but he still chose to use the word ‘intifada’, which is normally used in the context of the Palestinian struggle against Israeli occupation.

For good measure, he added the allegation that “Hamas had deliberately positioned themselves under civilian targets”. But unsurprisingly, he was silent about Israel allowing civilians to live and party on the border of Gaza – “the world’s largest open-air prison” – and Israel’s systematic use of human shields.

Still a cheerleader for Israel… just a bit less cheery

Many people suggested remaining low key on the issue would have been better than what Bono came up with:

Bono happily jumped into the ‘diabolical trap’ of a ‘both sides’ argument, masking the reality of Israel’s colonial oppression and Palestine’s anti-colonial resistance by underplaying Israeli power and overplaying Palestinians’. Israel has been unilaterally decimating Gaza with Western support for 22 months, but Bono still thinks “a cessation of hostilities on both sides” is the right message to put out.

Maybe he should listen more to bandmate The Edge, who insisted that Israel’s “ethnic cleansing” and “colonial genocide” would never bring peace. Because as he rightly said:

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.

There can be no peace without justice. No reconciliation without recognition. And no future unless we refuse to let the past be repeated.

Featured image via the Canary





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