Brian Eno’s Selective Outrage: The erasure of Jewish history, Israeli reality, and the moral complexity of a decades-long conflict

(essay)

Musician Brian Eno has compared "Racist" Israel to the Ku Klux Klan

British musician Brian Eno recently sent an open letter to David Byrne about Gaza. In it, he wrote:

“I saw a picture of a weeping Palestinian man holding a bag of meat. It was his son… killed by an Israeli missile attack… I suddenly thought it could have been one of my kids… I read the UN said Israel might be guilty of war crimes… Why does America continue its blind support of this one-sided exercise in ethnic cleansing?”

He described checkpoints, settlements, sewage dumping, and “endless humiliations.” He wrote, “Israel wants the process but not the peace… and when Palestinians erupt with their pathetic fireworks, they get hammered and shredded… because Israel ‘has a right to defend itself’ — whereas Palestine clearly doesn’t.”

The letter is vivid, emotional, and deliberately unbalanced. It paints in only one color, while the reality — as it has always been in the Middle East — is multi-layered, and morally tangled.

Mr. Eno,

With respect for your musical gifts, I feel the need to respond to your widely shared letter to David Byrne, which I first saw in the pages of Billboard. As I do, I wonder if your remarkable ability to focus on tone and texture — the emotional and physical dimensions of a single piece of music — also fosters a certain myopia when it comes to the Jewish state. Or perhaps it stems from something darker.

Your letter has the immediacy of a protest placard. The trouble is, you’ve taken a brutal, decades-long conflict and reduced it to a morality play with one villain, one victim, and zero complexity.

You accuse Israel of “ethnic cleansing” when Hamas’s founding charter explicitly calls for the elimination of Jews — not just Israelis, but Jews everywhere. You describe the rockets fired into Israel as “pathetic fireworks” without mentioning that they are Qassam, Katyusha, and Grad rockets — the majority unguided, but some Iranian-supplied precision missiles — all packed with shrapnel and ball bearings to maximize civilian casualties. Since October 7, more than 19,000 of these rockets have been fired into Israel, aimed at apartment blocks, shopping centers, and kindergartens.

They are routinely launched from schoolyards, hospital courtyards, and residential neighborhoods, deliberately using civilians as shields. You show checkpoints, but omit the suicide bombings, blown-up buses, and café massacres — yes Brian, “bags of meat” too, with parts of Jewish men, women, and children — that made them necessary. Strip away that context, as you have, and an uninformed reader could easily conclude that Israelis are simply a cruel people.

This same moral selectivity can be seen in much of the press coverage. Take the Al-Ahli hospital explosion on October 17. Within minutes, major outlets — including the New York Times — amplified Hamas’s claim that an Israeli airstrike had killed hundreds. Photos of charred bodies circulated globally before any investigation was complete. Within a day, independent analysts and U.S. intelligence confirmed that the blast was caused by a misfired Palestinian rocket launched from Gaza.

Yet the initial false narrative remained burned into the public imagination. The Times quietly altered its headline and story, but the damage was done — a ready-made blood libel for millions who will never see the correction. As was the case with the recent photo of the starving boy, seen by millions and followed only by a tepid retraction noting that his condition was caused by a genetic disorder — not by starvation.

You compare Jews returning to their ancestral homeland to the Ku Klux Klan. I know that’s hyperbole, but of an ignorant and dangerous sort. It collapses three thousand years of Jewish history into grotesque caricature. It erases the reality that Jews have been indigenous to the land of Israel since before the rise of Rome — Yemenite Jews fleeing pogroms, Ethiopian Jews rescued from famine, Soviet Jews escaping state antisemitism — all Am Yisrael, with roots in a land older than almost every nation on the map.

In your letter, you shower praise on UNRWA without mentioning that over a dozen of its employees participated directly in the October 7 pogrom. Others stored weapons in UNRWA schools, dug tunnels beneath classrooms, and held hostages in facilities marked with the blue UN flag. In its classrooms, children are taught that “treachery and disloyalty are the nature of the Jews. Beware of them” (7th-grade Islamic Education, Palestinian Authority curriculum). Ninth-graders are taught: “The enemies of Islam are the Jews. The Prophet killed them. And so must we.” These are not fringe extremists — this is the official curriculum, funded by foreign taxpayers and laundered through UNRWA as “education.” Yet, there is no comment about this from you.

You say Israel “wants the process but not the peace.” History suggests otherwise. Oslo, Camp David, Taba, Annapolis — each time, Israel offered deep territorial concessions, sometimes near-total withdrawals. Each time, the response was either “no” or renewed violence. This rejectionism was codified long before Hamas came to power. After Israel’s victory in the 1967 Six-Day War, Arab leaders gathered in Khartoum and issued the infamous “Three No’s”: no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, and no negotiations with Israel. For Hamas, “process” is not a path to peace but a pause to rearm and reposition — something it has demonstrated again and again.

You ask why Americans continue to support Israel. The main reason is identification — recognition of shared values. Both nations are imperfect, self-critical democracies that uphold freedoms some, perhaps like you, take for granted: a free press, an independent judiciary, women and minorities in positions of authority, open debate, and the right to peacefully dissent without fear of imprisonment, torture, or execution — protections virtually absent among Israel’s neighbors. Americans see in Israel a society fighting to survive in a region where those values are rare.

The Shoah too, is part of the moral backdrop, as is the return of a people to their ancestral home after two millennia of dispersion and persecution. But Americans also know that Israel has given the world innumerable tangible benefits: medical breakthroughs like the first FDA-approved drug to slow Alzheimer’s progression; drip irrigation that feeds arid lands; cybersecurity that safeguards the global internet; trauma medicine that has saved American soldiers; agricultural innovations that help feed millions; solar energy advances used from California to Kenya; water desalination technology that has turned desert into farmland; search-and-rescue expertise deployed to disaster zones worldwide; and emergency field hospitals that have treated earthquake victims in Haiti, Nepal, and Turkey.

And yes — war is cruel, full of horrors on all sides. But it is too easy to single out Israel while ignoring its reality: a tiny democracy bordered by groups and regimes who openly vow to wipe it off the map, a vow made literal on October 7, 2023. That reality informs every decision it makes, whether you approve of it or not.

Indeed, you saw human cruelty on your visit to Israel and the West Bank — and yes, cruelty exists. But you didn’t mention the cruelty of teaching five-year-olds to dress as suicide bombers. You didn’t mention the practice of hiding command centers under maternity wards. You didn’t mention that the Palestinian leadership has rejected every opportunity to create a functioning, peaceful state alongside Israel, because their true aim — stated openly in Arabic — is not coexistence, but conquest. And most glaringly, you didn’t once mention the bestial horror visited on Israelis on October 7, 2023. Why is that? I ask that, not as a rhetorical question, but one that demands an answer.

If you want to help Palestinians, as I do, I urge you to

• Use your voice to demand that every hostage be released, unconditionally.

• Call on the Palestinian Authority to hold elections for the first time in nearly two decades.

• Tell the regimes that bankroll Hamas to stop turning Gaza into a launchpad for war.

• Advocate for an end to the corruption that has siphoned billions in foreign aid away from infrastructure, jobs, and schools.

Outrage aimed only at Israel and America is not moral clarity. It is moral selectivity. Thankfully, there are those who still know the difference.