When “Fu*k Israel” Appears at One of America’s Most Popular Music Events

(Coachella and the Theater of the Big Lie — essay)

At this year’s Coachella, a Northern Irish hip-hop group—which I won’t deign to name (why give them free publicity?)—took the stage and soon began a chant:
“Free, Free—”
The crowd answered on cue:
“Palestine.”
Over and over again. Louder each time.

Then came the message, projected across massive screens:
“Free Palestine. Fuck Israel.”
The crowd went wild.

It was raucous, euphoric—and deeply disturbing.

First and foremost, these men are professional performers. They know exactly how to grab an audience’s attention. They’re savvy provocateurs who understand what a naive, young, ill-informed crowd wants: tribal affiliation, seduction, powerful bass lines, and the optics of morality—without the burden of paying the price for holding real moral values. They didn’t come to challenge the audience. They came to flatter them. They handed them a chant, a cause, and the Jews—a familiar enemy that crops up in the world’s dark imagination every 70 to 100 years. It had all the elements of a movement, minus the need to think.

This was a carefully curated theatrical event in which Israelis—and by extension, the overwhelming majority of Jews around the world who support Israel—were being labeled genocidal. The bitter irony didn’t seem to faze the crowd, who roared with approval when the words “Fuck Israel” appeared in massive letters behind the band.

What irony?

The memory of the brutal massacre at the nearly identical Nova music festival was completely erased. The rapes, the torture, the kidnappings—gone. October 7 vanished into the desert air, replaced by an easy-to-chant slogan and a false sense of righteousness. No mention of Hamas. No mention of the hostages. No complexity. Just one message: Israel is the oppressive villain, Hamas and its supporters are the righteous defenders of freedom and justice. And anyone who says otherwise? Suspect.

The Irish band trades on the ahistorical equivalence between the British occupation of Ireland and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It’s a seductive analogy—especially for those who know little about either. But it’s absolutely asinine. And here’s why:

Britain was a colonial power that occupied Ireland for centuries. It stripped the Irish of their language, their sovereignty, and often their dignity. Israel is not a colonial implant—it is the historic homeland of the Jewish people, reconstituted after the Holocaust, a tiny drop of land surrounded by oceans of hostile forces from the moment of its rebirth. To call Israelis colonizers is not just historically inaccurate—it is a blood libel rebranded for the tastes of the American music festival crowd.

And the crowd cheered. Loudly. Not in sorrow. Not in reflection. But in orgiastic ecstasy.

They weren’t responding to ideas—they were responding to a groove. To a good feeling. To the unerring certainty of belonging. That’s the seduction of a chant: it asks only for a big mouth, not an expansive mind.

When I saw the “Free Palestine / Fuck Israel” sign on social media, I couldn’t help but ask myself:

What if Coachella had been overrun by Hamas just two and a half years ago?

What if those same festival-goers—these same young fans—had been hunted down in porta-potties, raped and genitally mutilated beside their friends, burned alive in their cars, or dragged into tunnels to be paraded as trophies?
Would they be chanting “Fuck Israel”?
Would they be cheering for the men who did it?

No. They would be screaming for justice. Screaming for rescue. Not just for show, but in a real, visceral way. They wouldn’t be thinking about the Irish band—a stand-in for real humanitarianism and its one-size-fits-all “justice” slogans. They would be thinking about real war, real brutality, real loss, real blood—their own. They would know firsthand the scent of death, which infests the nostrils and then the mind. They would know a nightmare that never ends. Not a rock performance where chanting along with the lead singer is mistaken for an act of actual justice.

And that, precisely, is what makes this sort of theater not only grotesque—but dangerous.

I can only imagine what Jewish festival-goers must have felt in the midst of those animalistic chants—so reminiscent of others from the 1930s. Chants that history would later regret.

The Irish band knows better. They know the power of rhythm. They know the allure of unearned certainty. And they know that when you offer a large crowd the chance to feel righteous without risk, they’ll take it. Every time. I don’t blame only them. Everyone needs to make a living—and God knows, that’s exactly what they were doing up there: likely earning many thousands of dollars for the set.

They also know what it means to lead a crowd in rhythmic unison against the world’s only Jewish state. As adept songwriters, they understand how history rhymes. They might even understand how dangerous those rhymes become when everyone is shouting and no one is thinking.

But do you think they give a damn?

The crowd is worked up, the band’s on fire, and their performance check has already cleared.
“Oppressor, oppressed”—sing it any way you like.
The crowd eats it up.