“Death, Death to the IDF”– a counter-revolutionary slogan

There has been a big media furore in Britain about the rap group Bob Vylan leading a chant at the Glastonbury festival: “Death Death to the IDF”. The BBC livestreamed the event and have had to issue an apology for not cutting it off, since the slogan could be officially classified as “hate speech” or “incitement to violence”.

Revolutionaries, internationalists, aren’t concerned with the BBC’s legal issues, and we don’t doubt that the impending police “investigation” into Vylan and Kneecap’s sets is yet another expression of the increasingly repressive attitude of the British state.

But we are against the “death to the IDF” slogan because it is counter-revolutionary. It is accompanied by the waving of Palestinian flags and it can only mean that all soldiers of the Israeli army deserve death at the hands of the armed Palestinian nationalist gangs, proxies of Iranian imperialism. Contrast this to the slogans of the workers’ movement towards troops dragged into imperialist war: “turn the guns the other way”, “fraternisation”, “formation of workers’ and soldiers’ councils”. In short, turn imperialist war into proletarian revolution in both camps: the dismantling of all bourgeois armies and national states, the construction of a world without borders.

The principal problem facing proletarians in Israel and Palestine today is that over a century of mobilisation and indoctrination by both Zionism and Palestinian nationalism has made such slogans unrealisable without a major development of the class struggle on a world scale. But we can certainly denounce all those, even when they pose as socialists and revolutionaries, whose activities and slogans serve to spread the plague of nationalism. We can certainly work towards the development of a pole of internationalists willing to stand up for the real goals of the proletarian revolution. Such a stance means intransigent opposition to all states or factions engaged in the current imperialist war in the Middle East: the state of Israel and the USA on the one side, and Iran, Hamas and Hizbollah on the other. 

Bob Vylan’s chant was supposedly raised as a gesture of solidarity with the rap group Kneecap. We aren’t going to comment on the lyrical skills of Bob Vylan or Kneecap. But they suit each other politically, since Kneecap distinguishes itself by draping itself in Irish flags, raising chants in support of Hamas and Hezbollah, and bearing a name which reminds us of the most common form of repression against all forms of dissent in the areas ruled by the IRA: crippling their victims by shooting them in the knee. And this was always in fitting continuity with one of the founding counter-revolutionary actions of the IRA: the suppression of the workers’ strikes and embryonic councils that appeared in Ireland in 1921-22 as part of the world-wide revolutionary wave[1].

Amos, June 2025