Glastonbury, Jewish protest and the horror of the crowd
I didn’t go to the Glastonbury Music Festival this year. Actually, I’ve never been to it. I don’t like crowds and crowd behaviour, and the festival this year attracted over 200,000 people. I also don’t like mass camping: the noise, the litter, the lack of personal space, the filthy toilets and washing facilities, the drugs and—very often—the sleeping in mud when the event is a wash-out.
Wait: there’s more that I don’t like (there usually is). Glastonbury has its roots in hippiedom: it is the great survivor of that tradition of counter-intuitive, counter-cultural outdoor musical festivals inspired by Woodstock in 1969. Why counter-intuitive? Because the best rendition of music always used to be indoors, in carefully crafted acoustic halls and chambers. Woodstock and its derivatives were only made possible because of the availability of electric amplification.
So, even though music festivals have always seemed like a glorification of the natural—they’re outdoors, under the skies, accepting of whatever the weather hurls at them, and free from bourgeois restraint and convention—they have always been predicated on the unnatural: massive speakers, massive lighting, massive carparks and massive armies of drivers who make their way there by car.
They’re predicated also on the total erasure of the individuality of the spectator. All concerts are of course group phenomena but at big festivals, the size of those groups becomes oppressive. At Glastonbury, although smaller stages like the Bimble Inn accommodate crowds of only 750, the larger stages can hold 50,000 (the Other Stage) and 30,000 (West Holts), while the main showcase, the Pyramid Stage, holds around 120,000 people, a fifth more than the largest soccer stadiums.
Some people love to feel they’re part of a huge gathering—to feel at one with everyone else. In London that feeling is shared each September by audiences who attend the Last Night of the Proms at the Royal Albert Hall, the UK’s annual festival of anglophilia. In Israel it is felt by many who pray at the Kotel (the Western Wall) in Jerusalem. On a much smaller scale, it is felt whenever one davens in a minyan.
Behaviour shared with others becomes mutually reinforcing—or that’s the idea—especially when there’s something odd about it. Stuff you wouldn’t do on your own because it would feel unnatural or eccentric or attention-seeking becomes acceptable when others are doing the same thing.
Last Saturday, a rap-punk twosome called “Bob Vylan” performed on the West Holts stage at Glastonbury. The lead singer—a Bob Marley lookalike with muscles and with the preposterously anglo-patrician name Pascal Robinson-Foster—told the crowd that a record label he’d now parted from had employed a “Zionist”, about whom he used a very offensive epithet, knowing that the audience would appreciate it, which indeed they did.
A furore has since ensued, with the police being called in to investigate his “hate speech”, questions being asked of the BBC about why its on-duty staff did not immediately pull its live-stream, and criticism from politicians of different parties. The band has also now had its American visas revoked, ahead of a planned appearance in the USA.
The focus of this attention was not on Robinson-Foster’s remarks about the record company’s employee, however, but on a chant that he started—“Death, death, to the IDF”—which the crowd joined in with enthusiastically and which was part of a longer interruption during which he called repeatedly for the Palestinians to be free, “Inshallah”, and dedicated his set to other pro-Palestinian activist bands. It was the “death, death” chorus, however, that has been seized on as an expression of antisemitic hate speech, and which is now being investigated.
It is this phrase, also, that is being misrepresented in Britain by Jewish opinion-mongers who ought to know better. First, a former editor of the Jewish Chronicle wrote in the Daily Telegraph that Robinson-Foster had called for the “blood of Jews”, and then a former (Jewish) Director of BBC Television wrote in the London Times that the singer had called for the death of Jews.
Well, he didn’t quite. He called for the death of the IDF.
Isn’t that the same thing? Not really. But isn’t the IDF made up of Jews? Yes (but also Druze and Bedouin)—but that’s not the point, and it doesn’t help to adopt the stupidest interpretation of what was being said, how ever appealing it is to a mob that doesn’t really care what is said as long as the speaker is passionate in their advocacy.
It’s very obvious what the singer’s point was: he was calling on Israel to end the apparently indiscriminate killing of Palestinians and help them seek the autonomy they yearn for. He’s not a philosopher, he’s not an articulate linguist, he’s a crude, loud-mouthed, narcissistic, show-off. You don’t get refined speech, let alone refined thought, from people who whoop to 92 dB of noise on an outdoor stage—although, it now appears, the BBC had previously hailed Robinson-Foster as an “established poet”.
What the singer said was vulgar and egregious but its meaning was obvious, as his musical partner has now tried to suggest. “To civilians of Israel,” he has said, “understand this anger is not directed at you, and don’t let your government persuade you that a call against an army is a call against the people.”
I think we can take that at face value, but our clumsy pro-Jewish campaigners have foolishly muddied the waters, making it more difficult to untangle who exactly was at fault on Saturday, and why.
In order to make much of Bob Vylan’s supposed villainy, they are saying that because the IDF is a conscript army, any attack on the IDF is an attack on all Jews. Well, it’s not—because non-Israeli Jews aren’t conscripted. It may be an attack on all Israelis but to argue this is to endorse the Palestinian argument that all Jewish citizens of Israel are legitimate targets because they all serve in the army. Very silly.
It’s silly also because we have struggled to get a workable internationally agreed definition of antisemitism, and a key point is that Israel and Jews are two different things. That distinction is important because it defends against the terrorists’ argument that Jews everywhere can legitimately be blamed for what Israel does. They can’t, but the geniuses who claim to speak on our behalf have now conflated the two again, making it appear that the distinction has no validity: that all of us in the diaspora are the IDF. Very, very silly—and yet they’re being applauded by our Jewish community because the community is also a mutually-reinforcing mass phenomenon that sucks up group opinions.
What was truly offensive about what happened at Glastonbury was not the “death, death” chant but what Robinson-Foster said about “the Zionist”, and how his words were received by the crowd. That’s what the real tell was, and what made this gathering of innocent music-lovers in the fields of Somerset look like a rally of Hitler Youth in 1930s Germany. It turns out that the festival-goers REALLY didn’t like Jews, and readily responded to the singer’s invitations to agree about how foul we all are. Very nasty.
Curiously, this aspect of the Bob Vylan outburst has been largely unreported or under-reported. A story by Fatima Al-Kassab on National Public Radio’s website ignores it, for example, by instead playing actuality of the singer’s “Free Palestine” chants and giving him the last word by quoting him as saying: “Teaching our children to speak up for the change they want and need is the only way that we make this world a better place.”
Also under-reported is the hypocrisy of the festival organizers. Eavis, the daughter of the festival’s founder, Michael Eavis, posted to Instagram on Sunday that the team was “appalled” by the band’s behavior. “Their chants very much crossed a line and we are urgently reminding everyone involved in the production of the Festival that there is no place at Glastonbury for antisemitism, hate speech, or incitement to violence,” she wrote.
She also said that everyone is welcome at Glastonbury. Really? I can’t imagine an Israeli band being well received. Six weeks ago, just thirty miles to the west, at the Bristol venue Strange Brew, the British-Jewish klezmer band Oi Va Voi got cancelled, following pressure from local pro-Palestine activists.
Oi Va Voi is a determinedly left-wing collective which, over 20 years, has performed for peace and worked in Israel with Palestinian acts but, following the protests, the venue decided to accuse the band’s Israeli singer of using ambiguous imagery on an album cover that “could come across as politically insensitive and/or offensive to the people of Palestine”.
Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood has also been cancelled by venues in Bristol and London for performing with Israeli musician Dudu Tassa.
By contrast, although there was nothing at all ambiguous about Bob Vylan being politically provocative (to say nothing of Kneecap, the band it supported, which has advocated such criminal ideas as shooting Tory politicians), the Eavis family had no difficulty hosting them, in spite of being fully aware of the problems they might cause, but showed no interest in twinning Glastonbury with the Nova music festival, which would have been an uplifting gesture.
The issues at Somerset are not issues for the police to investigate: they’re much bigger than that. They have to do with the mass culture that we belong to and what that culture finds acceptable. Political and Jewish voices are calling for the BBC’s Director General Tim Davie to resign but guillotining the BBC’s head leaves in place the staff who didn’t think there was any problem promoting live video of jolly crowds enjoying the experience of hating Israel.
And now the damage is done. As far as the masses are concerned, festival fun-lovers have been told off by self-righteous, morally blind, censorious Jews so powerful that they’ve managed to manipulate leftwing and rightwing politicians into calling the BBC to account and the authorities into seeking to punish peace-loving activist musicians.
What a disaster.
