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When ‘nice Jewish boys and girls’ first took up the cause of Palestinian rights
(JTA) — In the four months since the Hamas attacks on Israel touched off war in Gaza, Jewish protesters have joined demonstrations in the streets of New York, San Francisco and other cities condemning Israel and demanding an immediate ceasefire.
But Jewish calls for a ceasefire haven’t only come from the far-left Jewish groups that often lead the rallies. In December, hundreds of staffers for 140 mainly progressive Jewish organizations signed a letter urging President Biden to press Israel for a ceasefire. Other Jewish leaders, including hundreds of rabbis, pushed back, signing a letter saying, “There is not broad support within the Jewish community for a ceasefire. Not now.”
These kinds of intra-communal clashes have been a signature of the Israel-Hamas war, leading to think pieces that talk of unprecedented divides within the Jewish community and of a generation of young Jews who reject what they say is a reflexively pro-Israel stance by the Jewish mainstream that doesn’t take Palestinian lives into consideration.
These divides are particularly stark, says the historian Geoffrey Levin, but they are not unprecedented. In his new book, “Our Palestine Question: Israel and American Jewish Dissent, 1948-1978,” he writes about an early, formative era before American Jewish institutions had unequivocally embraced Zionism, and when American Jewish leaders disagreed with the Israeli government over the fate of the 750,000 Palestinians displaced by Israel’s war for independence.
Many of these voices of dissent have been overlooked over the years — decades in which the largest Jewish organizations hesitated to show any daylight between their policies and Israel’s, especially on security affairs. Levin found them in the archives of the American Jewish Committee and other organizations. Documents and interviews revealed untold or mischaracterized stories of groups and individuals who were deeply concerned about the displaced Palestinians and were calling for solutions, from a binational state to two states to a “right of return,” that were being soundly rejected by Israel.
He also writes about the ways these dissenters were sidelined, whether by an American Jewish establishment that came to see its priorities and Israel’s as one and the same, by acts of Palestinian terror that shook the Diaspora to its core, or by Israeli efforts to “manage” American Jewish dissent.
“This generation is not the first American Jewish generation to think about Palestinians,” Levin told me. “This goes back to as long as there’s been the refugee issue. There have been Jews who went over there and saw things and felt like it didn’t fit with their American liberal or left-wing Jewish vision.”
Levin is assistant professor of Middle Eastern and Jewish studies at Emory University. He grew up in a “typical Reform” Jewish home outside Chicago, was president of the Hillel at Michigan State University and earned his PhD in Hebrew and Judaic Studies/History from New York University in 2019.
We spoke Thursday about Jewish attitudes toward Zionism, key moments in Jewish advocacy for Palestinian rights and how the communal struggles of the near past shed light on the present.
Our interview was edited for length and clarity.
Your book arrives among a spate of books dealing with the history of Jewish dissent over Israel and Zionism, including “The Threshold of Dissent,” by Marjorie N. Feld, “American Jews and the Movement for Justice in Palestine” by Oren Kroll-Zeldin, and “The Necessity of Exile” by Shaul Magid. Obviously they were researched and written well before Oct. 7. Have you thought about why this topic is getting so much interest in recent years?
We all have different relationships with this. I started my dissertation for what became this book in 2014. I think a lot of it is due to the collapse of the two-state solution, which as long as it was viable kept this ability for something called liberal Zionism to stay together. I also think there’s much more of a willingness within Jewish Studies for this sort of work than there was 15 years ago.
Is that a generational thing?
Partially, but for a lot of people, there is a pendulum in Israeli politics of left and right. For basically my whole adult life — I’m 34 — the right has been in power in Israel. And as Israel is going in this right-wing direction and parts of American Jewry is not, there is a kind of processing that is part of this interest in Jewish advocates of Palestinian rights.
Much of your book centers on the internal struggles of the American Jewish Committee, which you write was considered by Israelis as “the single most politically influential Jewish group in the United Sates in the 1950s.” What readers may not realize, and is a key theme in the book, is that the AJC, like the American Jewish community itself, wasn’t always the pro-Israel juggernaut we know today, but has a much more complicated relationship with Israel. It may not be apparent now, but the Jewish mainstream at this time was still conflicted about supporting a Jewish state, for a variety of reasons.
This doesn’t make sense to a lot of people today, but basically the AJC was saying, “We want to help Israel because there are Jews there, but we don’t ascribe to the more doctrinaire vision of Zionism at the time that requires Jews go back to Israel or views Jews as a nation.”
Don Peretz, second from left, who would later become an American Jewish Committee official studying Arab refugee affairs, in Acre while volunteering to aid displaced Arabs in February 1949. (Courtesy of Deborah Peretz)
Your book includes chapters on the wide variety of American Jewish dissent over Israel, well before the current era. There are American Jews who are ideologically and religiously opposed to Zionism; others who are, let’s say, prematurely pro-Palestinian but were certainly committed to the idea of a Jewish state; and activists who say Jews don’t deserve a state and certainly not in Palestine.
This is a book about people who have all these labels, who are Jewish, who care about Palestinians in a variety of ways and imagine lots of solutions. So there were anti-Zionist Jews in the ’40s and ’50s who didn’t necessarily care about Palestinians, but were anti-Zionist because of the American context and what their idea of Jewish identity is. In the ’50s and ’60s, I show this story about how some people began making the Palestinian rights issue part of their chief reasons for opposing Zionism. There are people like Rabbi Elmer Berger, executive director of the American Council for Judaism [from 1942 to 1955], who comes out of the Reform tradition and a Jewish tradition of anti-nationalism for Jews, and people like Sharon Rose, who calls herself a “nice Jewish girl from New York” and goes to Israel and rejects Zionism because of the Palestinian rights issues, in the 1970s, when it wasn’t a huge movement.
Your book covers a period in which discussion of Palestinian rights goes from pressing to nearly forbidden, and when talk of a two-state solution will come to be considered outside of the emerging American Jewish mainstream, and won’t emerge again until the Oslo era.
Yes. The scope of my book is from ’48 to ’77. But a lot of it is in the ’50s. There’s a two-year period, ’56 to ’58, where the AJC is flirting with having their own policies and their own discourse about Israel and Palestinian rights [distinct from Israel’s]. This is before America really falls in love with Israel — before “Exodus,” the book and movie, came out in 1958 and 1960 [respectively]. This is before the Six-Day War. Before this, the AJC’s letterhead about Israel actually calls itself non-Zionist, and then it kind of disappears. And so this is the story about how groups like them, which are really focused on American Jews and America more broadly, really take on defending Israel as part of their missions, because until then it wasn’t self-evident that an American Jewish advocacy group would consider that a core part of their mission.
What was the hesitation?
They had to get used to the new idea. They had to get used to Israel existing. They had to adjust to the idea that for the first time Jews are ruling over non-Jews. And so, you know, there’s quiet conversations: What does this mean for us? What does this mean for what it means to be Jewish? What does this mean for our relationship with the U.S. government?
So amid all these crosswinds, the AJC actually creates a subcommittee on the Arab refugee issue. Tell me about Don Peretz, the AJC official who cared deeply about Palestinian refugees and sought solutions in the 1950s in hopes of avoiding what would become an increasingly violent conflict.
So he’s born in 1922. His dad was a Sephardic Jew from Jerusalem who fled during World War I to the United States. The father married an Ashkenazi American Jewish woman, and Don’s born on Halloween of 1922. He gets very interested in pacifism, and while living in Queens he works for some Quaker relief efforts through the American Friends Service Committee. He’s not an ardent Zionist, like his father.
During World War II, Don doesn’t want to hold a gun so he gets trained as an interpreter and serves in Okinawa. I didn’t know that you could do this, but with his GI Bill benefits he goes to Hebrew University for a master’s degree and to connect with the land of his father’s family.
And the other thing that draws him to Hebrew University is its president, Rabbi Judah Magnes, a binationalist who supported a joint Arab-Jewish state.
Palestinian refugees line up for food at a camp in Amman, Jordan in 1955. (Three Lions/Getty Images)
Peretz was in what became Israel during the war for independence, but didn’t join the fighting.
He becomes a journalist and somehow gets abducted or arrested by an Arab Palestinian militia in Jerusalem. Eventually they find out he likes Magnes and they let him go, even though he is a Jew.
But the war has soiled a lot of his views about Israel and Zionism.This extreme nationalism sort of disgusts him. He leaves but he comes back when he finds out the Quaker American Friends Service Committee is devoted to helping Palestinian Arabs who are displaced, who were not allowed to return to their villages by the new Israeli government, even though they remained in this new state of Israel. He’s living in Haifa, helping people in the Galilee with food and clothing for some 40,000 people. People want him to stay and the Arabs want him to continue helping but he leaves to earn a PhD at Columbia University. And he completes in 1955 what to my knowledge is the first dissertation anywhere on the question of Israel and the Palestinian Arabs. It’s not meant to really push one way or another but to understand this issue deeply. And he impresses the American Jewish Committee.
The AJC actually creates a subcommittee on the Arab refugees.
They hire him in 1956 to work on a relief initiative to help Palestinian Arab refugees who are outside of Israel, or in Arab countries. American Christian groups are talking about the Palestinian refugee issue. Arab diplomats are talking about it. A CIA-backed group is talking about it and they [the AJC] feel like they can’t ignore it.
The head of the committee he’s working with is Harold Riegelman, the former Republican mayoral nominee of New York City, a former postmaster general. These are people who have influence. And the leader of the American Jewish Committee, Irving Engel, he’s proud of this idea and announces it in papers like the ones you write for. No one’s upset about it. I couldn’t find anyone attacking it publicly.
But who are upset about it? Israeli diplomats. I got into the primary sources, letters between diplomats in Hebrew, and I found that they didn’t want American Jews to have an independent voice on these issues. They thought the problem would go away if you don’t discuss it. And that’s often been the dynamic: Just don’t discuss these Palestinian-related issues, because by discussing it there might be pressure for some sort of solution that Israel doesn’t like.
The AJC put out a pamphlet on the refugee problem that did not rule out the return of many refugees to their former villages, at a time when this was certainly not the policy of Zionist groups and Israel. Did the Israelis make their displeasure known?
They tried to ruin Don Peretz’s career. They want to get the AJC to fire him. But then the [Suez Crisis] breaks out and people are distracted. The AJC doesn’t fire him, but they said, “Look, we’ll have Israeli diplomats look over everything he writes.” He has this book coming out that will be the first scholarly attempt to objectively look at Israel’s policies toward Palestinians, and the AJC says, “Don, we don’t have the budget for you. It can be part-time,” and he says, “I think I’ll leave.”
He becomes involved in a lot of different efforts later on as an academic and writer. And after leftists like Noam Chomsky take up this issue after‘’67, he’s involved with them. When Breira, the first sort of American Jewish attempt to really push for what we call the two-state solution, emerges, he served like a senior figure, giving them academic credibility.
Let’s talk about Breira, the first national American Jewish organization to advocate for a Palestinian state, and how it was driven out of existence in 1977 by a Jewish mainstream that accused it of being a “front” for the Palestine Liberation Organization. Your book got me thinking about the difference between them and the “ceasefire now” Jewish activists of today who are either anti-Zionist or non-Zionist. The activists in Breira were part of some of the Zionist organizations and institutions that rejected them.
They tried positioning themselves as nice Jewish girls and boys, and some became part of the establishment, like John Ruskay [who would go on to head UJA-Federation of New York], and a lot of them were burned by this experience. A lot of them had spent time in Israel. As I show in my book, they’re trying to say, “Look, we’re just saying what Israelis on the left are saying about Palestinian self-determination and like them we are meeting with PLO moderates.” But that’s not enough to protect them. They get called traitors and all the worst things that you can imagine that really hurt a young American Jew. And the organization falls apart.
This was when it was illegal in Israel to talk to the PLO.
No, it actually wasn’t at that time. It became illegal because of these sorts of meetings.
I remember when, once the Israeli government began talking with the PLO in the early 1990s and supporting some form of autonomy for the Palestinians, talk of a two-state solution became mainstream. Tell me a little bit more about how the discourse around Israel has changed with the fading of the two-state solution.
When I was first involved in Israel stuff on campus, Ehud Olmert was prime minister, but since then there’s been Benjamin Netanyahu, who’s been working against the two-state solution for as long as people who are my age or younger have been engaged with this. I’m old enough that I remember the Second Intifada and Israeli victimhood and the terror of that but people who are younger than me don’t think that’s important.
And you write about the disillusionment among many young Jews today, perhaps especially among the kinds of people who visit Israel and grew up in Zionist homes. You write, “surprise and disillusionment often emerge from real, meaningful exposure.”
My generation, millennials and Gen Z, were far more likely to have gone to Israel than the [Baby Boomer] generation because of all the sponsored trips, like Birthright. We were far more likely to be reading Israeli news websites versus [Baby Boomers]. I’m more likely to know Israelis because there was a program to send them to our summer camps and Hillels. I’m also more likely to know Palestinians because there’s a lot more in the U.S. or because I went over there. I’m more likely to have engaged with Israeli culture because there’s so much on Netflix. I think that’s part of the discomfort that this generation is having, some of which leads to activism. It’s a deeper understanding that the direction Israel is going in doesn’t really fit with the typical, liberal, left-leaning American Jewish mentality.
Don Peretz in the 1950s, when he advised AJC leaders on Middle East policy and wrote numerous reports for the group. (Courtesy of Deborah Peretz)
Which you see in street protests against the war in Gaza, which are often led by Jewish anti-Zionist and non-Zionist groups.
Right now, there’s a lot of attention on these big sort of [Jewish pro-Palestinian] protests, and they’re notable. You haven’t seen anything this big before. But there’s lots of Jews who are uncomfortable with Israel’s policies or speaking about Israel who are totally being mischaracterized. One of the blurbs for my book is from Derek Penslar, historian at Harvard and the winner of the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Association for Israel Studies, but he is now being painted as someone who’s very radical. So I think in some ways you have Jews who are rejecting any aspect of Zionism in greater numbers than ever before, but there are people who are trying to be nuanced and trying to raise things in a way that’s ultimately aiming to be good for Israel and Zionism.
Besides adding to the scholarship on this period in American Jewish history, what impact do you hope your book might make?
I finished this book a year before Oct. 7. What I do want is for people to understand how to have more empathy for each other and understand why people view things the way they do. I want people to understand the Palestinian dilemma and how the Palestinians advocate for themselves and others in a way that’s not antisemitic. I want American Jews to have greater tolerance for a variety of views within the community. A lot of the people in my book are what we call experts who spent lots of time in the region and come to these conclusions not because they hate Israel or Judaism or themselves, but because they’re interested in Judaism or Zionism.
I didn’t want to end without asking about how the past few months have been for you, your students and colleagues on campus. Emory has a pretty sizable Jewish community. What changed for you and them after Oct. 7?
It’s been a challenging time for anyone connected with the region after Oct. 7. I am a Jewish Studies professor, I’m a Middle East Studies professor. The number one thing, ever since this broke out, is that I’ve been trying to be as attentive as I can to the needs of my students, whether they’re Muslim, whether they’re Israeli, whether they’re Jewish, whoever is feeling very emotional at this point. I spent all of October and November really trying to meet the students, be a resource for them, talk to my faculty colleagues. Jewish students were really disturbed by the sort of social media posts by people they knew and the lack of people who reached out to them.
When I came back to class on Oct. 10, I talked about the people I know who are affected. I know someone who was killed, and their son who lost his daughter. I know someone who has family in Gaza. And I asked, how are you? How can we make this campus a place that’s for everyone? And I’m trying to communicate that to the university that we need to prioritize the needs of all of our students who are deeply affected by this. But it’s been hard sometimes to communicate in the university setting that you need to put all of your students first. Put aside donors, put aside the news, just, like, meet and talk with the students. Your Jewish students aren’t okay. Your Muslim students aren’t okay.
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Former Australian Nurses Charged Over Threatening Viral Video Banned from NDIS
Illustrative: Supporters of Hamas gather for a rally in Melbourne, Australia. Photo: Reuters/Joel Carrett
Two former Australian nurses who were charged over a viral video in which they allegedly threatened to kill Israeli patients have been banned from working under the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS), four months after being suspended from their jobs at Bankstown-Lidcombe Hospital in Sydney.
Earlier this year, Ahmad Rashad Nadir and Sarah Abu Lebdeh, both 27, gained international attention after they were seen in an online video posing as doctors and making inflammatory statements during a night shift conversation with Israeli influencer Max Veifer.
The widely circulated footage, which sparked international outrage and condemnation, showed Abu Lebdeh declaring she would refuse to treat Israeli patients and instead kill them, while Nadir made a throat-slitting gesture and claimed he had already killed many.
Following the incident, New South Wales authorities suspended their nursing registrations and banned them from working as nurses nationwide. They are now also prohibited from working with or providing any services — paid or unpaid — to NDIS participants for two years.
This latest ban, which took effect on May 9, applies nationwide and prohibits Nadir and Abu Lebdeh from working with NDIS participants or performing any role for or on behalf of NDIS providers in any Australian state or territory.
Abu Lebdeh was charged with federal offenses, including threatening violence against a group and using a carriage service to threaten, menace, and harass. If convicted, she faces up to 22 years in prison.
Nadir was charged with federal offenses, including using a carriage service to menace, harass, or cause offense, as well as possession of a prohibited drug.
Currently, both of them remain free on bail and have not yet entered any pleas, with a court appearance scheduled for July 29. They’ve been prohibited from leaving Australia or using social media while their cases proceed.
According to Nadir’s lawyer, the video was captured “without the consent and knowledge” of his client, and he intends to argue for its exclusion from court.
“We will be challenging the admissibility of the video recording because it was a private conversation which was recorded by the person overseas without my client’s consent and without his knowledge,” Nadir’s lawyer said. “That video recording was made secretly overseas and was unlawfully obtained.”
This incident, which drew international attention, occurred amid a surge of antisemitic acts across Australia since the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza began in October 2023, with Jewish institutions targeted in arson attacks and businesses defaced.
Antisemitism spiked to record levels in Australia — especially in Sydney and Melbourne, which are home to some 85 percent of the country’s Jewish population — following Hamas’s Oct. 7 atrocities, with the escalation continuing amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and Iran.
According to a report from the Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ), the country’s Jewish community experienced over 2,000 antisemitic incidents between October 2023 and September 2024, more than quadrupling from 495 in the prior 12 months.
The number of antisemitic physical assaults in Australia rose from 11 in 2023 to 65 in 2024. The level of antisemitism for the past year was six times the average of the preceding 10 years.
The post Former Australian Nurses Charged Over Threatening Viral Video Banned from NDIS first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Boulder Firebomber Charged With Murder Following Death of Victim
Boulder attack suspect Mohamed Sabry Soliman poses for a jail booking photograph after his arrest in Boulder, Colorado, June 2, 2025. Photo: Boulder Police Department/Handout via REUTERS
A victim of the antisemitic Boulder, Colorado firebombing died on Monday, prompting local law enforcement to charge suspect Mohamed Soliman with murder in the first degree.
“Severe injuries” caused the death of Karen Diamond, 82, the Boulder County District Attorney’s Office (BCDA) said on Monday in a statement. She was one of 13 people injured when Soliman hurled Molotov cocktails into a crowd of Jewish people who were participating in a demonstration to raise awareness of the hostages who remain imprisoned by Hamas in Gaza. Her death adds five new charges to the over 200 federal and state criminal charges which could lock Soliman away for over 600 years.
“These additional charges, including the counts of First Degree Murder, are being filed after consultation with the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the Boulder Police Department,” said the DA’s office, adding that it “continues to work closely with federal, state, and local partners in the strong response to this attack. We stand united against acts of antisemitism and hate.”
“This horrific attack has now claimed the life of an innocent person who was beloved by her family and friends,” said Michal Dougherty, district attorney of Boulder County. “Our hearts are with the Diamond family during this incredibly difficult time. Our office will fight for justice for the victims, their loved ones, and the community. Part of what makes Colorado special is that people come together in response to a tragedy; I know that the community will continue to unite in supporting the Diamond family and all the victims of this attack.”
Prosecutors said in May that Soliman yelled “Free Palestine” during the attack, and, according to court documents, told investigators that he wanted to “kill all Zionist people.”
That incident came less than two weeks after a gunman murdered two Israeli embassy staffers in Washington, DC, while they were leaving an event at the Capital Jewish Museum hosted by the American Jewish Committee. The suspect charged for the double murder, 31-year-old Elias Rodriguez from Chicago, also yelled “Free Palestine” while being arrested by police after the shooting, according to video of the incident. The FBI affidavit supporting the criminal charges against Rodriguez stated that he told law enforcement he “did it for Gaza.”
In Garret Park, Maryland, a middle-aged man, Clift A. Seferlis, was recently arrested by federal authorities for sending a series of threatening messages to Jewish organizations in Philadelphia. Seferlis referenced the war in Gaza in his communications.
“The Victim Jewish Institution 1 received numerous additional messages since April 1, 2024, which contained a threat to physically destroy the institution,” the US Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania said in a statement. “Prior to the receipt of the May 7, 2025, mailing, Victim Jewish Institution 1 and its employees had received very similar-looking letters, believed to have been sent by Seferlis, which referenced Victim Jewish Institution 1’s ‘many big open windows,’ ‘Kristallnacht,’ ‘anger and rage,’ and a future need to ‘rebuild’ the institution following its destruction.”
Another antisemitic incident motivated by anti-Zionism occurred in San Francisco, where Juan Diaz-Rivas, Alejandro Flores-Lamas, and others law enforcement is working to identify, allegedly beat up a Jewish victim in the middle of the night. Diaz-Rivas and Flores-Lamas, along with their associates, approached the victim while shouting “F—ck the Jews, Free Palestine,” according to the office of the San Francis district attorney.
“[O]ne of them punched the victim, who fell to the ground, hit his head and lost consciousness,” the district attorney’s office said in a statement. “Allegedly, Mr. Diaz-Rivas and others in the group continued to punch and kick the victim while he was down. A worker at a nearby business heard the altercation and antisemitic language and attempted to intervene. While trying to help the victim, he was kicked and punched.”
According to data released by the Anti-Defamation League’s (ADL) latest Audit of Antisemitic Incidents in April, antisemitism in the US is surging to break “all previous annual records.”
In 2024 alone, the ADL recorded 9,354 antisemitic incidents — an average of 25.6 a day — across the US, an eruption of hatred not recorded in the nearly thirty years since the organization began tracking such data in 1979. Incidents of harassment, vandalism, and assault all increased by double digits, and for the first time ever a majority of outrages — 58 percent — were related to the existence of Israel as the world’s only Jewish state.
The Algemeiner parsed the ADL data, finding dramatic rises in incidents on college campuses, which saw the largest growth in 2024. The 1,694 incidents tallied by the ADL amounted to an 84 percent increase over the previous year. Additionally, antisemites were emboldened to commit more offenses in public in 2024 than they did in 2023, perpetrating 19 percent more attacks on Jewish people, pro-Israel demonstrators, and businesses perceived as being Jewish-owned or affiliated with Jews.
“In 2024, hatred toward Israel was a driving force behind antisemitism across the US, with more than half of all antisemitic incidents referencing Israel or Zionism,” Oren Segal, ADL senior vice president for counter-extremism and intelligence, said when the report was released. “These incidents, along with all those documented in the audit, serve as a clear reminder that silence is not an option. Good people must stand up, push back, and confront antisemitism wherever it appears. And that starts with understanding what fuels it and learning to recognize it in all its forms.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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US State Department Revokes Visas of UK Punk Rap Act Bob Vylan Amid Outrage Over Duo’s Chants of ‘Death to the IDF’
Bob Vylan music duo performance at Glastonbury Festival (Source: FLIKR)
The US State Department has revoked the visas for the English punk rap duo Bob Vylan amid ongoing outrage over their weekend performance at the Glastonbury Festival, in which the pair chanted “Death to the IDF.”
The State Department’s decision to cancel their visas would preclude a planned fall concert tour of the US by the British rappers.
“The [US State Department] has revoked the US visas for the members of the Bob Vylan band in light of their hateful tirade at Glastonbury, including leading the crowd in death chants. Foreigners who glorify violence and hatred are not welcome visitors to our country,” Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau wrote on X/Twitter on Monday.
During a June 28 set at Glastonbury Festival, Bob Vylan’s Pascal Robinson-Foster ignited a firestorm by leading the crowd in chants of “Death, death, to the IDF,” referring to the Israel Defense Forces. He also complained about working for a “f—ing Zionist” during the set.
The video of the performance went viral, sparking outrage across the globe.
The BBC, which streamed the performance live, issued an on‑screen warning but continued its broadcast, prompting criticism by government officials for failing to cut the feed.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer and festival organizers condemned the IDF chant as hate speech and incitement to violence. The Israeli Embassy in London denounced the language as “inflammatory and hateful.”
“Millions of people tuned in to enjoy Glastonbury this weekend across the BBC’s output but one performance within our livestreams included comments that were deeply offensive,” the BBC said in a statement following the event.
“These abhorrent chants, which included calls for the death of members of the Israeli Defense Forces … have no place in any civil society,” Leo Terrell, Chair of the US Department of Justice Task Force to Combat Antisemitism, declared Sunday in a statement posted on X.
Citing the act’s US tour plans, Terrell said his task force would be “reaching out to the U.S. Department of State on Monday to determine what measures are available to address the situation and to prevent the promotion of violent antisemitic rhetoric in the United States.”
British authorities, meanwhile, have launched a formal investigation into Bob Vylan’s controversial appearance at Glastonbury. Avon and Somerset Police confirmed they are reviewing footage and working with the Crown Prosecution Service to determine whether the performance constitutes a hate crime or incitement to violence.
United Talent Agency (UTA), one of the premier entertainment talent agencies, dropped the duo, claming “antisemitic sentiments expressed by the group were utterly unacceptable.”
The band defended their performance on social media as necessary protest, stating that “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.”
The post US State Department Revokes Visas of UK Punk Rap Act Bob Vylan Amid Outrage Over Duo’s Chants of ‘Death to the IDF’ first appeared on Algemeiner.com.