Hate and the limits of empathy

Whether or not the British rapper Bobby Vylan's call for"death to the IDF" at Glastonbury constituted hate speech, the crowd's reflexive adoption of his chant is deeply worrying.

I can’t get the images out of my mind – not the ones of Bobby Vylan chanting “death, death to the IDF” from Glastonbury’s West Holts stage on Sunday but the images of the festival goers directly in front of him.

As the rapper and grandson of a Windrush immigrant pumped his fists, the crowd of mostly white British youth mindlessly echoed his call for the death of the Israeli Defence Forces and, by extension, the Jewish and Arab servicemen, many of them conscripts, who serve in its ranks.

Don’t get me wrong. I share the crowd’s belief that some members of the IDF – or at least the politicians and generals who direct their actions – are guilty of war crimes. I am even willing to give the crowd the benefit of the doubt that when they joined in the subsequent chant of “Free, free Palestine”, it was not necessarily a call for the elimination of the world’s only Jewish state.

What I can’t get my mind around is how anyone can think it’s OK to call for the death of another person – and calling for the death of the IDF, Israeli’s security force, would certainly leave millions of Israelis, many of them critics of Netanyahu and his Likud party allies, defenceless in the event of further attacks from Hamas and similarly genocidal Islamist groups.