Censorship of Pro-Palestine Speech in the Music Industry Shows the Power of Demands for Decolonization

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Since the beginning of Israel’s latest genocidal siege on Palestinians in October 2023, pro-Palestine musical artists have faced censorship by American and European governments and music industry companies—not to mention pro-Israel online mobs. 

Bands and musicians who openly support Palestine have been banned from performing in Hungary, censored by the BBC, investigated by the U.K. government for alleged terrorism, and had festival organizers halt performances for displaying a Palestinian flag. This blatant censorship reveals that powerful public and private institutions don’t want the masses to even consider the possibility of decolonizing Palestine. Also unsurprisingly, the dominant classes don’t want to intervene in Israel’s demolition of Gaza. 

But to make music is to beckon possibilities of a new world, and to listen to music is to want that world to become true. If demanding the liberation of Palestine to large audiences was not influential, if it did not risk lighting a fire in concertgoers across the world, there would be no need to censor these artists. Though capitalism has turned music and culture into consumable commodities, there is still revolutionary potential in art that can be reaped. African American writer, documentarian, activist, and professor Toni Cade Bambara said it best when she wrote that her job as a culture worker who belongs to an oppressed class “is to make revolution irresistible.” 

Watching the censorship of artists unfold over the last two years has led me to a vital conclusion: Prominent people and institutions don’t want the masses to know about the possibilities of decolonizing Palestine because it might sprout movements that demand reparations to one of the world's biggest unhealed wounds: colonialism and its victims. 

Solidarity Between Colonized Peoples

One of the strongest pro-Palestine voices in the music industry is Kneecap, a hip hop group from Belfast, Ireland. Continuing the Irish tradition of solidarity with other colonized people, Kneecap has consistently led “Free Palestine” chants and flown the Palestinian flags during concerts, no matter where they perform. In April, the band’s unapologetic calls for an end to the occupation of Palestine during their performance at Coachella resulted in a viral moral panic on social media, with Sharon Osborne calling for the band members’ visas to the U.S. to be revoked. In May, U.K. police charged Liam Óg Ó hAnnaidh, who uses the stage name  Mo Chara, with terrorism for allegedly flying a Hezbollah flag during a London performance in November 2024. 

In a statement posted on social media in May after the charge was made public, Kneecap wrote, "We deny this 'offence' and will vehemently defend ourselves.” Characterizing the charge as “political policing,” the rap group said the allegations against Ó hAnnaidh were a “carnival of distraction” from the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. "Fourteen thousand babies are about to die of starvation in Gaza, with food sent by the world sitting on the other side of a wall, and once again the British establishment is focused on us," the statement continued. 

The case against Ó hAnnaidh was thrown out last month. 

In the “mostly true” autobiographical film Kneecap (2024), which tells the story of the hip hop group, Ó hAnnaidh sits across from a policeman in an interrogation room, refusing to answer any of the officer’s questions posed in English. Opting to respond in Irish Gaeilge after being arrested at a drug-filled party, Ó hAnnaidh can speak English but chooses not to, in part to piss off the policeman.

“Why don't you just speak the Queen's English?” the cop asks, red-faced with rage. In real life, Ó hAnnaidh made a point to request a Gaeilge interpreter during his trial in Westminster, which highlighted the difficulties of Irish people being able to speak their native language in the English court system, let alone having access to a translator.

To make music is to beckon possibilities of a new world, and to listen to music is to want that world to become true.

As the narrator of his own story, Ó hAnnaidh notes that the pig can’t prove he is lying about his inability to speak English. So the delinquent rapper, refusing to answer in English, simply stares at the cop until the supposed translator—J. J. Ó Dochartaigh, better known as Kneecap’s beatmaker DJ Próvai—is brought into the room. Ó Dochartaigh helps Ó hAnnaidh out of the sticky situation, thoroughly impressed by the Gaeilge poetry he finds in the young man’s notebook during the ordeal.

Effectively, this is the beginning of Kneecap’s mission to make Gaeilge cool to the young people of Ireland through their music. 

The decline of the Irish language is a direct result of English colonization of Ireland, an ongoing process since the 12th century. English settler colonial rule meant that Irish people were violently and permanently dispossessed of their land, culture, and language. Like the many territories colonized by the British Empire, Ireland’s native language Gaeilge was stamped out in favor of “the Queen’s English.” 

“Settler colonial rule in Ireland severed speakers’ connections to Gaeilge and, subsequently, to relationships that were mediated through Gaeilge,” sociologists Alison MacKenzie, Orla McGurk, and Mel Engman wrote in a research paper about the modern reclamation of the Irish language. “Local populations were ruthlessly subordinated to the non-indigenous settlers associated with the English crown, and language (i.e. the promotion of English and suppression of Gaeilge) was an early tool of control.”

According to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s (UNESCO) 2021 Atlas of World Languages in Danger, Gaeilge is an endangered language, with only an estimated 20,000 to 40,000 Irish language speakers worldwide. Ó hAnnaidh’s refusal to speak English to a policeman is an act of political defiance. More broadly, the existence of colonized subjects who speak Irish is a direct challenge to the enduring and brutal power of the British crown in Belfast, where Catholics and Protestants are still largely segregated. The stigma of being a colonial subject did not disappear after the Belfast Agreement, which the establishment states brought the conflicts between the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and the British army to an end. 

The colonizer does not care to give a brighter future to its colonial subjects, even after the process of colonialism is 'over.'

The story told in the band’s film—in which they all play themselves—is slightly fictionalized. That scene isn’t really how Ó Dochartaigh and Ó hAnnaidh met, but a friend of the band actually got arrested and refused to speak English. In reality, the band met at an Irish language festival organized by another member of the band, Naoise Ó Cairealláin, now better known as Móglaí Bap. Unlike in the film, Ó Cairealláin’s father isn’t really Michael Fassbender, nor is he in hiding for paramilitary activity against the British, but his parents were campaigners for Irish language rights. The film does accurately portray how Ó Cairealláin and Ó hAnnaidh are members of the first generation who came after the ceasefire between the IRA and the British, a population of young people promised peace, abundance, and a whole new world their parents and grandparents were not able to experience. 

But the larger messaging of Kneecap’s music and film is that the colonizer does not care to give a brighter future to its colonial subjects, even after the process of colonialism is “over.” The band’s catalogue, mostly rapped in Irish, tells the struggles of working-class Catholics living under British rule. Through the band’s embrace of hip hop, a genre created by African American communities in the U.S. and often used as a tool for political and societal commentary about racism, policing, and inequality, Kneecap mock the British government, express longing for the revolution, and rap about how bad the police are at their jobs. Using Irish to tell their stories, the hip hop group’s work also reclaims the stereotype of the “low-life scum” colonial subject that is historically impoverished and stigmatized due to colonial extraction and occupation. 

This is how Kneecap—and political organizing efforts over the last two decades—is making the Irish language irresistible to a younger public. To speak Irish today is to be cool, and the proof is that Irish language learning is on the rise in the north of  Ireland and as well as in the U.K.

Beyond Kneecap, Ireland is one of the most pro-Palestine nations in the world, and the Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign was formed back in 2001. For many Irish young people like the 20-somethings behind Kneecap, their connection to Palestinian and other colonized peoples is clear—and just like in the U.S., there is a larger reason why those in power want to sever activists’ efforts to make these connections. 

The British government has an interest in drawing the media away from the genocide of Palestinians because of the government’s direct support of Israel, as well as Britain’s colonization of Palestine prior to the invention of the Jewish ethnostate. Since the beginning of Israel's latest campaign on Gaza, the U.K. has supported Israel’s military siege through arms provisions, logistical aid, and direct military interventions in Yemen, which a report published in January suggests could be “in breach of international law.” Larger efforts to censor Kneecap and other artists have another function: Suppressing art that deals with colonialism’s effects and demands decolonization. 

Indeed, Kneecap continues to be censored across the world. In June, the BBC confirmed it would not air the group’s Glastonbury concert, and Kneecap is currently forbidden from entering Canada for allegedly “glorifying terrorist organizations,” according to the government. The group was also forced to cancel its sold-out tour in the U.S. due to Ó hAnnaidh’s terrorism charge. Given these actions against Kneecap and ongoing efforts to censor the group, it’s essential to ask: Why are governments so scared of the spread of decolonial speech?

Palestine is Everything  

“Palestine is really the center of the world,” said activist, author, and academic Angela Davis in a May interview with Democracy Now! following a talk she gave at a Jewish Voice for Peace conference in Baltimore, Maryland. Davis has spent most of her adult life as a radical advocate for social justice, connecting struggles between Palestine and the Black liberation movement in the U.S., most notably in her 2016 book Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement. While Davis broadly writes from her perspective as a Black liberation activist and scholar, her Democracy Now! interview encapsulates how the Palestinian struggle is at the center of any liberation movement. 

Though there are plenty of examples of the effects of colonialism, Palestine has long been the most visible and active display of how constructing a nation in colonized land requires land theft, genocide, and destruction. In the images we watch on social media of destroyed homes and dead and maimed Palestinians, we see glimpses of what the colonization of any ex-colony likely looked like as it happened. The continued and merciless murder of Palestinian women and children—the brutal racialization of Palestinian men into inherent rapists and terrorists—this is the story of the world we share, playing out in real time as we scroll on phones that run on lithium batteries extracted from Indigenous lands. 

Our lives are intrinsically laced with the effects of colonialism, so artists’ demand that we overturn colonialism globally is a very real threat to modern life. 

Kneecap is not alone in making this demand. The group has received support from other bands, also driving home the message against the colonization of Palestine.

If only the majority of the music industry took it upon themselves to not be complicit in genocide.  

When the BBC refused to broadcast Kneecap due to concerns of pro-terrorism messaging, U.K. punk duo Bob Vylan chanted “Free Palestine” during their nationally broadcast performance at Glastonbury and also encouraged the audience to join in on “Death to the IDF (Israeli Defense Forces)” chants. As a result, Bob Vylan now faces its own investigation by the Metropolitan police, along with cancelled gigs across Europe. It seems that the only speech governments consider acceptable is focused on calls for humanitarian aid, never mind that Israel’s blockade means aid is not allowed into the Gaza Strip, as shown by the interception of the Global Sumud Flotilla by the IDF last week. Needless to say, demanding an end to the mass extermination of Palestinians or expressing anger at an army that has committed war crimes against Palestinians since 1948 is not acceptable speech. 

In response to backlash and other censorship not entirely made public, according to The Guardian, Kneecap, producer Brian Eno, and the groups Massive Attack and Fontaines DC announced the formation of a syndicate for artists speaking out about Israel’s military assault on Gaza. Massive Attack, in particular, has been a target of Israeli and Jewish critics for comparing Israel’s attack on Gaza to the Holocaust. In a statement to The Guardian regarding its decision to co-create the syndicate, Massive Attack said: “This collective action is really about offering some kind of solidarity to those artists who are living day after day in a screen-time genocide, but are worried about using their platforms to express their horror at that because of the level of censorship within their industry or from highly organised external legal bodies, terrifying them and their management teams with aggressive legal actions. The intention is clear and obvious: to silence them.”

More recently, Massive Attack removed its music from Spotify to protest the nearly $700 million investment the streaming platform’s soon-to-be former Chief Executive Daniel Ek, made in defense technology company, Helsing. (It’s worth noting that Ek first invested $115 million in Helsing back in 2021 and joined the company’s board.)  While the company claims it is not involved in Gaza, Massive Attack cited its “moral and ethical burden” to leave the platform due to artists’ streaming revenue being used to fund “lethal, dystopian technologies.”

If only the majority of the music industry took it upon themselves to not be complicit in genocide. 

Too Little, Too Late?

It’s no secret that the music industry has made a practice of turning art, a potentially useful tool for revolutionary imagination, into an easily consumable, numbing product. This is likely why the industry appears so dismayed by Kneecap’s insistence on calling for a free Palestine, even when it’s been to the detriment of the trio’s career and wallet. Not only is it rare for artists to stick their necks out for what they believe is right, it’s actively discouraged. Many major players in the industry, for example, were fully aware of the sexual abuse and misogyny committed by some of the biggest artists in the world and stayed silent, opting to protect abusers and abusive practices that push marginalized people and women out of the industry. Most famously, Kesha was forced to pause her career for years while engaging in a legal battle with her alleged rapist. Considering the industry will throw people under the bus for its own maintenance, it isn’t surprising that the majority of global stars have not spoken out about Palestine or publicly taken action. 

While speaking out can feel scary, what’s actually terrifying is experiencing genocide as the Western world remains silent. 

Almost two years into the genocide, the September humanitarian fundraiser event Together For Palestine featured an impressive array of artist support, including Portishead, Brian Eno, Florence Pugh, Rina Sawayama, and Pink Pantheress, among many others. It’s great to see musicians finally defying the censorship around Palestine and its colonization. But there’s also disappointment. Why did it take so long for this public support of Palestinians to manifest? 

Palestinian artists have long navigated censorship over their own existence. For them, staying silent on colonization was never an option. 

The reason governments, universities, and other public institutions across the world want to quash pro-Palestine speech is because they understand the danger it poses to life as we know it.

Consider Palestinian artist Marwan Abdelhamid, better known as Saint Levant, who has an EP called “From Gaza With Love.” Pro-Israel organizations have dragged the young singer-songwriter through the mud and called for a boycott of the French fashion brand Yves Saint Laurent (YSL) after the 24-year-old was featured in a YSL campaign. Or look at Chilean-Palestinian pop star Elian Amer Marjieh, known professionally as Elyanna, who toured with Coldplay over the summer and even sang a duet with the band’s frontman, Chris Martin. However, Martin took a cowardly neutral stance on stage in September when he invited Israeli fans on stage. 

“And though it’s controversial maybe, I also want to welcome people in the audience from Palestine. We have, we are, I believe we’re all equal humans,” Martin told the crowd at the London concert. 

The very existence of these Palestinian artists defies Israel and gets labeled by Zionists as antisemitic. Does their art and the struggles of their people only count two years into the genocide? Do the lives of thousands of Palestinians who have been murdered, maimed, and starved by Israel not matter? Did the entire music industry need the United Nations to confirm the genocide before it became acceptable to do or say something, anything?

Perhaps the artists who have remained silent, or only recently began to offer timid support to the people of Palestine, do understand the “dangers” of decolonial speech more than we give them credit for. They know that being vocally, unapologetically pro-Palestine will have professional, financial, and perhaps even legal consequences. And the reason governments, universities, and other public institutions across the world want to quash pro-Palestine speech is because they too understand the danger it poses to life as we know it. When wide swathes of the public can be persuaded to view liberation from the perspective of Indigenous people, it can only amount to revolution. 

And we can’t have that, now can we?  

Kneecap did not respond to a request for interview or comment prior to publication.

This piece was edited by Tina Vasquez and copyedited by s.e. smith.