Glastonbury Festival made headlines across the world this year, but not because of the music. The focus before the festival had been on the Irish rap trio Kneecap—who had waved the flag of Hezbollah and said that, “The only good Tory is a dead Tory. Kill your local MP.” But it was London-based punk-rap duo Bob Vylan that went viral for leading a series of Palestine-related political chants, including one in which they call for “death, death to the IDF.”

It wasn’t the first time that Vylan had chanted such things. Although the group later tried to frame their chant as a call to dismantle the Israeli military, footage from 28 May has since surfaced of the group’s frontman Pascal Robinson-Foster calling for “death to every single IDF soldier.” Indeed, during their Glastonbury set itself, Robinson-Foster shone a light on his intentions, saying: “We are the violent punks, because sometimes you gotta get your message across with violence, because that is the only language that some people speak, unfortunately.”

This is a sentiment that I’ve encountered many times, as a Palestinian who has talked to people from both sides of the conflict. A lot of Palestinians believe that violence is the only language that Israelis understand, and a lot of Israelis believe that violence is the only language that Palestinians understand, and the consequence of this is more spirals of violence. It’s not a new sentiment in the Levant—but to see it take root in Britain is concerning, not least because it risks importing the cycles of hatred and violence from the Middle East.

Listening through Bob Vylan’s discography reveals a group whose work is interwoven with a fascination with left-wing political violence. Their latest record Humble as the Sun features tracks with titles like “Makes Me Violent” and “Get Yourself a Gun,” in which they advise listeners to arm themselves in response to rent hikes.

Of course, Bob Vylan is hardly the first punk band to court controversy or use political outrage to grab attention. The genre started out that way in the 1970s, with monotonous works expressing a rage born from working-class frustration, together with a performative rebellion against the political establishment and ossified social norms.

Hardcore punk took the genre in a more muscular, confrontational direction in the ’80s—as bands like Black Flag, Crass, and Discharge ventured into darker, more explicitly anarchist territory. These groups screamed against authority, police brutality, war, and corporate control. But even at their most furious, the aggression was sonic and aesthetic—meant to blow out the speakers, not to cheer on literal armed conflict.

Vylan’s work is influenced by the funk-metal of Rage Against The Machine, but it represents a dimmer and less imaginative evolution of that formula, lacking Tom Morello’s virtuosic guitar solos and punchy riff work, and amping up the trollish provocations, a product for a new era in which content can easily go viral on social media for its extremity, offensiveness, radical politics and violent rhetoric. 

All of this signals a seismic shift: once, progressive activists in the West more often rallied around slogans of peace, coexistence, and human rights; now, a significant faction glorifies so-called “armed resistance” and indulges in chants calling for the death of those seen as political enemies. Yes, a fringe assortment of Maoists, Stalinists, and others—including former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn—have long described Hamas and Hezbollah as their friends. But for most of my life, they remained very far from the mainstream. Bob Vylan’s chants and gestures were cheered on by the crowd at a world-renowned music festival.

Many pro-Palestinian protestors are deeply concerned about the well-being of civilians caught up in the war—and that’s perfectly reasonable. But we’ve gone far beyond that. Anti-war protests of the 2000s called for an end to the war against Iraq, not for death to British and American soldiers. Indeed in 2023 and 2024, most pro-Palestine protests called for a ceasefire—not for “death to the IDF.” But now pro-war chants have begun to echo from festival stages. This descent from yesteryear’s songs celebrating hope, togetherness, and peace to today’s “get yourself a gun” agitprop is deeply unsettling.