Israel and Gaza, Held Hostage by Fundamentalism

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/08/bono-israel-gaza-hostage-fundamentalism/683829/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=the-atlantic&utm_content=edit-promo

Posted by theatlantic

3 comments

  1. “As someone who has long believed in Israel’s right to exist and supported a two-state solution, I want to make clear—to anyone who cares to listen—our band’s condemnation of Netanyahu’s immoral actions and to join all who have called for a cessation of hostilities on both sides,” Bono writes. 

    Onstage at Sphere Las Vegas on October 7–8, while mourning Hamas’s attack on Israel, including the Nova music festival, the lead singer of u/u2 writes that he wasn’t thinking about politics. “I just couldn’t help but express the pain everyone in the room was feeling and is still feeling for other music lovers and fans like us—hiding under a stage in Kibbutz Re’im then butchered to set a diabolical trap for Israel and to get a war going that might just redraw the map ‘from the river to the sea,’” Bono writes.

    Over the months that followed, Israel’s revenge for the Hamas attack “appeared more and more disproportionate and disinterested in the equally innocent civilian lives in Gaza,” Bono writes. “I hoped Israel would return to reason. I was making excuses for a people seared and shaped by the experience of Holocaust, who understood the threat of extermination not simply as a fear but as a fact.” 

    “But I also understood that Hamas is not the Palestinian people,” Bono continues. “Palestinians have for decades endured and continue to endure marginalization, oppression, occupation, and the systematic stealing of the land that is rightfully theirs. Given our own historic experience of oppression and occupation in Ireland, it’s little wonder so many here have campaigned for decades for justice for the Palestinian people.”

    Images of starving children in Gaza brought Bono back to a 1985 working trip to a food station in Ethiopia—where, he writes, he witnessed chronic malnutrition up close. “We know Hamas is using starvation as a weapon in the war, but now so too is Israel, and I feel revulsion for that moral failure,” Bono continues at the link in our bio. “The government of Israel is not the nation of Israel, but the government of Israel, led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu today, deserves our categorical and unequivocal condemnation.”

    Read more: [https://theatln.tc/fP2lMXKt](https://theatln.tc/fP2lMXKt) 

    — Katie Anthony, associate editor, audience and engagement, *The Atlantic*

  2. There HAD been a ceasefire on October 6th of 2023.
    I wonder who broke it.
    While I don’t hold Palestineans wholly responsible for Hamas’ actions, the fact is that Hamas IS supported by the majority of Palestineans. Most Palestineans do NOT support a two state solution, most Palestineans don’t support Jews existing in our homeland to begin with and every time some peaceful settlement is reached, its not the Israelis who reignite tensions.

  3. Not Israel and Gaza. Gaza. Israel has built a first world nation because they want to live. The Palestinians agendas were different.

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