The four members of Irish rock supergroup U2 have weighed in on the ongoing Israel-Gaza conflict, with each member — Bono, The Edge, Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen Jr. — releasing their own individual statements. The four statements were shared on U2’s official Instagram account and website on Sunday, alongside the following joint message: “Everyone has long been horrified by what is unfolding in Gaza—but the blocking of humanitarian aid and now plans for a military takeover of Gaza City has taken the conflict into uncharted territory. We are not experts in the politics of the region, but we want our audience to know where we each stand.”
Bono, the lead singer of the band and the most politically active member, released the longest of the four statements, nearly 1,250 words, in which he explained that he “generally tried to stay out of the politics of the Middle East,” not out of humility but “more uncertainty in the face of obvious complexity.” The singer said he felt compelled to speak out about the Nova festival massacre on Oct. 7, an event which he described as “evil,” and which occurred while U2 was performing on stage at the Sphere in Las Vegas. Bono harshly criticized Hamas and its late leader Yahya Sinwar but he devoted much of his opprobrium on the Israeli government and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in particular, and he was at pains to separate the country’s political leaders from its people. “We know Hamas are using starvation as a weapon in the war, but now so too is Israel and I feel revulsion for the moral failure,” Bono writes. He adds, that “the Government of Israel is not the nation of Israel, but the Government of Israel led by Benjamin Netanyahu today deserves our categorical and unequivocal condemnation.”
He continues, “Our band stands in solidarity with the people of Palestine who truly seek a path to peace and coexistence with Israel and with their rightful and legitimate demand for statehood. We stand in solidarity with the remaining hostages and plead that someone rational negotiate their release.” Bono ends his statement calling on Israel and the international community to flood Gaza with aid.
In his statement, U2 guitarist The Edge also lambasted Netanyahu and the artist posed three questions for Israel’s leader, adding that he asked “them in the hope of engaging the conscience and sanity of the people of Israel.” In his first question, The Edge wonders if Netanyahu’s considers the impact of the situation on Gaza will have on the reputation of Israel and its people. “Do you not see that the longer this continues, the more Israel risks becoming isolated, mistrusted, and remembered not as a haven from persecution, but as a state that, when provoked, systematically persecuted a neighbouring civilian population?,” he writes. His second question takes Netanyahu’s party Likud to task for its end goal in Gaza and the West Bank, and removing Palestianians from both occupied territories. And third, The Edge, if Netanyahu rejects a two-state solution, then what was his political vision. “Simply perpetual conflict? A future of walls, blockades, military occupation? A state of permanent inequality? And if this apartheid state transpires don’t you destroy the very argument for Israel’s existence as a moral response to the horrors of the Holocaust?”
Clayton, U2’s bassist, kept his statement short and questioned Israel’s claims to have a superior technologically savvy army when it has wrought utter devastation in Gaza. “Preserving civilian life is a choice in this war,” Clayton writes.
And finally, Mullen, the band’s drummer, acknowledged the horrors of Oct. 7 but also was disgusted by the imposition of man made famine in Gaza by Israel. “To state the obvious, starving innocent civilians as a weapon of war is inhumane and criminal,” Mullen writes. He also lamented the silence over the famine. “Where is the outrage from within Israel, outside of a small, if increasingly vocal, minority? Where is the outrage from the diaspora? Beyond some reluctant and muted acknowledgement of a famine inflicted, nothing. Silence,” Mullen writes.
Bono full statement:
Apart from the attack on the Nova music festival on October 7th, which felt like it happened while U2 were on stage at Sphere Las Vegas, I have generally tried to stay out of the politics of the Middle East… this was not humility, more uncertainty in the face of obvious complexity… I have over recent months written about the war in Gaza in The Atlantic and spoken about it in The Observer, but I circled the subject.
As a cofounder of the ONE Campaign, which tackles AIDS and extreme poverty in Africa, I felt my experience should be on the catastrophes facing that work and that part of the world. The hemorrhaging of human life in Sudan or Ethiopia hardly makes the news. Sudan alone is beyond comprehension, with a civil war that has left 150,000 dead and 2 million people facing famine.[1]
And that was before the dismantling of USAID in March and gutting of PEPFAR, life-saving programs for the poorest of the poor that ONE has fought for decades to protect… the cuts to which will likely lead to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children over the next few years.[2]
But but but… there is no hierarchy to such things.
The images of starving children on the Gaza Strip brought me back to a working trip to a food station in Ethiopia my wife Ali and I made 40 years ago next month following U2’s participation in Live Aid 1985. Another man-made famine.
To witness chronic malnutrition up close would make it personal for any family, especially as it affects children. Because when the loss of non-combatant life en masse appears so calculated… especially the deaths of children, then ‘evil’ is not a hyperbolic adjective… in the sacred text of Jew, Christian, and Muslim it is an evil that must be resisted.
The rape, murder, and abduction of Israelis at the Nova music festival was evil.
On that awful Saturday night/Sunday morning of October 7/8 2023, I wasn’t thinking about politics. On stage in the Nevada desert, 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’… a gamble Hamas’ leadership were willing to play with the lives of two million Palestinians… to sow the seeds for a global intifada that U2 had glimpsed at work in Paris during the Bataclan attack in 2015… but only if Israel’s leaders fell for this trap that Hamas set for them.
Yahya Sinwar didn’t mind if he lost the battle or even the war if he could destroy Israel as a moral as well as an economic force. Over the next months as Israel’s revenge for the Hamas attack appeared more and more disproportionate and disinterested in the equally innocent civilian lives in Gaza… I felt as nauseous as everyone, but reminded myself Hamas had deliberately positioned themselves under civilian targets, having tunneled their way from school to mosque to hospital. When did a just war to defend the country turn into an unjust land grab? 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 is not simply a fear but a fact… I re-read Hamas’ charter of 1988[3]… it’s an evil read (Article Seven!)
But I also understood that Hamas are not the Palestinian people… a people who 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, it’s little wonder so many here in Ireland have campaigned for decades for justice for the Palestinian people.
We know Hamas are using starvation as a weapon in the war, but now so too is Israel and I feel revulsion for the moral failure. The Government of Israel is not the nation of Israel, but the Government of Israel led by Benjamin Netanyahu today deserves our categorical and unequivocal condemnation. There is no justification for the brutality he and his far right government have inflicted on the Palestinian people… in Gaza… in the West Bank. And not just since October 7, well before it too… though the level of depravity and lawlessness we are seeing now feels like uncharted territory.
Curiously those who say these reports are not true are not demanding access for journalists and seem deaf to the revealing rhetoric. Examples that sharpen my pen include: Israel’s Heritage Minister claiming that the government is racing to wipe out Gaza[4]… his Defense Minister and Security Minister arguing no aid should be let into the territory.[5],[6] “Not one grain of wheat.”[7] And now Netanyahu announces[8] a military takeover of Gaza City… which most informed commentators understand as a euphemism for the colonization of Gaza. We know the rest of the Gaza Strip… and the West Bank are next. What century are we in?
Is the world not done with this far, far right thinking? We know where it ends… world war… millenarianism… Might the world deserve to know where this once promising bright-minded democratic nation is headed unless there is a dramatic change of course? Is what was once an oasis of innovation and free-thinking now in hock to a fundamentalism as blunt as a machete? Are Israelis really ready to let Benjamin Netanyahu do to Israel what its enemies failed to achieve over the last 77 years? And disappear it from membership in a community of nations built around even a flawed decency?
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 join all who have called for a cessation of hostilities on both sides.
If not Irish voices, please please please stop and listen to Jewish ones – from the high mindedness of Rabbi Sharon Brous, to the tearful comedy of the Grody-Patinkin family – who fear the damage to Judaism, as well as Israel’s neighbours. Listen to the more than 100,000 Israelis who this week in Tel Aviv protested for an end to the war.
Our band stands in solidarity with the people of Palestine who truly seek a path to peace and coexistence with Israel and with their rightful and legitimate demand for statehood. We stand in solidarity with the remaining hostages and plead that someone rational negotiate their release. Could it be Marwan Barghouthi who the former head of Mossad Efraim Halevy described as “probably the most sane and the most qualified person” to lead the Palestinians?[9]
Wiser heads than mine will have a view, but surely the hostages deserve a different approach — and quick.
We urge more good people in Israel to demand unfettered access by professionals to deliver the critical care needed throughout Gaza and the West Bank that they best know how to distribute… and to let the correct number of trucks through. It will take more than 100 trucks a day to take seriously the need – more like 600[10] – but the flooding of humanitarian aid will also undercut the black marketing that has been happening to benefit Hamas.
The band is pledged to contribute our support by donating to Medical Aid For Palestinians.
–Bono
The Edge’s full statement:
We are all deeply shocked and profoundly grieved by the suffering unfolding in Gaza. What we are witnessing is not a distant tragedy—it is a test of our shared humanity.
I have three questions for Prime Minister Netanyahu. I ask them in the hope of engaging the conscience and sanity of the people of Israel.
First: Do you truly believe that such devastation—inflicted so intentionally and relentlessly on a civilian population—can happen without heaping generational shame upon those responsible? Do you not see that the longer this continues, the more Israel risks becoming isolated, mistrusted, and remembered not as a haven from persecution, but as a state that, when provoked, systematically persecuted a neighbouring civilian population?
Second: If the end goal is, as the Likud platform suggests, the removal of Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank to make way for a “Greater Israel,” then that is not peace—it is dispossession; it is ethnic cleansing, and, according to many legal scholars, colonial genocide. It is an injustice on a massive scale. And injustice, as we learned in Ireland, is never the path to security: it breeds resentment, it hardens hearts, and it guarantees that future generations will inherit conflict rather than peace. The oppressed do not forget. How can this course of action possibly make your people safer?
Third: If you reject the two-state solution—as your government now openly does—then what is your political vision? Simply perpetual conflict? A future of walls, blockades, military occupation? A state of permanent inequality? And if this apartheid state transpires don’t you destroy the very argument for Israel’s existence as a moral response to the horrors of the Holocaust? For if Israel comes to be seen as a state that systematically denies another people their rights, then the world will inevitably ask whether the only just and sustainable future, the only tolerable future, is a shared state—one where Jews and Palestinians live together as equals under the law.
We know from our own experience in Ireland that peace is not made through dominance. Peace is made when people sit down with their opponents—when they recognise the equal dignity of all, even those they once feared or despised.
There can be no peace without justice. No reconciliation without recognition. And no future unless we refuse to let the past be repeated.
The road to peace is difficult. But it is never too late, or too early, to begin walking it.
-The Edge
Adam Clayton’s full statement:
The humanitarian crisis in Gaza caused by Israel’s aid blockade and bombing looks like revenge on a civilian population who are not responsible for Hamas’ murderous attack on October 7. If Israel moves to colonise the Gaza Strip, it will permanently undo any possibility of lasting peace or solution for hostilities. Forgetting the morality of the situation for a moment, doesn’t the technical superiority of Israel’s modern army make a boast of its precision targeting of individuals from thousands of miles away? And if so why are the IDF bombarding a civilian population from the skies indiscriminately destroying any bit of shelter and infrastructure?
Preserving civilian life is a choice in this war.
-Adam
Larry Mullen Jr.’s full statement:
The images of the Hamas-led massacre of Israelis on October 7th and in particular the footage of innocent music fans being slaughtered, beaten and abused at the Nova Music Festival were harrowing to watch. Nothing was achieved except more misery for the region at the hands of Hamas and its allies.
So what did Hamas expect would happen when they committed mass murder and took the hostages?
Israel’s response was expected.
After those attacks the total obliteration of Hamas was called for by Israel and its allies and was expected.
A ground war was expected.
Aerial bombardment and destruction were expected .
The indiscriminate decimation of most homes and hospitals in Gaza, with a majority of those killed being women and children, was not expected.
Imposing famine was not expected.
It’s difficult to comprehend how any civilised society can think starving children is going to further any cause and be justified as an acceptable response to another horror. To state the obvious, starving innocent civilians as a weapon of war is inhumane and criminal.
Where is the outrage from within Israel, outside of a small, if increasingly vocal, minority?
Where is the outrage from the diaspora?
Beyond some reluctant and muted acknowledgement of a famine inflicted, nothing.
Silence.
The power to change this obscenity is in the hands of Israel
I undoubtedly support Israel’s right to exist and I also believe Palestinians deserve the same right and a state of their own.
Silence serves none of us.
-Larry
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