Kneecap seems to have been the most outspokenly anti-genocide music group at this year’s Coachella festival. And its bold solidarity with Palestinians amid an ongoing war on free speech in the US has predictably caused pro-Israel lobbyists to throw their toys out of the pram. But Kneecap is standing strong, and consistently cutting through the bullshit.
Kneecap speaking simple truths isn’t ‘aggressive’ – fucking genocide is
The messaging Kneecap shared at Coachella was straightforward, opposing Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza and the US government’s enabling of its war crimes:
Some uncensored messaging to Coachella 🤝🇵🇸 pic.twitter.com/WbHZBrCZl5
— KNEECAP (@KNEECAPCEOL) April 19, 2025
That shouldn’t be at all controversial. Because numerous genocide experts have long accused the settler-colonial apartheid state of committing genocide in Gaza (the occupied Palestinian territory whose highly concentrated population Israel had previously isolated with a brutal blockade that turned the strip into “the world’s largest open-air prison”).
But genocide apologists claimed Kneecap had engaged in “hate speech”, and called for more censorship of such “aggressive” messages. The group had a perfect response for them, though, saying:
Honesty isn’t aggressive – fucking bombs are
During Kneecap’s performance, one member also stressed that:
The Irish not so long ago were persecuted at the hands of the Brits. But we were never bombed from the fucking skies with nowhere to go. The Palestinians have nowhere to go. It’s their fucking home, and they’re bombing them from the sky. If you’re not calling it a genocide, what the fuck are you calling it?
The group has received hundreds of violent Zionist threats as a result, but also thousands of solidarity messages.
Propagandists “deeply hurt” by facts
As the BBC reported:
the organisers of the Nova Music Festival, Tribe of Nova, said Kneecap shared messaging that “deeply hurt many in our community”.
On 7 October 2023, Hamas launched an attack from occupied Gaza targeting “the headquarters of the Israeli army’s Gaza Division”, the Re’im military base. It was apparently unaware of the rave that was going on about three miles away, something even Israeli intelligence believes. The location for the Nova festival was only announced on 6 October. But as the “Tribe of Nova Foundation” explained, “young adults came together to celebrate but found themselves in a war zone”. As Israel initiated the ‘Hannibal Directive‘ against its own citizens to stop the taking of hostages, the chaos killed 364 people. 40 more became hostages.
Since 7 October, Israeli occupation forces have killed at least one Palestinian child every hour in Gaza, murdering around 17,492 children. That number includes about 825 babies, 895 one-year-olds, 3,266 preschoolers, and 4,032 six-to-10-year-olds.
Tribe of Nova was apparently “deeply hurt” that Kneecap would highlight the suffering of Palestinians. But it said “our response must be rooted in empathy, not hate”. And it invited Kneecap “to visit the Nova Exhibition” in order “to connect. To witness. To understand.”
Critics have called the Nova Exhibition “pure propaganda” and “traveling apartheid apologia” that ignores the context from before and after the events of 7 October. Jewish critics in particular have described it as “A Grotesque Theatre of Colonial Violence and Selective Grief” which is guilty of “fetishizing and exceptionalizing Jewish Israeli suffering”.
To be fair to Tribe of Nova, the Canary also looked through some of its social media posts to try and find examples of the “empathy” and ‘understanding’ it claims to hold dear. We didn’t find any. What we did find, however, were attempts to paint Israel’s genocide in Gaza as a “just war” or “just struggle”.
No one is truly free until Palestinians are free, as Kneecap knows
We live in a world where the political, media, and cultural establishment want to censor voices opposing genocide. And in the US under Donald Trump, a full-blown war on free speech is raging, on behalf of Israeli war criminals. The previous government of Trump’s ‘opponent’ Joe Biden, of course, very much enabled this crackdown with its own repression and demonisation of students protesting Israel’s genocide.
Trump’s regime has abducted and tried to deport pro-Palestinian voices, from Mahmoud Khalil to Rumeysa Ozturk and Mohsen Mahdawi. Cultural figures calling this out, meanwhile, are few and far between.
Amid this environment of censorship and attacks on free speech, Kneecap has taken a bold and risky stand. But it’s a necessary one for all of us. Because as Nelson Mandela once said, “our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians”. If we let Western establishment forces silence us on genocide, what else will they silence us on?
Featured image via the Canary
