From Glastonbury to Gaza: no direction home

The year moves through its seasons, and so does the farm over longer cycles. In recent days, I’ve been stepping off the veranda and plucking greengages, figs and apples from the surrounding trees for my breakfasts. I have my petty gripes, but I’ve got to admit that my life is about as close to Eden as any mortal sinner could reasonably expect.

Meanwhile, in a part of the world closer to the setting of that biblical paradise, other people are going through something more like hell. My last post about my trip to the Glastonbury Festival left hanging some questions about the larger big-P politics on display there, and indeed a lot of these turned on the situation in Gaza and the wider politics of that region. Time to talk about Palestine, Israel, Syria and Iran, then? Well, some readers have indicated an interest in me sharing my views on all that, whereas I think others will find them uninteresting and unimportant. I’m probably in the latter camp myself. But to oblige the first group and round out my account of the festival I’m going to write something here about my opinions on Gaza and related matters, while trying to stay attentive to their unimportance. In fact, possibly the most interesting and important aspect of this post is my analysis of how uninteresting and unimportant it is.

To start with the festival itself, something of a media storm arose in the leadup to it around the unpleasantly-named Irish rap group Kneecap, largely because of their outspoken remarks about Palestine. The Prime Minister had said it was inappropriate for them to be performing at the festival, so naturally I tried to get along to see them. But his words apparently had a similarly galvanizing effect on many others. By the time I got there, the stage was closed due to overcrowding. So, for better or worse, Kneecap will likely remain on the lengthy list of bands I have never seen, and never will.

In the event, the controversies around Kneecap were upstaged by the act preceding them, Bob Vylan, and that band’s chanting of ‘Death to the IDF’ which was inadvertently livestreamed by the BBC. The somewhat confected media outrage around that incident was mercifully brief, and the news cycle quickly moved on – not least because of the many actual deaths inflicted by the IDF in the following days.

In ...