On this day, 249 years ago, Americans declared war on Britain, or at least on the British Army. To declare war on an army is to wish death upon it, and to act on that wish.

About a week ago, punk rocker Bob Vylan led a chant at Glastonbury Festival in Britain, wishing death on the Israeli military: “Death to the IDF.” I agree with him. The IDF should be defeated, destroyed, and if necessary, annihilated. It’s an army of aggression, conquest, occupation, torture, and genocide. It has no right to exist, and no right of self-defense. If any organization on the planet deserves death, it’s the IDF.

I command no army of my own, and possess no weapons. So all of the preceding claims are pious wishes without effective force. They still seem to scare a lot of people. I’m glad they do. Those who feel fear at “Death to the IDF” deserve the fear that they feel. 

Many people, Bob Vylan included, have said that because the real story is Gaza, we should focus exclusively on Gaza and ignore the controversy over “Death to the IDF.” I agree that Gaza is the more important story, but don’t think we should ignore the Glastonbury controversy altogether. We can only advocate for Gaza, or for Palestine–or for anything–if we’re free. A good test of our freedom today is our right to say something as “controversial” as “Death to the IDF.” Doing so tests our collective commitment to freedom, and passes a verdict on it of “true” or “false.” 

I do say “Death to the IDF,” and insist on my right to say it. If I can’t say it–if anyone can stop me from saying it, or coercively interrogate my saying it–then I’m not free. If I’m not free, we’re not free, and we should put an end to the lie that we are, along with the empty, posturing talk about living in a “free country” in “the free and civilized world.” If freedom isn’t upheld when it matters, it doesn’t matter. If we can’t oppose a genocidal army–an army we’ve assisted and armed for decades–then we’re de facto slaves. The only thing worse than that is being too cowardly to admit it. 

People have now started to play the predictable game of pretending not to understand what “Death to the IDF” means. A British newspaper deliberately misquoted Vylan as saying “Death to Israelis.” Some have blithely equated the IDF with Jews, or vice versa, and translated his statement as “Death to the Jews.” Some have professed to be “appalled” by the “glorification of violence” involved, ignoring what the “glorification” was a response to. Others have simply called the statement “anti-Semitic,” in the full knowledge of how cheap and meaningless it now is to say so–cheap and meaningless precisely because indiscriminate over-use has made it that way. 

The basic underlying assumption here is that the IDF is a morally innocent organization which no decent person would attack. An adjacent assumption is that Israel = The Jews, so that the IDF likewise = The Jews. It then “follows” that if you advocate killing any Jew involved in any of the preceding equations, you must only be doing so because they’re Jewish. And so, the inference runs, surely you’re the sort of person who would kill any Jew “simply for being a Jew.” Therefore: “Death to the IDF” = “Heil Hitler,” and the chant we heard at Glastonbury was a descent into neo-Nazism.

All of these assumptions are attempts to conceal the obvious, because all of them are the exact opposite of the truth. The misnamed IDF is and has always been an army of aggression. Israel was founded in aggression, has always sustained itself in aggression, and since October 2023 has taken its aggressions to undreamt-of lengths. Far from being innocent, the IDF is stained in the blood of the innocent. Far from being an organization no decent person would attack, it’s an organization no decent person would defend. 

Beyond that, Israel doesn’t = The Jews, and never has. There have arguably been Jewish non- or anti-Zionists since the beginnings of Judaism, surely before the beginnings of Israel, and there’s no shortage of them today. Zionism is a specific nationalist movement with a specific constituency. That’s all it is, and it can’t claim or appropriate more, no matter how badly its partisans want to. No one can honestly or without culpability claim that Zionism is some kind of moral axiom the rejection of which is a moral offense. Zionism is contestable. Israel is contestable. The IDF’s claims to moral purity are contestable, as are its claims to being committed exclusively to the defense of the innocent against aggression.

I live in a Jewish household. When I played the clip of “Death to the IDF” to the resident Jew around here, she smiled. If the IDF thinks it’s won this war, its members should remember that smile. It says, loud and clear: Jews want you dead, too. If the IDF considers that response from that source compatible with victory, maybe that’s because its indiscriminate war against Palestinians is also a discriminate one against Jews. 

As long as Israel’s aggressive character has gone unquestioned, both before and after October 2023, it’s been easy to subscribe to the dogma that Israel is simply too Jewish to be guilty of anything. In the inverted moral universe of Western Civilization, “Jewish” either means “demonically guilty” or “angelically innocent”–and since the defeat of the Third Reich, has come to mean the latter. From this perspective, what “Jew” can’t mean is human, hence capable in the ordinary human way of both good and evil.

Whatever their philo-Semitic pretensions, many “Westerners” have trouble seeing either Jews or Palestinians as fully human. Such Westerners’ exaggerated, often pathetically ignorant love of Jews conceals a deep-seated animosity, a conditional love that only lasts as long as Jews play a certain role in the civilizational script: Chosen People and Model Minority. Jews have become an object of admiration for the West on the theological premise that God commands us to exalt them, or on the ideological premise that they have (under our benign tutelage) finally become as Western as us. By contrast, Palestinians are heirs of the Amalekites, God’s most hated racial enemy, or inhuman savages because they haven’t, since the days of Agag, managed to Westernize.

Western philo-Semites can’t seem to break free of this set of reaction formations: they need a God-chosen model minority as badly as they need “primitive” racial enemies. And so they need angelic Jews and demonic Palestinians, less because they have grounded convictions about either, but because they find a Jew-on-Palestinian bloodbath affirming. It would ruin the script, and destroy the fun, to discover that both sides were merely human. It would really ruin the script to discover that there are Jews who deserve death, not because they’re Jews, but because they’re responsible moral agents who’ve acted in such a way as to call death upon themselves. I regret to inform you that there are Jews in the world who fit that description. 

Ha’aretz, June 27, 2025

Anyone who still buys into the supremacist mythology of Western philo-Semitism is free to keep lying to themselves about Israeli innocence, but the trick has worn thin on the rest of us. Once we keep Israel’s aggressions in mind–a full century of brutal, mind-numbing, cynically manipulative aggressions–”death to the IDF” becomes less taboo than simple common sense. In the last six months alone, Israel has violated its ceasefire with Hamas, started a war with Iran, asserted its right to violate the ceasefire that ended the Iran war, and engaged in admitted, obvious, undeniable mass slaughter in Gaza. If that doesn’t deserve death, nothing can. But obviously, some things do. 

I’m grateful to Bob Vylan for his moral clarity, but that moral clarity will have less effect than it should unless we all echo what he said. “Death to the IDF” is nothing to be ashamed of. It’s a declaration of independence from the rule of ethno-nationalist brutality and the ethos of collective gaslighting it requires. Stand up and say it. Make it a rallying cry. The IDF has weapons. We have mere words. It’s past time to discover which of the two will prevail.