Glastonbury 2024 Becomes a Platform for Pro-Palestinian Support
In this year’s Glastonbury Festival, there were signs of Palestinians’ support all around, and many performers sang to the Palestinians and pointed out the destruction going on in Gaza due to Israel’s aggression on the tiny strip.
During the five-day festival that ended on Sunday, Palestinian flags and posters carried to the participants’ rallies were waved and pasted in different parts of the 1,500-acre Somerset farmland in England. Such symbols could be observed in BBC broadcasts of the performances. It is also noteworthy that the top pop star and main performer of the festival, Dua Lipa, during her performance on June 28, moved to the Palestinian flag and made it perform an aerobics dance, waving it and attracting attention to it with the devices’ cameras.
Several musicians advocated for the Palestinians during a great music festival with a capacity of 200 thousand people. Blur band member Damon Albarn joined Bombay Bicycle Club on stage, encouraging the audience to shout if they were for Palestine and labelling the Gaza Strip conflict as an “unfair war.
Live during their sets, members of Irish hip hop trio Kneecap opened with the following text on a screen: “More than 20,000 children have been killed by Israel in 9 months. ” As part of the concentrated performance art, both performers and much of the audience chanted “Free, free Palestine. ” When contemporary Irish folk outfit Lankum played a new song about Palestine, the Palestinian flag was strung across the drum
Norwegian singer-songwriter AURORA went on stage with a white placard inscription: ‘No child should be part of war. Ever. ’ She dedicated her performance to children in Palestine, Sudan, Congo and Yemen.
Most of the individuals who did not attend the festival resorted to the use of social media to support the different solidarity platforms. At least 37,877 Palestinians have died, and 86,969 have been wounded nearly a decade into the aggression carried out by the Israeli military in the Gaza Strip. Thousands more are still missing under the debris.
Coldplay, one of the most famous bands in the world, became the most highlighted one with their performance on the pyramid stage. They invited Palestinian-Chilean singer Elyanna and Nigerian musician Femi Kuti on ‘Arabesque,’ but near the end of their set, Chris Martin said that fans should send love to Israel, Palestine, Myanmar, Ukraine, ‘peaceful’ Russians, and so on. Some people accused him of being politically neutral in an active state of conflict, which is highly unwarranted.
People on social networking profiles could not resist an opportunity to be rude, some of them accused Coldplay of providing a pass to genocide, and others could not understand why Coldplay was so supportive of Palestine while there was a large show of shedding support for the Palestine issue at the festival. Some of the users associated the events with the terrorist act that took place during the Nova music festival in Israel and claimed that performers and spectators at Glastonbury were funding terrorists.
The second significant recognised moment was an inflatable life raft with dummies crowdsurfed during the performance of the punk band Idles. It depicted refugees crossing the English Channel and seeking asylum in Britain, referring to the conservatives’ ‘stop the boats’ policy.
It turned out that the prank was coordinated by street artist and political activist Banksy, who called specific attention to a special kind of motivation. The act was widely discussed, and even though some found the writing on the wall timely and thought-provoking, others claimed that the event was a craving spectacle.
The political, social, and musical importance of the Glastonbury Festival of Contemporary Performing Arts was once again proved in 2000.
