Unicorns for Israel

By twilight mist @Adobe Stock

Originally posted April 29th, 2024

Something Deeply Wrong

Hamas still has “five freaking American hostages.” There’s nothing like a good cause, and the music industry has long been behind potent issues. Think Band Aid, Live Aid, Farm Aid, Stand Up to Cancer, Hope for Haiti, the Concert for Sandy Relief, the Concert for Ukraine. Big-name musicians from every genre will come, and usually perform for free, writes Matthew Hennessey in the WSJ:

All they typically want is to show the world how much they care.

A Perk of Fame

For singer/writer John Ondrasik, right now, it’s Israel.

The Grammy-nominated American singer and musician, who goes by the nom de chanson Five for Fighting, has been steadfast and outspoken about the Jewish state’s security needs since the Oct. 7 attacks. This has made him a unicorn among his music-industry peers. Most prefer simply to keep their heads down.

Artists such as Ani DiFranco, Billy Bragg, Drake, Dua Lipa, Patti Smith and Peter Gabriel have called for a cease-fire, the only currently acceptable way to express support for Hamas. Music publisher BMG reportedly dropped its contract with Roger Waters after the Pink Floyd founder suggested in a January interview that Oct. 7 might have been a “false-flag operation.”

“Something’s deeply wrong in the culture when people can’t come out and say that what happened on Oct. 7 was evil,” says Mr. Ondrasik.

“No context. No buts. How did we get to a place where our music stars can’t condemn pure atrocities?” The Grammy gesture was “pathetic,” he fumes. “They couldn’t even say the word Hamas. They couldn’t say the word Israel.” The best Mr. Mason could do was say that if “you go to a concert like the Nova concert, you shouldn’t be afraid of being attacked.”

The mellow Mr. Ondrasik grows suddenly indignant. “And if you’re in your house?” he asks. “Maybe you shouldn’t be attacked there either?”

The Evilness of Hamas

As his stage name, Five for Fighting, suggests, Matthew Ondrasik is a brawler. He has appeared on Fox News and Mark Levin’s radio show. On Twitter, he is also aggressive in his support of Israel.

The angry energy bubbling up on college campuses threatens to spill over into the wider world. “I feel some of that. I’m scared for my wife at home right now.” But that’s as far as his sympathy goes for artists who agree but can’t find the courage to stand alongside him.

On April 13, the night before Iran launched a barrage of missiles and drones at Israel, he performed at an outdoor concert in Tel Aviv and condemned “the evil that is Hamas.” He sang his Oct. 7-themed song, “OK”—the refrain is “We are not OK”—for the families of hostages still in Gaza.

To Be Human

Since Ondrasik is not from Israel and has no relatives living there., Matthew Hennessey wondered why Ondrasik is doing this The Slav, from Southern California, says it’s because “he is human.”

In Tel Aviv he told the crowd, “One doesn’t have to be Jewish to support Israel in their fight—sorry, our fight—for freedom, democracy, life, civilization, against those who want to tear it down.”

Like 1938, a Time for Choosing

(Ondrasik) says he can’t stay silent while Jews are being slaughtered in Israel and pushed around elsewhere. It feels to him like “Germany in 1938. People didn’t stand up and you saw what happened.” That comparison is a recurring theme of our conversation.

Hennessey met Ondrasik in a West Coast hotel room on Ondrasik’s day off while on tour. Mr. Ondrasik isn’t playing a rock show. His venue is smaller, backed with a string quartet. Ondrasik reminds Hennessey how music was a big part of the attack on 7 October.

Among the 1,200 killed by Hamas that day were 364 revelers at the weekend-long Nova electronic-music festival. Hamas killers in motorized paragliders appeared on the horizon as a peaceful desert dawn broke. They descended on the panicking crowd and murdered music fans indiscriminately. It was as if Woodstock had been invaded by the Manson Family. Forty-four festivalgoers were kidnapped back to Gaza.

Hamas’s savagery on Oct. 7 made an initial impression on a certain famous band known for its social conscience. The Irish megastars U2, who often use their platform for issue advocacy, offered prayers for the victims at an Oct. 9 concert at the Sphere in Las Vegas, although they promptly threw their lot in with the “cease-fire now” crowd. Recording Academy CEO Harvey Mason Jr.paid tribute to the Nova festival dead during the Grammy Awards in February, saying, “Music must be our safe space.” But there has been no big benefit concert for Israel, or even a sustained sense of outrage among musicians and artists at Hamas’s brutality.

Herodoxy in the Music Industry

Mr. Hennessey writes that ignoring the savagery of Hamas on 7 October is most likely political.

The music industry, like the film and TV business, is a left-wing bastion. Open expression of heterodox political positions, even those considered broadly mainstream, can lead to the blacklist. In the perverse progressive taxonomy of the Middle East, Israel—a diverse, pluralistic and democratic welfare state granting full rights to women, gays and religious minorities—is the bad guy. Gaza’s Palestinians, who in 2006 elected to be ruled by the militant jihadists of Hamas, who are intolerant of homosexuality (to put it mildly) and used rape as a weapon on Oct. 7, are somehow the good guys.

Getting People’s Attention 

Ondrasik has hope someone will soon organize a concert on the site of the Nova festival. He acknowledges hearing a rumor that Barbra Streisand put out a song about antisemitism.

So maybe that’s a good sign. Maybe things will start to tip.”

But Hennessey doesn’t believe that because Ondrasik doesn’t look like he believes that. Ondrasik played in NYC after the Twin Towers collapsed and recalls:

Paul McCartney organized a benefit for the families of police and firefighters and for the rescue workers who were still combing through the wreckage. The concert went off on Oct. 20, 2001, six weeks after the Twin Towers came down.

That sense of togetherness is now more than two decades out of fashion, but the victims of 9/11 were no less innocent than the victims of Oct. 7. Israelis massacred in their homes and villages didn’t deserve what Hamas did to them. The young music lovers slaughtered at the Nova festival did nothing to earn their fates. But they don’t get a benefit concert or a tribute album. They barely even get a second thought.

“I know you feel abandoned,” Mr. Ondrasik told the hostage families in Tel Aviv on April 13. “That’s because you have been.”