Mick Clifford: Bono blasted over Gaza — but was his silence actually a moral choice?

Bono’s Gaza response drew fierce backlash, but his decades of activism on Aids and poverty tell a more complicated story

Bono may well have concluded it was best to keep his own counsel rather than anger Trump’s administration. Picture: Doug Peters/PA

Here’s a line that will most likely elicit some derision: Maybe Bono is entitled to be cut a little slack.

Last week, the singer and his U2 bandmates released individual statements about the genocide in Gaza.

An ageing rock band collectively making a pronouncement on such a matter at this point in time is highly questionable. That the four members released their own individual statements borders on the ridiculous.

Notwithstanding that, the reaction to Bono in particular has been savagely negative.

On social media, comments about the singer’s statement were was visceral, vitriolic, and here and there even freighted with a form of hatred.

The whole farrago spoke volumes, not just about Bono’s image in some quarters of this country, but how comments around the attack on Gaza have evolved

A few matters require laying out before cutting the singer some slack. The first is that the only people who matter a whit in any discussion on Gaza are those being murdered and starved from the ruins created by the Israeli Defense Forces.

The second matter of note is that it could all stop tomorrow if the US — and not just Donald Trump — ceased providing the means to perpetrate the genocide.

In previous decades, at various spots around the world, the US did step in the prevent slaughter of innocents. Here, it is enabling such slaughter.

That brings us back to Bono.

Skill and status

Whatever one thinks of the singer, his music, or his musings, there is one incontrovertible fact about the work he has done on Aids, hunger, and debt relief in the developing world: An unaccountable number of people who would otherwise be dead are alive today because of his efforts.

 This plaudit also applies to thousands of workers on the ground across the globe, but Bono brings a particular skill and status to his work.

Those who have benefitted live in the poorest outposts of Africa and Asia, and are probably so preoccupied in trying to stay alive and provide for families that they haven’t an iota who he is. But their lives matter as much as any life in Tel Aviv or Gaza, Ireland or the US.

Palestinian and Israeli activists take part in a protest against the killing of journalists in the Gaza Strip as they gather in the West Bank town of Beit Jala on Friday. Picture: Mahmoud Illean/AP

There has been criticism of his work, particularly along the lines that he represents a white man interfering in the lives of black people, making them dependent rather than minding his own business. Much of this criticism is informed by an ideology that dictates it is preferable to allow people die today in order to contribute towards some abstract form of justice tomorrow.

To suggest in some ways that Bono’s work and focus has been flawed is entirely justified.

To infer that he should therefore have done nothing at all in this area is wantonly misguided — to put it as its most charitable

When the October 7 massacre by Hamas on innocent Israelis occurred, U2 were playing a residency in Las Vegas. The following night, during Pride, the band’s song about Martin Luther King, Bono took a moment to pay tribute to “those beautiful kids at that music festival”. It was an appropriate intervention and in keeping with the band’s long-standing ethos.

Months later, that clip was circulated on social media. By then, Israel’s murderously disproportionate response to Hamas was well under way.

The Gaza Strip was being laid to ruin, innocents killed by the thousand. Any initial sympathy for Israelis was being ground down by the relentless bombing of a whole people as if they were collectively culpable for Hamas’s crimes.

At this time of growing anger against the Israeli government and its defence forces, U2 — and Bono in particular — were cast as viewing the whole thing through the lens of the oppressor.

It was, like so much on social media, both a gross distortion and most likely highly effective in its aim.

Since then, as the genocide has developed, as the forced starvation has begun to kill, Bono’s silence has been used as a stick to beat him. The basest of motives — principally concern for his money and celebrity — have been ascribed to him as if the main thrust of his life’s work has been all about material acquisition.

Focus on catastrophes

Last weekend, the long-awaited statement condemning Israel was released and, in addition, Bono penned an opinion piece for the Atlantic magazine.

In both, he referenced the work he has done over the last 30-plus years.

“As a co-founder of the One Campaign, which tackles Aids and extreme poverty in Africa, I felt my experience should be focused on the catastrophes facing that work and that part of the world,” he wrote.

“The haemorrhaging of human life in Sudan or Ethiopia hardly makes the news. The civil war in Sudan alone is beyond comprehension, leaving 150,000 dead and 2m people facing famine.”

Surely he has a point.

If so, his silence up to this juncture makes perfect sense. Along with Bob Geldof, he has a crucial role in getting the US to intervene in the Aids and debt crises in Africa 20 years ago.

That has made a difference to the lives of anonymous Africans who exist far from any media focus.

Last January, Trump began dismantling foreign aid to the developing world by closing the national agency, USAid. A study published in The Lancet in June estimated that USAid had saved 90m lives over the last 20 years.

Mourners sit around the grave of Al Jazeera correspondent Anas al-Sharif, who was killed alongside other journalists in an overnight Israeli strike on their tent in Gaza City. Picture: Omar Al-qatta/AFP

The research also concluded that, if the current approach to aid from the Trump administration continues, 14m people will die by 2030.

Against such a febrile background, Bono may well have concluded it was best for the sake of the work he has been involved in to keep his own counsel rather than anger Trump’s administration. The current US president has a record of lashing out against those who irritate or anger him, and there would be every possibility that he could do so against any of the projects to which Bono has lent his weight.

Any high profile intervention on his part would have no effect on the US’s enablement of the Gaza genocide, but it may well have had repercussions for the lives of others who are struggling against the ravages of famine and war.

On that basis, his silence was not just understandable but morally sound

The reality is that the US’s moral authority in the world at large has been severely damaged through a combination of Trump’s policies and the complete capitulation of the country’s power centres to a war criminal such as Benjamin Netanyahu. All sorts of leaders in other countries, in business, in the arts, and in development work are scrambling to come to terms with the current global dispensation.

It certainly looks like Bono had some struggles in this regard. For those who revel in casting him as one who is only concerned with his own welfare, such struggles had precious little to do with considerations for the dispossessed.

A more nuanced view might concede that his record suggests he has as much social conscience, if not far more, than many of his critics.