We know the genocide in Gaza is a collective work, a sort of F35 genocide whose parts come from an imperial collective, a collective of old colonial states now led by the USA. So the denial of genocide, at least of its naming, is also shared by these states across the Imperial collective. Within this sharing of denial, the Gaza genocide dredges out the particularities of the colonial history of each of its participating states in their ‘post colonial’ present. Here in Britain the genocide in its denial has led to possibly the largest and most sustained social mobilisation in its history. A scale of mobilisation met by a scale of repression that has opened up its contradictions of state. A post Empire Britain constituted as a liberal democracy, yet as a liberal state that overlays a colonial state with its imperial trajectory. Rap opens up the faultlines between them. Through rappers such as Bob Vylan and Kneecap, an insurgent rap tells us why the scale of killing in Gaza is not only bound with our own repression but also coincides with a rising fascism at home. Rap entwines these. The writing here is to show us how and why. If the disciplines of discourse are exhausted by horror and impunity, rap by its strictures of rhyme and ‘slanguage’ carves open raw space in a time when the disintegration of the liberal state is on show as openly as the transparency of a genocide. 

I

This country’s in dire need of a fucking spanking, mate… 
Yeah, and kill the fucking queen,…^[i]

So say the lyrics from a track England’s Ending in Bob Vylan’s 2020 album We Live Here.

No-one cared. In The Price of Life album 2022 which won Bob Vylan multiple awards, the rap in Wicked and Bad goes,

Let’s go dig up Maggie’s grave and ask her where that milk went
Down to storm those Downing doors, run inside and *** them……
England’s ending, death’s still pending, burn those fucking buildings^[ii]

Again nothing of concern to the state. Then came the chant at Glastonbury of Death death to the IDF and the sky fell in. To know why is to know the space Israel occupies in the psyche of the West. A place from where Israel as the remaining embodiment of settler-colonialism sanctifies the history and renews the telos of the West. And it’s the telos that has found a revisiting through the genocide in Gaza. 

If only Fanon were here with us today. The author of the Wretched of the Earth would cut through the revisionism of our age and the necessity of its maintenance of the colonial relation. The relation that still depends on the primal fear of the colonial settler rooted in a sense of guilt and insecurity in spite of the separation from the dispossessed colonised. The primal fear that, according to Fanon, is not merely a personal or a psychological fear, but something deeper, a fear structured and embedded in the coloniser’s institutions through a moral order by endlessly recalling the innate savagery and violence of the colonised. This recalling requires a stage; today that is Gaza with Hamas as the quintessence of evil.

Just like the days of old, the stage is set for a Manichean struggle which Israel embodies on our behalf – as Netanyahu says, We are fighting for you. The struggle of Israel’s survival is our struggle, the struggle of democratic values being fought for us by the ‘most moral army in the world’, the IDF.   

Here the slogan Death, death to the IDF throws us back into a briar patch of colonial memory, the forgotten slogans by which the colonised, if rhetorically, could force a claim to their freedom through liberation chants of ‘death to the …‘. The space of the dot, dot, dot enables the naming. The naming is the act. For the colonised, liberation is predicated on death, the death to free themselves of colonialism as articulated in The Wretched of the Earth, and to enable the birth of a new [man]. Within liberation movements such chants became folkloric. I recall a march in the financial district of the City of London, in June 1999 that I co-organised where WTO Murtabad (meaning death to the WTO) was chanted by farmers from India^[iii]. A chant against the entry of corporations like Monsanto into indigenous global south markets using rewritten WTO rules. The Corporation of London police who escorted us took no issue. They understood the meaning well. As did the UK Screen Industry with the Bob Vylan chant at this year’s Glastonbury: “Saying ‘Death to the IDF’ is not a literal threat; it is a call for the dismantling of a brutal military apparatus that is committing war crimes and killing civilians.”^[iv]

The British state and media though would find more time and imagination for condemnations of the chant – as with the BBC’s claim of ‘antisemitic chants’ for which ‘heads must roll’ – than for the tens of thousands largely women and children killed or maimed by the IDF. But these tens of thousands of deaths do not affect the affairs of state here; by intent they are partitioned out of our affairs whilst the chant lies within. Which explains an immediate intervention from Kier Starmer, the prime minister, followed by the clamour to ban the rap duo, cancel their gigs, deny travel visas. All this is necessary but naming a process of transparent homicide unprecedented in history is not. This is the dichotomy dragged out into the open by a chant in a green field in the greenest of England, sung by the thousands of young white revellers. The death, death… is not simply about the death of the IDF, but the death of our own pretence. The pretence that binds Israel and Britain, as states, in a common project that enables the legitimisation of not only a scale of unaccounted slaughter, but forgets how its executor, the IDF, came into being by the merger of three militias, the Haganah, the Irgun and the Lehi (better known as the Stern Gang). The function of these militias was to fulfil the British Mandate, in effect to dispossess the Palestinians. Two of them, the Irgun and the Stern Gang, were classified as terror organisations when they turned on the British. Yet the very same militias can metamorphose into “the most moral army in the world”. This colonial alchemy mirrors our own alchemy, a colonial Britain with its ‘surrender’ of Empire to become a liberal post-colonial state. The parallels between them, as colonial alchemies, hold the reasons for the meltdown with the Bob Vylan chant and why measures to silence the rappers are unrelenting. 

II

Rap has always been a way in for the policing of Britain’s minorities. The legacy of the much hated Form 696^[v] forced on London’s live venues as a way to control black genres is still remembered. 696 would be followed by Project Alpha^[vi] a special investigations unit set up by London’s Met Police to monitor social media for rap, in particular specific genres like drill rap. A FOI^[vii] (Freedom of Information) request would show how the Met also tried to get YouTube and other platforms to remove drill content; which explains the question posed by the Musicians Union, can a genre be criminal by its nature?^[viii]

In a national debate on race and identity, following the riots of the summer of 2011, the English historian David Starkey singled out rap as a symptom of England’s social decline whereby a “destructive, nihilistic gangster culture has become the fashion”. Re-invoking the Enoch Powell Rivers of Blood speech^[ix] from 1968, Starkey suggested that it was not so much the black race but that “black culture would destroy English culture”^[x]. The malaise of Britain today, Starkey pronounced, was that the “whites have become black”. The ‘whites have become black’ can only be read as a form of rejection, an incapacity to identify with what Britain was or had become. Towards this, the antagonism of rap lay in what it inherently is, does and how it does it. Rap to remind ourselves is a subset of hip hop, an umbrella term that has its synecdoches. Russell Potter’s book on hip hop, Spectacular Vernaculars (1995) referencing De Certeau’s bricolage and Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome describes hip hop as a “a high-speed dialectical network, in which producers consume, consumers produce”. That is, hip hop hybridises, top down and bottom up. On its ‘blackness’, Potter writes, “It is hard to think of anything less distinctively “black” than Kraftwerk’s “Trans-Europe Express,” Queen’s “We Will Rock You,” or Frank Zappa’s “Tiny Umbrellas”- yet each in its turn has been claimed by DJs and used to make distinctive and lasting contributions to hip-hop”^[xi]. In summary, hip hop functions as a Deleuzian assemblage that opens up uncontainable switchboards of cross fertilisation. 

Cross-fertilising with anything and everything in the cultural spectrum of Britain, hip hop takes its place in a Britain where it may equally be valid to argue that the blacks have become white just as the whites have become black. Yet this is a Britain where, as we see from historians such as Starkey, it becomes easier by the decade to make political capital by racialising crisis, or by placing the blame on a culture alien to the nature of Britain, one that comes inevitably from the colonies. This is the reflex in a nation whose self-image is unchanging whilst its society transforms; a nation whose establishment remains utterly detached from its societal turmoil but maintains its place through that detachment, ever reliant on the use of a Royal Family to sanction itself. 

Thus the distinction of a social stratification where the Queen (or King) remains the focal obsession of such a thing as a ‘national life; a national life pictured as in the days of yesteryear and separated from the realities of common life which can flow with its own groundswell. One has no bearing on the other. This can help towards explaining why the Queen should be the target in rituals of ‘raging against the system’; as with the punks and Sex Pistols in the 70s, their Never Mind the Bollocks album timed to coincide with national celebrations for the Queen’s Silver Jubilee:

God save the Queen/ The fascist regime/ They made you a moron /A potential H bomb
God save the Queen / She ain’t no human being / There is no future /In England’s dreaming^[xii]

God Save the Queen reached the top of the pop charts despite its ban by the BBC. Dumped by one record label after another, arrested by the Met for their own Jubilee celebrations, the Sex Pistols provided enduring material for generations to give vent the same way. Which is exactly what Bob Vylan does with their Price of Life album though it should be noted in harder language yet with less censure than the Sex Pistols. Because the nihilism of no future in England’s dreaming remains but with even less to dream of in a society that for most part lives from pay packet to pay packet, in a now Brexited island extolled to find salvation in the flag. 

Wipe my backside with a St. George’s flag/ Let the mother country get dicked down/ Big black dicked down, mm, honey/ Laugh and joke but there ain’t shit funny
Still catch Oxford grads when they’re buying their coke/ Make yuppie kids run that money…
[chorus]
Burn Britannia, kill the Queen, that’s a vibe…^[xiii]

III

There was a time when a post Empire Britain could promise free education, free healthcare, secure housing: the ‘cradle to grave’ Britain that prided itself on the institution of welfare. Yet within a generation the optimism became mired in the contradictions of capital and class, and riven by strikes, unemployment and recession. Then the Empire struck back. Margaret Thatcher came to power just a few years after the punks with a messianic mission to restore Britain’s greatness. Thatcher’s vision was to turn Britain into a classless nation where no-one would be held back, where everyone could dream to succeed. A vision to be made possible by clearing Britain of its postwar liberal socialism, its labour unions and its welfare society. Thatcher’s use of state violence to eviscerate socialism in a scorched earth way also destroyed the postwar consensus and its safety nets. In their place, Thatcher spoke of a return to values, of self-reliance, thrift and hard work, and specifically of Victorian values. Through a claim to lost values, the destruction of the welfare state merged with a reclamation of Britain’s own lost mission. Values would restore greatness. Thatcherism tied values of a post-class society ruled by the market to a renewed patriotism rooted in Empire that found the opportunity to cement itself through the Falklands war.

Margaret Thatcher’s formula would prevail Falklands onwards. Yet the vision of a post-class society, the narratives that sold the population into workfare would lead to a more intensely class-ist society, one that in the coming decades forced those it claimed to liberate into a sense of victimhood. A counter racialisation of a white victimhood that would come of age with a subject indispensable to the national politics of today – the Far Right defender of identity and history. A subject through whom it became possible to reconnect with colonial history without apology. A subject whose making as a demographic became essential to Britain’s place on the world stage for a new era of post-colonial colonial wars also known by its euphemism as the War on Terror. The War on Terror unlike the colonial wars in the days of Empire presented fresh challenges that demanded renewed articulations of an ‘us’ from the ‘them’, the ‘here’ from the ‘there’. This was how the primal fear of the colonised could ground itself in domestic society as Enoch Powell had promised. In his Rivers of Blood speech, Powell narrating through ‘an ordinary Englishman in an ordinary house’, prophesied that “in 15 or 20 years’ time the black man will have the whip hand over the white man”. The speech distilled the structural fear that Fanon articulated to apply to a post-colonial Britain. If in Powell’s own time, it was an useful fiction, through the War on Terror it could become a concrete domestic subject: the homegrown terrorist. A subject to embody the perennial fear with an omnipresence in British life, one that in turn casts selective communities as the enemy within, the means to legitimise new instruments of state. 

In the making of these subjects, the rehabilitation of Empire, not moving on from it, became central to the national identity of a post Empire Britain. It would return us to the absolutism of days gone by, of pure good and evil. It would enable an evolution of a new legal architecture of security and censorship. And in that process, it would enable our social habituation to the necessities of endless wars and killing. By the curation of news footage from Afghanistan to Iraq, Syria, to Libya, a managed diet of colonial killing became the means to preserve and to protect our values, the values of a liberal society.

Who they killing, when they make a killing? / Conditions getting worse, ignore the terms and conditions 
[chorus] 
Can you hear me through the white noise? / Can you hear me through the white noise?^[xiv]

The lyrics from Bob Vylan and metalcore artist Bad Omens are on the terms and conditions that most do not have to read. Which is how we are naturalised under the umbrella of the liberal state just as the white noise of everyday life is saturated with announcements to keep us awake to the omnipresent enemy within: See it / Say it / Sorted^[xv]. At every station platform and every carriage, every train, every ten minutes or so.

IV

The battleground of the state versus rap is at its most intense in the pursuit of the Belfast rappers Kneecap. We are outside the pavement at Westminster Magistrates Court whilst Mo Chara of Kneecap is inside facing terrorism charges – for picking up a flag thrown at them in a concert and waving it. The flag happened to be a Hezbullah flag, one of ever-increasing number of proscribed organisations in Britain: the Britain of today where any casual reference to a banned group, a sign, a gesture falls under the remit of its terrorism laws. The terror charge against Mo Chara, in time, in another court hearing, would be thrown out only for the state to file an appeal. The state’s determination to target Kneecap lies is how every performance of theirs strikes a raw nerve in the colonial psyche, the one that connects Ireland and Palestine through paramilitaries and genocides. When the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) was disbanded on Ireland’s independence in 1922, the notoriously brutal paramilitary, the Black and Tans were sent north to the town of Newtownards near Belfast, the part of Ireland retained by Britain. There the RIC could be rebranded as the RUC (Royal Ulster Constabulary). Newtownards became the recruitment hub for Palestine which Britain had acquired through the 1922 Mandate. Thus the British Palestine Gendarmerie created by Winston Churchill began with the Black and Tans, who also went by the name of Winston’s Boys. In the immortal words of Ronald Storrs, the Governor of Jerusalem, the intention to set up a ‘loyal Jewish Ulster’ was stated openly.

Richard Andrew Cahill’s essay “Going Beserk”:“Black and Tans” in Palestine^[xvi] gives us a picture of their time in Palestine. The Ulsterman Douglas Duff as the Police Inspector for Jerusalem established the snatch squads and pseudo-gangs that would serve as models for Zionist militias to come. Duff left his legacy with term “duffing up” at the time slang for techniques of torture without leaving physical marks. David Ben Gurion who founded the Haganah as an underground militia group at the very start of the British mandate in 1920 writes that, “hundreds of Hagana members received partial military training, with the aid of the British Army, and the lessons were passed on in secret to thousands of others both inside and outside the ranks of the force which remained until the end of the British Mandate”^[xvii]. In particular, Ben Gurion would describe the forming of the dreaded SNS (Special Night Squads) as the “most successful and complete co-operation between the Jews and the British”. After the Nakba and the declaration of the state of Israel, Ben Gurion would become its President just as the Haganah would become the backbone of the IDF.

It’s hard to imagine how shaping of the IDF or IOF (Israeli Occupation Forces) could be possible without the RUC and British recruitment from Ireland; as a reminder, the artist Tadhg Hickey flew in from Belfast to support Kneecap with a rendition outside the court house of the Irish folk song Go on Home British soldiers Go on Home^[xviii]; lyrics updated to address the current genocide. 

The RUC was disbanded on paper after the 1998 Good Friday agreement to follow the RIC into history but the nature of their work continues through the IOF and IDF. The acronyms RIC, RUC, IOF, IDF form a continuum in a process of colonial renewal from one place to another through militias and genocides. It’s a process we know better thanks to the chants of rappers. Irrespective of the number of terror charges and cancelled concerts, Kneecap drive at the same spot, an inner sanctum of the colonial, where the acronyms that do the dirty work century to century are made, the work that drives the colonial genocides that then renews the foundational fear Fanon identified which in turn legitimises the moral order it rests upon. This is the cycle that rap pulls out for us from the compound of history. It is the same cycle that also demands the making of subjects to play the part of Winston’s Boys, now for a domestic austerity, to fly the flag in neighbourhood streets and paint red crosses on roundabouts just as the state passes one repressive law after another. On how these things are entwined, only rap will express, in its own way.

Kemi ya wally / Maggie is still sleeping in her box 
/You don’t care about which race /  You just care about gimme that^[xix]

The lines are from the Kneecap the Recap a release in response to attempts to defund the Belfast rappers. Slanguage aside, the rap unpacks the Thatcherite and colonial legacies woven into the normality that naturalises austerity just as it racialises its symptoms. Kemi is Kemi Badenoch who tries to withhold state grants to Kneecap and is the present leader of the Conservative party. A politician of Nigerian origin, Badenoch disavows her Nigerian identity and in response to criterion for migration to Britain suggests that, “not all cultures are equally valid”^[xx]. The rationale that once legitimated nineteenth century settler colonialism and sustained an apartheid state in South Africa now has electoral currency; values from colonial time are re-packaged and rebranded whereby the means to power in the twenty-first century depend on the same values that enabled the scramble for Africa in the nineteeth. Which tells us that colonialism is not a historical phenomenon that is behind us but one facing us. The flipping of the colonial sandglass became materially possible through the production of necessary subjects whose making is not so much an organic social evolution, but instead comes from an exploitation of the state’s own social fabric. It was Margaret Thatcher who cleared the pathway using the toolkit of the liberal state itself. In an interview as Conservative leader^[xxi] before she came to power, one that is somehow more contemporary than it was forty years ago, Thatcher laid out the ground work through a conjugation of unions and immigrants but her weapon of choice was always the discourse of values. By instrumentalising values, her work would begin with eradicating the [working] class antagonism from society, to remove its political base, the trade unions and the labour movement, and sell off its habitat, social housing; that is, to neutralise it as a form of political subjectivity. But as we have seen with class, neutralisation does not mean disappearance; instead it is how a production line of subjects for a new kind of reserve army could come into being, or in effect, how an old colonial nation can renew itself as a new colonial state.

V 

The repression necessitated by collusion and denial of genocide has pushed the state to a point where it teeters on the edge, unable to go further without rendering the very idea of a liberal order meaningless. Yet ever faithful to its practices, it seeks to save itself by sedating its own population through further expansion of its terror laws. Which is why retired pensioners from the shires are bundled into police vans under the terrorism act, just as rappers are pursued by the same laws. Rap’s capacity for intervention in this time has lineage through a dimension of its own making, gangsta rap. As Eithne Quinn explains it in the Black Music Research Journal^[xxii], gangsta rap with its rejection of the assimilationist ethic, its steadfast use of hardcore emerged as a way to break out of the ‘burden of representation’ and to force a change in the modus operandi of its own industry. Gangsta rap made it possible to top the Billboard charts “on your own terms”; it told us commercial success did not mean selling out your values. NWA’s Fu*k the Police. Public Enemy’s Fight the Power. To what end is contentious but rap pushes us onto the terrain of our making as subjects. It digs up the layers of our making, throwing them up as cutting memes. How they fall and the connections they make is beyond anyone’s calculation. Thus, just as in a reactionary imaginary, it can turn ‘whites into blacks’, rap hybridises, synergises in ways the state can not deal with, given what it is predicated on: the recursive colonial narratives it must renew for another chapter of its time to come. This is what rap in its insurgent sense is antithetical to. As a form of antagonism, rap points to a fundamentally different process of our production as subjects, wherein the state’s instrumentalisation of values for narratives of colonial renewal become valueless. It is how rap frees itself to tell us that the recursive narratives that enable a genocide by denial are also to reproduce us as subjects. To tell us that our movement against a colonial genocide is not only about Palestine but also for a fundamentally different process of our own making.

Siraj Izhar is an artist and activist. His writings are at amplife.org

End notes: 

[i]    Bob Vylan England’s Ending Album We Live Here 2020 online: Youtube

[ii]   Bob Vylan Wicked & Bad Album The Price Of Life 2022 online: Youtube

[iii]  Peoples Global Action (PGA) UK Caravan march June 1999, anon interview at PGA Oral History

[iv]  UK Screen Industry quoted by the Guardian 30 June 2025 

[v]   What was Form 696? November 2021 Horniman Museum

[vi]  Project Alpha FOI request reference no: 01.FOI.23.030443

[vii] Removal of drill or rap videos from social networks FOI request reference no: 01.FOI.24.035643  

[viii] Why Are Drill Rappers Criminalised for Making Music? November 2020 Musicians Union

[ix]  Enoch Powell speech, Conservative Association meeting in Birmingham, April 20 1968 Readable online

[x]   David Starkey, BBC iPlayer – Newsnight 12-08-2011 section online BBC

[xi]  Russell A. Potter, Spectacular Vernaculars: Hip-Hop and the Politics of Postmodernism, State University of New York Press, 1995 Readable chapter online

[xii] Sex Pistols God Save The Queen from album Never Mind the Bollocks 1977 available on Youtube

[xiii] Bob Vylan Take That Album The Price Of Life 2022 online: Youtube

[xiv] Bad Omens x Bob Vylan, Terms and Conditions 2024 online: Youtube

[xv] See, Say it, Sorted announcements, recording samples on Youtube

[xvi] Richard Andrew Cahill, “Going Beserk”:“Black and Tans” in Palestine, Jerusalem Quarterly
Issue. 38, Summer 2009 online at Institute for Palestine Studies

[xvii]       David Ben Gurion, Britain’s Contribution to Arming the Hagana, Jewish Observer and the Middle East Review, September 20, 1963 pp. 13-14 

[xviii]      Tadhg Hickey Go On Home, British Soldiers, lyrics online at Instagram

[xix] Kneecap the Recap Ft. Mozey (Bootleg Version) 2025 on Soundcloud

[xx]        Kemi Badenoch, “not all cultures are equally valid“, quote and commentary in the Guardian 29 September 2024

[xxi] Margaret Thatcher, Interview for Granada TV, World in Action, January 1978. Transcript online at Margaret Thatcher Foundation

[xxii]       Eithne Quinn, Black British Cultural Studies and the Rap on Gangsta, Black Music Research Journal, Vol. 20, No. 2, University of Illinois Press 2000 Readable online