Cat Stevens is right: what's happening in Gaza is intolerable

And with free speech in the UK under threat, as he also says, 'the dictators are here too'

Yusuf / Cat Stevens performing in Hyde Park on 11th July 2025

There were many great moments in Hyde Park last Friday where, on a scorching afternoon, the line up for the BST festival proved irresistible for 60,000 people of a certain age.

Van Morrison was first to take the stage with the sun still beating down. The atmosphere was electric: even the notoriously grumpy Morrison reportedly cracked a smile. Not that I saw it from my position 200 yards from the stage, but this rare event was confirmed by Louis Chilton in this joyful review

Next on stage was Yusuf / Cat Stevens, singing as beautifully as ever and reminding us what a great songwriter he is. The evening closed with Neil Young returning to his rock roots and seemingly having the time of his life.

But this isn’t a gig review, it’s a far more serious a piece, prompted by something Stevens said while introducing his tragic song The Little Ones, written in response to the massacre at Srebrenica which, as he reminded us, took place 30 years ago to the day.

Re-dedicating the song to the little ones who have lost their lives in Gaza, he said:

“The number of innocent children being slaughtered is indescribable.”

and then:

“You may believe we live in a free society, but dictators are here too.”

A few years ago such statements would have been met with huge cheers. On Friday the reaction was disappointingly muted; an indication, I think, of the success of a concerted media/government operation to make people feel uncomfortable about speaking out, or even showing support for others when they speak out, against the brutal policies of the Israeli government.

The suppression of anti-Israeli protests, including the proscription of the campaigning group Palestine Action, which under British law is now regarded as a terrorist organisation no different from Al-Qaeda or Islamic State, suggests the British government cares as little for the civil liberties of its own people as it does for the lives of innocent civilians in Gaza.

For those who don’t know, Palestine Action is / was a direct action protest group whose efforts were focussed on preventing British-manufactured weapons being exported to Israel for use against the people of Gaza.

The statement put out by Artists for Palestine UK in reaction to the ban says all that needs to be said:

Palestine Action is intervening to stop a genocide. It is acting to save life. We deplore the government’s decision to proscribe it. Labelling non-violent direct action as ‘terrorism’ is an abuse of language and an attack on democracy. The real threat to the life of the nation comes not from Palestine Action but from the home secretary’s efforts to ban it. We call on the government to withdraw its proscription of Palestine Action and to stop arming Israel.

As things stand, anyone expressing support for Palestine Action is liable to arrest under the Terrorism Act 2000. This is patently absurd and makes the UK Government appear not only weak but devoid of all humanitarian concern.

Credit must go those who signed the open letter calling for the ban to be lifted, and in doing so presumably putting themselves at risk of arrest. I doubt, though, that the police will be knocking at the doors of Paul Weller, Tilda Swinton, Steve Coogan or Myriam Margolyes any time soon. Instead, it’s the the brave souls who took to the streets last weekend in defiance of the ban who get to feel the long arm of a very bad law.

A shared tragedy

In case you’ve not read my previous posts on Israel / Palestine (they’re here and here), I will reiterate my position:

1. I unreservedly support the right of the state of Israel to exist and to defend its pre-1968 borders.

2. As any reasonable person must, I acknowledge and celebrate the immense and unique contribution to culture and science made by Jewish people over the last century.

3. I also condemn, unreservedly, the actions of Hamas terrorists on the night of 7th October 2023.

4. But I do not believe it is anti-Semitic to condemn the atrocities currently being committed by the Netanyahu government in Gaza.

5. Neither is it anti-Semitic to call out the illegal actions of some settlers on the occupied West Bank.

6. Far from improving the long-term security of the state of Israel and the safety of its people, Netanyahu’s genocidal strategy is likely only to condemn the region to further conflict for decades to come.

Israelis and Palestinians share a common tragedy. They both suffer under political leaders who care more for their own power than for the people whose interests they are supposed to represent.

Where are the Politicians?

This excellent letter to The Guardian from four British bishops eloquently summarises the violent and clearly illegal actions of settlers on the West Bank, and questions the dire response of the British government.

But we shouldn’t have to rely on bishops to condemn illegal settler violence. Neither should we have to rely on the Pope, who this weekend made his most overtly political statement since his election, calling for a ‘revolution of love’. Where are the politicians who should be holding Netanyahu to account?

Again, we shouldn’t have to rely on the actress Juliet Stevenson and her husband, Hugh Brody, who is Jewish and whose mother survived the Holocaust, to remind the world how bad things have become. In this recent interview they suggested that fear of being branded as anti-Semitic is forcing many people who are appalled by events in Gaza into silence:

“In my industry, every institution, every arts organisation who could and should be standing up is too frightened, because of the risk of losing money and sponsorship.”

This is what Yusuf / Cat Stevens means when he says ‘the dictators are here too’.

But thank God for brave people like Ms. Stevenson and her husband, and the former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Ohlmert who this weekend said that Israeli plans to build a ‘humanitarian city’ on the ruins of Rafah amount to establishing a concentration camp for Gazans who have survived the genocide. When an Israeli politician uses such emotive language, it is clear how intolerable the situation has become.

Further evidence of western governments closing ranks comes with the news that Donald Trump has announced sanctions against the UN Rapporteur for the West Bank and Gaza, Francesca Albanese, simply for telling the world the truth about what is happening. Avaaz have launched a petition to have Albanese nominated for the Novel Peace Prize. Such gestures might not change much, but they do provide an opportunity for decent, reasonable people to make their feelings known.

It’s not just Gaza

Insidious injunctions against the right to protest are not limited to Israel / Gaza, of course. While Yusuf / Cat Stevens was treating us to song after beautiful song on Friday evening, advertising screens around the site were displaying the words ‘No Music on a Dead Planet’ paid for by the campaigning group Music Declares Emergency.

Last year, five protesters from Just Stop Oil were given prison sentences of five and four years for holding up traffic on the M25 motorway around London, sentences of unprecedented severity for non-violent protest. They were described by UN Human Rights Commissioner, Volker Türk, as ‘deeply troubling’.

I’m not up to speed with how sentencing decisions are made, but it’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that politicians will have signalled their desire for punitive sentences having concluded they would play well with voters. As Stevens said on Friday ‘You may think you live in a free society.’

In the wake of the sentences, Just Stop Oil announced it would disband and devise less adversarial means of protest. The only protests likely to be allowed are ones which fail to draw sufficient attention to the gravity of the situation, and do nothing to better educate the public about the need for an urgent change in policy. Meanwhile, politicians and voters continue to bury their heads in the sand while Britain and the rest of the world endures record temperatures and increasingly frequent catastrophic climate events.

To paraphrase another of Stevens’ songs: Where will the children play when the impact of climate change becomes so great that the social contract disintegrates under pressure from mass migration, food and water shortages and the gradual breakdown of the complex infrastructure on which modern society depends?

Many more concerned citizens will doubtless be languishing in prison for attempting to speak truth to power before we reach that point.

Avoiding Civilizational Collapse

This substack is entitled Progress and Survival because I believe our precious civilization will not survive unless we continue actively to strive for progress towards a more just, inclusive and sustainable world.

What’s happening in Gaza now, and the failure of political leaders across the world to respond to it in the strongest possible terms, represents the worst case of civilizational back-sliding since the Rwandan genocide three decades ago.

And it’s not just the scale of the humanitarian crimes being committed: as we grow more tolerant of such abuses of human rights and breaches of international law, we give licence to the transgressors to repeat their atrocities.

While Yusuf / Cat Stevens was fabulous, the highlight for me last Friday came when the Chrome Hearts vacated the stage to leave Neil Young alone at a battered old upright piano to sing us his 1970 classic After the Gold Rush. Young was a 24 year-old hippie rock star when he wrote the immortal lyric:

Look at mother nature on the run in the nineteen seventies.

He’s now changed it to:

Look at mother nature on the run in the twenty-first century.

So much for immortal lyrics.

If Young could see the environmental writing on the wall in 1970; if scientists at Exxon Mobil were able to predict with stunning accuracy the effect of carbon emissions on the atmosphere as early as 1977, then why is our civilization currently balanced on a knife-edge, with no sign of the governments that matter taking anything like the action necessary to curb this existential threat.

Getting to grips with climate change is a far more complex moral and political challenge than Gaza, but ultimately it will cost many more lives.

The failure of world leaders in respect of both the Gaza genocide and climate change are symptomatic of a political system (yes, democracy) and an international diplomatic order which are both now so dysfunctional that they themselves pose a considerable threat to the future.

I gave up being a revolutionary sometime in my twenties, having persuaded myself there were enough decent people in the world to make it possible to change things, and to save the planet, through a combination of appeals to reason, effective moral leadership and democratic elections. Yusuf / Cat Stevens and Neil Young have remained revolutionaries all their lives. They were right.