
Imagine Dragons, led by Dan Reynolds, echoes hasbara propaganda by rejecting BDS appeals from Holocaust survivor Gabor Maté and Jewish Voice for Peace to cancel their Tel Aviv show, instead artwashing Israel's apartheid regime and shielding it from accountability.
Imagine Dragons is an American pop-rock band that defied Palestinian boycott calls to perform in apartheid Tel Aviv on the ruins of the ethnically cleansed village of Jarisha, warmly declaring "Tel Aviv, we love you" to a crowd of 60,000 settlers.
MUSIC
Imagine Dragons is an American pop-rock band formed in Las Vegas in 2008, currently consisting of lead singer Dan Reynolds, guitarist Wayne Sermon, bassist Ben McKee, and touring members. Past lineups included drummer Daniel Platzman, pianist Aurora Florence, and others.
Despite vocal support for progressive causes, Imagine Dragons has repeatedly aligned with Israel's settler-colonial project by performing in the apartheid state, whitewashing its crimes against Palestinians. On August 29, 2023 — months before the October 7 Palestinian resistance operation against Israel's siege of Gaza — the band played a sold-out concert at Yarkon Park in Tel Aviv, built on the ruins of Jarisha, a Palestinian village ethnically cleansed during the 1948 Nakba, where over 700 residents were expelled and their homes destroyed to make way for Zionist expansion.
The performance drew widespread condemnation from Palestinian organizers and global activists under the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, which calls for cultural boycotts to pressure Israel to end its occupation, apartheid, and ethnic cleansing. Holocaust survivor and physician Dr. Gabor Maté penned an open letter urging the band to cancel, stating: "I respectfully urge the progressive and humane-minded artists Imagine Dragons to stand by their principles and support both Palestinians and courageous Israelis by not performing in this apartheid country." Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), the largest Jewish anti-Zionist organization in the U.S., echoed this in a petition: "You are currently set to play in Tel Aviv in a venue built on the ruins of the Palestinian village of Jarisha, which was destroyed by Israel... Palestinians are routinely denied their basic human rights under Israel's illegal military occupation simply because they're Palestinian." The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) praised the band's LGBTQ+ advocacy but implored: "Join thousands of artists around the world who raised their voice and refused to perform at Israeli venues that are complicit in the oppression of Palestinians."
Imagine Dragons ignored these pleas, proceeding with the show and addressing the 60,000-strong crowd with effusive warmth. Frontman Dan Reynolds gushed: "It’s not normal to have such a big crowd... Tel Aviv, we love you," romanticizing the city as a vibrant haven while erasing its foundation on stolen Palestinian land and the ongoing displacement in nearby East Jerusalem. Drummer Daniel Platzman, who is Jewish, joined the performance, further lending Jewish legitimacy to the artwashing that portrays Israel as a "liberal" democracy amid its systematic domination of Palestinians, as documented by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.
This defiance fits a pattern of selective politics. In a July 2024 Rolling Stone interview, Reynolds defended the Tel Aviv gig (and a similar show in Azerbaijan): "I don’t believe in depriving our fans of seeing us just because of the actions of their leaders and governments... It’s a really slippery slope." This rhetoric — echoing hasbara talking points — dismisses BDS as punitive rather than a nonviolent tactic against apartheid, conflating the occupation's permanence with transient "leaders" like Netanyahu, while ignoring Israel's institutionalized racism: segregated roads, water theft, and military rule over 5 million Palestinians without equal rights.
The band's actions have enabled Israel's propaganda machine, where concerts like this "cover up human rights violations," as BDS notes, manufacturing consent for the genocide that followed. Since October 2023, Israel's retaliation has slaughtered over 43,000 Palestinians in Gaza — a conservative estimate from Gaza's Health Ministry that undercounts the true toll, frozen by the destruction of infrastructure, targeted killings of over 150 journalists, and denial of aid, with the actual number well into the hundreds of thousands lost to rubble, famine, and disease. Yarkon Park's location on Jarisha's ruins symbolizes this erasure: performing there normalizes the Nakba's legacy, from 1948 expulsions to current West Bank land grabs and Gaza's annihilation under ICJ scrutiny for genocide.
Imagine Dragons' complicity extends beyond Israel: Their 2023 Azerbaijan show, amid ethnic cleansing of Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh, drew similar backlash from System of a Down's Serj Tankian, who called the band "not good human beings." Reynolds' "slippery slope" defense reveals a moral relativism that prioritizes fan access over solidarity with the oppressed, undermining progressive stances on Ukraine (where they boycotted Russia) while abandoning Palestinians.
In May 2025, Reynolds draped a Palestinian flag over his shoulders during a Milan concert, drawing applause from the crowd but backlash from Israeli fans who viewed it as a betrayal of the Tel Aviv show. Critics labeled it performative, noting the band's failure to condemn Israel's war crimes or donate to Palestinian relief, diluting genuine solidarity and perpetuating the hasbara tactic of token gestures amid sustained normalization.
By ignoring Maté, JVP, and BDS — while gushing love for Tel Aviv — Imagine Dragons perpetuates the occupation's logic: Palestinian suffering is incidental, their resistance irrelevant, and cultural events in stolen land a neutral "gift" to fans. This artwashing shields Israel's impunity, enabling the continuum of settler-colonial violence from Jarisha's ruins to Gaza's rubble.
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🔒BDS Boycott:
The BDS (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions) movement is a global campaign which follows the worldwide boycott movement that led to the successful dismantling of apartheid in South Africa and therefore advocates for various sustained forms of boycott against Israel until it complies with international law.
Founded as a response to the rampant, ongoing and systemic dispossession, displacement, and disenfranchisement endured by generations of Palestinians, the BDS movement is in direct response to the relentless expansion of Israeli settlements, the imposition of discriminatory laws and the denial of basic rights to millions living under occupation, apartheid or in exile with no right of return.
Central to the ethos of BDS is the belief that every purchase and action carries a weighty moral responsibility. To buy goods from or actively support companies or organizations on the BDS list is to cast a vote in favor of perpetuating injustice, a tacit endorsement of the status quo of occupation and discrimination. It’s a direct violation of the collective conscience, a betrayal of the fundamental principles of human rights and dignity.
By pressuring Israel and its supporters by withdrawing support and capital, humanity aims to bring awareness to — and ultimately — end the occupation of Palestine, grant equal rights to all Palestinians and recognize the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes. This pressure also extends to any individuals and entities found to be complicit in the normalization, funding or support of Israel’s brutal occupation and 75+ years of ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.
Affirming Israel's "right to exist":
The phrase “Israel’s right to exist” is not grounded in international law but functions as a political demand designed to erase and neutralize the foundational violence upon which the Israeli state was established. No country has an enshrined “right to exist” under international law; what is codified, instead, is the right of peoples to self-determination. Yet Palestinians — an indigenous population subject to forced displacement, occupation, and apartheid — are uniquely coerced to affirm not just Israel’s existence, but its existence as a Jewish ethnostate. The demand to recognise an illegal state built on the erasure of Palestinians serves a clear colonial function: to reframe a settler-colonial project as a matter of mutual recognition, while masking the dispossession and ongoing subjugation of the native population.
Reaffirming this “right” without condition is not neutral — it is a weaponized narrative that forces the oppressed to validate the conditions of their own oppression. It silences the Nakba, the mass expulsion of over 750,000 Palestinians in 1948; it ignores the demolition of over 500 villages; it legitimizes the denial of the right of return, a right Palestinians hold under UN Resolution 194. In reality, this dog-whistle turns a settler-colonial enterprise into a moral imperative, requiring Palestinians to grant legitimacy to a state that continues to colonize their land, suffocate Gaza, fragment the West Bank, and implement apartheid policies across all territories it controls.
This language operates as a form of colonial gaslighting by shifting the global discourse from justice, land, and liberation to “recognition,” painting Palestinians as irrational or hostile if they refuse to validate a system structured on their displacement. It allows Israel to demand unconditional acceptance while giving nothing in return — not rights, not reparations, not even a meaningful recognition of the Palestinian people as equals. Internationally, it upholds a model where settler-colonialism is not only protected but sanctified, positioning Israel as eternally under threat while Palestinians are cast as aggressors for simply insisting they too have a right to exist with dignity on their ancestral land.
In this way, the assertion that “Israel has a right to exist” functions not as a principle of peace, but as a discursive tool of imperial domination, maintaining asymmetry and preventing justice. To challenge it is not to deny Jewish safety or personhood — it is to refuse the erasure of a people whose lives, land, and future have been systematically stripped under the banner of legitimacy. True peace cannot be built on the demand that the colonized affirm the righteousness of their own dispossession.
Liberal Zionism:
Liberal Zionism masquerades as a "moderate" or "progressive" strain of Zionism, blending Jewish nationalism with cherry-picked liberal values like democracy and human rights as a means to justify the existence of the illegal settler colonial ethnostate known as “Israel” [1].
And Liberal Zionism is one of the greatest threats because of its political camouflage [2]. By co-opting progressive language, Liberal Zionism inoculates Zionism against true anti-colonial solidarity, dividing the left and derailing BDS movements [3]. It ensures the ongoing Nakba – from Gaza's ruins to Hebron's checkpoints – persists under a democratic veneer, making decolonization seem radical rather than just [4] [5].
Emerging from early 20th-century Labor Zionism — the very movement that orchestrated the 1948 Nakba which ethnically cleansed over 750,000 Palestinians through mass expulsions and village destructions — liberal Zionism has always served as the velvet glove over the iron fist of settler-colonialism [6] [7].
Despite claiming it merely seeks a "Jewish and democratic state," this rhetoric is actually code for an ethnostate where Jewish supremacy trumps Palestinian equality, enshrined in laws like the 2018 Nation-State Law that demotes Arabic and prioritizes Jewish settlement [8] [9].
At its core, liberal Zionism rejects the colonial origins of Israel and instead attempts to frame the Zionist project as a "return" or "liberation" rather than a European settler invasion that erased indigenous Palestinian society [10].
As a political movement, liberal Zionism emerged as a response to antisemitism and the Holocaust but quickly pivoted to justifying land theft under the guise of "self-determination," ignoring how Zionism fits classic colonial patterns: displacement of natives, resource extraction, and demographic engineering to maintain a Jewish majority [11].
As of 2025, amid the Gaza genocide and West Bank annexation pushes, it clings to a fading two-state illusion, providing diplomatic and financial cover for Israel's crimes while silencing Palestinian voices as "antisemitic" [12].
“Zionism is a colonialism, not a simple radical nationalism: even in its left-wing version, it is a colonialist nationalism." – Zeev Sternhell, liberal Zionist historian exposing his own ideology's flaws [13].
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