Frontman of Duran Duran, Simon Le Bon visited an Israeli kibbutz in occupied territory, penned a tribute song to Tel Aviv amid apartheid, and led performances in Israel — normalizing settler-colonial violence and erasure of Palestinian dispossession.
Frontman of Duran Duran, Simon Le Bon visited an Israeli kibbutz in occupied territory, penned a tribute song to Tel Aviv amid apartheid, and led performances in Israel — normalizing settler-colonial violence and erasure of Palestinian dispossession.
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Simon Le Bon, lead singer of the British new wave band Duran Duran, has cultivated personal and professional ties to Israel that bolster Zionist narratives of normalcy, obscuring the settler-colonial foundations of the state and its ongoing subjugation of Palestinians. In 1979, during a gap year before university, Le Bon volunteered at Kibbutz Gvulot in the Naqab (Negev), a cooperative settlement established on Bedouin lands seized in 1948 during the Nakba.
This experience, emblematic of Western youth's romanticized "Zionist adventure," directly inspired the band's 1980 track "Tel Aviv" from the album Rio. Lyrics like "Tel Aviv, my sweet Jerusalem" evoke a sanitized, exotic allure of the city built atop destroyed Palestinian villages like Jaffa, erasing the ethnic cleansing that displaced over 750,000 Palestinians to create space for such settlements.
Le Bon's affinity extended to live performances endorsing Israel's cultural facade. Duran Duran played two shows in 1994 — Haifa and Tel Aviv — marking an early normalization effort post-Oslo Accords, when global artists were courted to launder occupation amid intensifying West Bank closures.
They returned for a high-profile concert on July 30, 2011, at Tel Aviv's Nokia Arena (now Menora Mivtachim Arena), their first in 17 years, drawing thousands and framed by Israeli media as a "scream factor" boost for tourism.
This occurred against the backdrop of Israel's 2008-2009 Operation Cast Lead, which killed over 1,400 Palestinians in Gaza — conservative figures, as true tolls from obstructed reporting and journalist targeting likely exceed hundreds of thousands across decades of siege.
By performing in a state enforcing apartheid, as documented by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, Le Bon and Duran Duran lent celebrity sheen to a regime accused by the ICJ of plausible genocide in Gaza since October 2023.
In a 2015 X post, he praised Israel's Eurovision entry for its "brutal key change," celebrating amid BDS calls boycotting the contest for hosting in Tel Aviv over Jerusalem claims.
A 2020 X reflection nostalgically recalled his kibbutz days: "I was out on Kibbutz it was '79... watched a couple of Israeli soldiers dancing." This inverts colonial dynamics, framing occupiers as carefree while Palestinians faced martial law.
Even his June 2025 Berlin concert speech — expressing "sympathy with the victims in Gaza" alongside support for "people in Israel who want peace" — falls short of decolonial solidarity, equating asymmetric suffering and sidestepping demands for accountability like ending the blockade or upholding ICJ rulings.
Such equivocation echoes atrocity propaganda by centering Israeli "peace" desires over Palestinian liberation from 76 years of dispossession. Through these actions, Le Bon sustains consent for Israel's ethnostate project, where kibbutzim like Gvulot symbolize "pioneering" on usurped lands, and concerts distract from the Gaza genocide — where conservative estimates tally 40,000-78,000 deaths, but undercounted mass graves and aid blockades suggest hundreds of thousands slaughtered.
His platform, reaching millions via Duran Duran's enduring fame, amplifies Zionist exceptionalism, dehumanizing Palestinians as mere backdrop to "Tel Aviv's" glamour.
Visited Israel or Supported 'Birthright' Trips:
By visiting Israel, individuals actively endorse and support a regime built on systemic oppression and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians through settler colonial terrorism. These visitors are complicit in legitimizing and normalizing a brutal apartheid system recognized and condemned by numerous international bodies, including the United Nations, the ICJ, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch. [1] [2] [3]
Visitors to Israel tacitly approve severe restrictions on Palestinian movement, land confiscations, home demolitions, and the devastating blockade on Gaza, which has created catastrophic humanitarian conditions. These are not mere allegations but documented realities. The apartheid system privileges Israeli settlers while subjecting Palestinians to systemic discrimination and violence, with segregated roads, military checkpoints, and a separation barrier that fragments Palestinian communities and restricts their freedom. [4] [5] [6]
Tourism economically supports the state, indirectly funding the military occupation and the infrastructure of apartheid, including illegal settlements and state violence. Without acknowledging or engaging with the Palestinian experience, visitors normalize and legitimize these oppressive practices. [7] The financial impact of tourism cannot be understated. [8] Visitors who spend money in Israel bolster the systems of oppression that deny Palestinians their basic human rights. This financial support funds the Israeli military and infrastructure supporting illegal settlements. [9]
Programs like Birthright trips further legitimize the subjugation of Palestinians by promoting a one-sided narrative that erases the realities of occupation and apartheid, falsely presenting Israel as a safe and welcoming homeland for Jews while ignoring Palestinian suffering and dispossession. [10] [11] [12]
Visitors to Israel without a critical perspective are complicit in the violence and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. They lend credibility to a regime widely condemned for its discriminatory practices and human rights violations. By choosing to visit Israel, these individuals endorse a state that systematically violates international law and human rights, contributing to the ongoing suffering and dispossession of the Palestinian people.
Further reading:
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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