At this year’s Glastonbury Festival, the UK punk-rap duo Bob Vylan took the stage and shouted “F*** the IDF” to a cheering crowd. Another artist. Another stage. Another instance of venom toward Israel dressed up as activism. But this time, there was a layer of irony too rich to ignore: the band’s very name pays homage to Bob Dylan, perhaps the most iconic Jewish musician of all time, and one who once wrote one of the most fiercely Zionist songs in modern music history.
Let that sink in.
Bob Dylan, born Robert Zimmerman, is not just a cultural icon, he is a proud Jew, unafraid to stand up for Israel when it was unpopular to do so. His 1983 song Neighbourhood Bully is a scorching response to those who cast Israel as an aggressor while ignoring the threats and violence it faces daily.
“The neighbourhood bully just lives to survive / He’s criticized and condemned for being alive.”
The song wasn’t subtle, and Dylan didn’t want it to be. At a time when other artists dodged political landmines, Dylan walked straight into the fray. He saw through the hypocrisy of global criticism how Israel was maligned not for its actions, but for daring to exist as a Jewish state that fought back.
“He’s the neighbourhood bully.”
“He’s supposed to lay down and die when his door is kicked in.”
Neighbourhood Bully was a protest song of a different kind – not against power, but against the selective outrage that let others punch down with impunity. Dylan paints a picture of a nation surrounded, demonized, and forced to defend itself, while the world demands it show restraint. Sound familiar?
“Well, he knocked out a lynch mob, he was criticized / Old women condemned him, said he should apologize.”
Fast forward forty years, and the stages have flipped. Now it’s open season on Israel in Western pop culture. Artists like Bob Vylan, who named themselves after the very man who stood up for Zionism feel emboldened not just to criticize, but to dehumanize. “F*** the IDF” isn’t a political critique; it’s a slogan of erasure. It doesn’t ask for nuance, accountability, or peace. It simply demands that the Jewish state have no right to defend itself.
“He’s always on trial for just being born.”
What’s more disturbing is the crowd’s response, not just applause, but celebration. The normalization of this language, especially in progressive artistic spaces, is becoming more pervasive by the day. The nuance is gone. The context is gone. The history is gone. And the original Dylan – the one who sang of exiles and pogroms, of a nation surrounded and condemned – has been replaced with a new, performative kind of righteousness, loud and unthinking.
Vylan seems to have learned little from Dylan
“He’s not supposed to fight back, he’s supposed to have thick skin / He’s supposed to lay down and die when his door is kicked in.”
Of course, Bob Dylan himself has been no stranger to protest. He marched with Martin Luther King Jr. He called out injustice wherever he saw it. But he never needed to erase a people to express his truth. And he understood, deeply, that the Jewish story and Israel’s place in it could not be separated from centuries of persecution and struggle.
“He got no allies to really speak of / What he gets he must pay for, he don’t get it out of love.”
To name your band after Bob Dylan and then shout “F*** the IDF” is more than ironic. It’s a hijacking of legacy. A warping of values. It’s a reminder of how easily the names and symbols of Jewish resilience can be repurposed by those who know little of the pain behind them.
We are living in a time when anti-Israel sentiment has become fashionable, a marker of moral standing in elite cultural circles. But let’s be clear: calling for the destruction of the Jewish state, or demonizing those who protect it, is not activism. It is something far older, and far more dangerous.
Bob Dylan knew that and had the courage to say it — in a song, no less — long before it was popular.
“He’s the neighbourhood bully.”
And for those of us watching the distortion of his legacy unfold on the stages of Europe’s biggest festivals, we must do more than cringe. We must speak.
Because silence, too, has a legacy. Dylan did not stay silent – and neither should we.
Leah Stern is Partner, Global Communications for Israel’s most active venture firm, OurCrowd and heads their UK operations.
