Israel, the DEI exception to 'everyone': How the music industry lost its moral compass - opinion

Music crosses borders between cultures, communities, and strangers. Our rave culture was founded on the belief that everyone belonged; that all were welcome, safe, and celebrated. Until, on a Saturday morning, a specific border was crossed that would bring the pulse of music and its uniting values to a hard stop.

For nearly twenty years, I worked in an industry that came of age alongside some of the most impactful social and political shifts of my generation. I was part of movements like #MeToo and BLM as they took the stage, grabbed the mic, and demanded that long-standing wrongs be confronted.

We were building, or so I believed at the time, a new social contract: protect one another, respect one another, and never tolerate in our scene what we would not accept for ourselves.

Around the time of Eric Morillo’s death, an American DJ who had taken a fatal overdose three days before he was due in court for rape charges, I had authored a code of conduct as a pro bono researcher for an industry-leading trade body: a document its members would adopt, addressing gender discrimination and sexual violence in the music industry and rave scene.

The code gained significant attention and press coverage, including from the BBC, due to its relevant timing. And rightly so. Sexual violence does not belong on the dance floor, or anywhere else.

At the time, I felt proud to be part of that change. I believed I was contributing to something bigger: an industry willing to confront its own failings and create a safer and more equitable culture- perhaps even a voice of resistance.

We were tastemakers. We shaped conversations and conventions and moved society in directions that politics sometimes struggled to impact. For better or worse, I believed this music culture was a pioneer of social change.

It was righteous. However, I began to see that the principles we worked so hard to establish were not universal. They extended only to those deemed worthy of them - those who passed the unspoken test of our industry’s court of public opinion.

October 7 should have been the day on which those principles became uncomplicated. A music festival had become a killing field.

Young people who had gone to dance were raped, murdered, kidnapped and hunted while fleeing.

Yet, before the Nova Festival had even finished counting its dead, the cultural sorting had already begun. On October 8, while the scale of the massacre was still emerging, Kneecap posted its ‘Solidarity with the Palestinian struggle’ across its socials, with a fist emoji.

First, I bore witness to the music industry turning its back on its own DEI values in favor of ideological purity tests, exclusionary of those not approved of, selective boycotts in the name of selective social justice, and perhaps inevitably the trend developed into straight-up discrimination under the rule of law.

Let us sit with the following thought experiment for a moment and ask ourselves where political expression ends, and political conformity as a condition of cultural participation, begins.

After the cruelest and deadliest (sexual-) violence at a rave, that distinction became painfully clear.

Then came Glastonbury. In 2025, Bob Vylan stood before one of the world’s most famous festival audiences and led the crowd in chants of ‘Death, death to the IDF’. The BBC streamed the performance live on national tv. It later concluded that the broadcasting breached its editorial standards on harm and offense. Vylan later told Louis Theroux in a podcast that BBC employees had congratulated the band backstage, telling him it ‘was fantastic’ and they [the BBC] ‘loved it!’.

When ‘Fuck Zionism’ becomes an awards acceptance speech subsequently amplified by the institution handing out the award, and a death chant is broadcast by a national broadcaster whose employees apparently congratulated him backstage, the question becomes not only what artists are saying, but what cultural institutions have learned to tolerate, amplify and even celebrate.

Call it the rave scene, or dance, or culture; its foundational mythology was essentially: radical inclusion.

House and techno developed through marginalized communities, until house and techno itself was marginalizing communities. The festival conference Sonar in Barcelona, and the LGBTQ festival in Amsterdam, Milkshake, were two of the many events where artists pulled out of the event lineup because the event was somehow connected to a Zionist investor and thus immediately complicit in the only ‘genocide relevant enough’.

By 2024, this movement was effectively policing the ideological purity of its own infrastructure. Apparently, radical inclusion does not apply when artists or company ownership are born in one specific country or belong to one specific marginalized race.

Peace-building musical collabs such as Jonny Greenwood and Dudu Tassa's Arabic show, Jarak Qaribak (“Your Neighborhood is Your Friend”), were canceled as a result of the BDS Movement. The project involved musicians from Syria, Lebanon, Kuwait, and Iraq - the kind of cross-collabs generally praised by the arts & culture.

While peace-building performances become unacceptable, shouting hate speech and antisemitic libels through a mic when accepting an award on stage becomes celebrated as an act of cool resistance; what is being contributed to these foundational DEI values of the music industry? Because where does political accountability end and collective punishment of a people as a whole begin?

By 2025, over 400 musicians had joined a geo-block boycott to make their music unavailable in Israel, calling their campaign ‘No Music for Genocide’. The name itself invites an uncomfortable

question. If No Music for Genocide is really a principle rather than a geographical preference, where were the comparable mass geo-blocking campaigns and cultural boycotts as Sudan or Iran descended into mass atrocity?

Challenging their objective, I posted a few very politically correct words on my LinkedIn, the point of which was ‘Boycotting musicians and fans in Israel will not free Palestine’.

Exclusion, hate, and polarization didn’t really seem like the way to go for me as a music executive who believed in dialogue and listening to each other.

I’d lead my own panel for five years at Amsterdam Dance Event on the subject of DEI, so I believed in ‘talking about the hard stuff’. Then followed the wave of hate, antisemitic libels, and threats from industry professionals employed by major labels, publicly traded tech companies, and places of work with codes of conduct specifically prohibiting them from publicly attacking ‘fellow colleagues’.

The proof remained, indeed, in the pudding.

I believed that the principles we spent years building - safety, dignity, and inclusion - applied to everyone.

Radical inclusion, it seemed, had added an exception: it did not apply to people born in a particular country, or to Jews and Israelis. A counterculture that once challenged the boundaries of society was now policing the ideological boundaries of its own. Glorifying terror under the banner of DEI was dubbed ‘resistance’.

DEI's own conviction of righteousness and one-sidedness expanded rapidly, well organized, and well funded. By then, the contradiction became impossible to ignore.

And perhaps Damon Albarn provides the simplest counterexample. Albarn has hardly been silent about Palestinian suffering or his criticism of Israel. Yet after Bob Vylan’s Glastonbury performance, he called the episode a ‘spectacular misfire’ and spoke instead about wanting to work with musicians in both Palestine and Israel.

It really should not be revolutionary to suggest that one can advocate for Palestinians without demanding the cultural exclusion of Israelis. Isn’t this exactly what music was supposed to be for?

What started as an industry-wide commitment to safety had developed into ideological gatekeeping: diversity but under political uniformity. Inclusion, except when the artist was born in Israel.

To quote a house classic: If music is the answer, the answer cannot be less cultural contact. It has to be more. Because when we try to make music morally pure, we destroy precisely the thing that made it morally valuable: its ability to bring together people who would otherwise never meet.