U2’s Bono compares Ben Gvir to Nazi SS chief Himmler over his comments on Gaza

Irish singer-songwriter and U2 frontman Bono compared Israel’s National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir to SS chief Heinrich Himmler in an interview with Rolling Stone published Monday, drawing a sharp rebuke from the far-right politician.

In the interview, Bono discussed a new song, described by Rolling Stone as: “Bono’s elliptical take on the thousands of years that led up to Gaza, with an empathetic look at the history of the Jewish people, all narrated simultaneously by the biblical David and the statue Michelangelo made of him.”

“It’s an attempt to try and grasp what’s going on in a world where we never needed the moral force of Judaism more than now,” Bono said, while repudiating the “unholy offense” of the Hamas-led October 7, 2023, massacre on Israel.

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Bono added, however, that he is horrified by the far-right Otzma Yehudit leader Ben Gvir’s comments on Gazans — specifically a comment in which the minister said that “there are people there who are not worthy of life” — and compared Ben Gvir to Himmler.

Ben Gvir made that remark last month while speaking on a podcast, where he advocated for killing “30 to 40” people in the Gaza Strip each night, apparently referring to terror operatives, though he did not specify so.

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“Not just those who pose an immediate threat. No, there are people there who are not worthy of life,” he elaborated. “They shouldn’t live. They’re not even people.”

“As a person who has stood by Israel,” Bono said, “and standing by Israel — as I stand with the Palestinian people, by the way, that they have a Palestine — there’s all this semantic back and forth over genocide, and it’s a legal term, and the ICC and the ICJ will rule on it eventually.”

(Israel has rejected accusations of genocide in Gaza as baseless, and has dismissed the legal proceedings against it at the United Nations’ International Court of Justice and International Criminal Court as biased and lacking jurisdiction.)

“But here’s a guy, a minister in the government,” Bono continued, “and he’s not being locked up… and this guy Netanyahu says, ‘Well, I need him to keep my majority.’”

Bono added: “So many of the people that have expanded my mind, changed my consciousness, made me laugh, broken my heart with their songs, lifted my spirits, are Jewish. And this guy’s putting their religion in the shade… It’s just outrageous.”

He urged Israel “to fix the situation. They have to put what happened at the Nakba right, by making some compromise that some of these people don’t wanna make, and do the just thing. Justice is at the heart of Judaism.” (Nakba is the Arabic term for the “catastrophe” surrounding the 1948 establishment of Israel and displacement of Palestinians amid the war launched against the nascent state by its Arab neighbors.)

In response, Ben Gvir blasted Bono, writing on X: “There is no limit to the hypocrisy of the world’s supporters of terrorism. Bono did not compare the Hamas murderers to Himmler – only those who defend the Jews from the next massacre.”

“I have news for him: the Jews are done apologizing for their right to live. We can do without your sympathy for dead Jews; we prefer to remain alive and face your criticism,” he said.

“If you truly care about the residents of Gaza, help them leave for Ireland. They are begging to emigrate from Gaza. They will have a wonderful future in Ireland,” he added.

Ireland has long been a strong supporter of the Palestinian cause, with sympathy often linked to the country’s own history of British rule.

Dublin formally recognized a Palestinian state in 2024 alongside Spain and Norway, and has repeatedly criticized Israel over the Gaza conflict that erupted with the devastating Hamas-led invasion of southern Israel on October 7, 2023.

Israel has in response shut its embassy in Dublin and accused the Irish government of extreme anti-Israel bias and antisemitism.

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