U2 frontman Bono drew parallels between Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Nazi mass murderer Heinrich Himler, citing quotes that Bono attributed to the Israeli politician, Rolling Stone UK reported on Monday.
The interview does not quote Bono, whose real name is Paul David Hewson, as directly naming Himmler, who was a mastermind of the mass murder of six million Jews in the Holocaust.
Bono is “particularly horrified by the words of Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s far-right minister of national security, comparing his rhetoric about Gaza — ‘there are people there who are not worthy of life. They shouldn’t live. They’re not even people’ — to Himmler,” the interviewer wrote. Bono reportedly called for Ben-Gvir to be arrested.
The statement referenced, which Ben-Gvir made last month on the podcast of Rom Braslavski, a former Hamas hostage, was widely reported in Israeli media and beyond as a call for indiscriminate killing of Gazans. However, Ben-Gvir clarified in the interview that he meant Gazans implicated in terrorism.
“I think we need to do targeted killings in Gaza, take down 30-40 every night. Not only those who endanger you at that moment. There are people who don’t deserve to live. Also, they’re not ‘people.’ I’m giving them a compliment by calling them people,” said Ben-Gvir. Later in the interview he drew a distinction between civilians in Gaza and terrorists, saying: “Throughout Gaza, we need to encourage emigration as much as possible and send them to their countries. And for the terrorists—no immigration or anything. Kill them one by one.”
According to the Rolling Stone interview, Bono had a new song with an “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.” The song lyrics include a line that says: “Everybody is my people/Let my people go,” and: “Who would choose to be chosen?”
Speaking of the song, “The Tears of Things,” Bono said: “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 condemned Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023 attack on Israel, calling it “an unholy offence.” Bono referred to himself as “a person who has stood by Israel 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.”
Turning to the subject of Ben-Gvir, Bono said: “But here’s a guy, a minister in the government, and he’s not being locked up... and this guy Netanyahu says, ‘Well, I need him to keep my majority,’” referring to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “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 continued.
Gaza to Ireland 🇮🇪
— איתמר בן גביר (@itamarbengvir) September 29, 2026
בונו, ד״ש עם שיר מעוצמה יהודית@U2 pic.twitter.com/tAzdfEJdpN
Ben-Gvir on X responded to Bono’s interview with a music video which appeared to have been generated by artificial intelligence. The video showed Bono and promoted the idea of Gazans moving to Bono’s native Ireland.
Israel, Bono said in the interview, has “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 Arabic for “catastrophe,” and it’s a term used by Palestinians and their supporters to describe the defeat of the Arab militias and armies in their 1947-1949 war to prevent the establishment of Israel. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians left their homes in what is now Israel during the fighting, as did thousands of Jews inside pre-state Israel. Hundreds of thousands of Jews left Arab countries in the two decades that followed that war, often amid persecution by Arab regimes.
At U2’s Las Vegas concert on Oct. 8, 2023, Bono dedicated “Pride (In the Name of Love)” to those murdered at the Nova festival on Oct. 7, 2023, and changed some of its lyrics to refer to the massacre.
