Sinéad O’Connor’s Palestinian Solidarity and Legacy

26 July 2025 marked the second anniversary of Sinéad O’Connor’s death. (She adopted the name Shuhada’ Sadaqat in 2018 but continued to use her birthname professionally, hence I follow her lead here.) An artist and activist, she possessed a voice which was radical in every sense of the word and resonates with renewed urgency as the genocide in Gaza continues. Her legacies as an Irish protest singer and opponent of imperialist regimes echo in musicians’ resistance today to the Israeli state’s brutal assault on Gaza. But first let us trace her history of solidarity with Palestine.

Concerts and controversies

In June 1995, O’Connor played two concerts in Caesarea, Israel. These predated the BDS movement and, in her view, ‘it wasn’t what you might call “a big deal.”’ But nearly twenty years later, the singer recalled how she had found Israel ‘aggressive’ and bore a scar from ‘a photographer shoving his camera right into my chest’ during a scuffle. In 1997 she agreed to sing at ‘Sharing Jerusalem: Two Capitals for Two States.’ It must be said that then, as now, the notion of a two-state solution or any just resolution for Palestinians was illusory. It coincided with Netanyahu’s first term as Prime Minister, during a period when Israel continued its settler expansionist policies in the occupied Palestinian territories. Even though this event was organised by Israeli and Palestinian women’s groups to promote peaceful co-existence, O’Connor was subjected to death threats and forced to withdraw. Right-wing Israeli extremist group the Ideological Front claimed responsibility. One individual not directly associated with the threats but who gloated about their outcome was Itamar Ben-Gvir – who currently serves in Netanyahu’s cabinet as Minister for National Security. He boasted that ‘the pressure we put on her not to arrive [was] a success.’ O’Connor responded by confronting Ben-Gvir in an open letter. ‘I have always had the most passionate love for the Jewish people, and sorrow for what they have suffered throughout the centuries,’ she began. After quoting the Old Testament she concluded: ‘God does not reward those who bring terror to the children of the world. SO YOU HAVE SUCCEEDED IN NOTHING BUT YOUR SOUL’S FAILURE.’ 

Given this, it seems astonishing that years later O’Connor initially accepted an opportunity to perform on 11 September 2014 in Caesarea. A row erupted in June when activists pressed her to cancel the concert in line with BDS principles. At first she reacted by pleading ignorance. ‘I agreed to perform unaware any such boycott had been requested. Had I been aware I would not have agreed to perform,’ she said. She subsequently ‘requested to pull out of the show’ so long as this did not incur legal costs, citing the financial pressures she faced to provide for her four children. Fellow Irish artists and activists responded, including the composer Raymond Deane. In a public Facebook post he warned O’Connor that her performance would be ‘exploited to the hilt by the Israeli regime’ and urged ‘Please don’t sing for the oppressor.’ In a later statement Deane reassured her that ‘everyone knows you care about social justice […] you’ll do the right thing, and you will be supported and respected for it. A few weeks later, O’Connor confirmed her withdrawal. As she told Hot Press magazine: ‘nobody with any sanity, including myself, would have anything but sympathy for the Palestinian plight. There’s not a sane person on earth who in any way sanctions what the fuck the Israeli authorities are doing.’ She added: ‘I’ve been accused of somehow being a supporter of the Israeli authorities, which is nonsense – nothing could be further from the truth.’ Her support for the BDS cultural boycott gratified Palestinians and allies. Later that summer a fan threw a Gaza t-shirt at her while she was on stage at the Roundhouse in London. To the audience’s delight, she stripped down to her bra and performed an impromptu costume change. And, in her final public appearance on 9 March 2023, when she received the Classic Irish Album award at the Choice Music Prize in Dublin, she wore a keffiyeh. 

In 2025, it is worth reflecting on how the 2014 saga unfolded and concluded. O’Connor justified her initial willingness to perform by asserting that ‘musicians are notoriously stupid/ignorant people.’ Yet she proved receptive to the advice of fellow (better informed) musicians and ultimately acted in accordance with her social justice values. This is to the credit not only of the singer but also to activists who patiently and compassionately educated her on the situation. O’Connor’s journey – from playing Israel in 1995 to engaging with proposed two-state cultural initiatives, to boycotting Israel in 2014 and overtly supporting Palestine until she died – shows how her position evolved. In dark times this offers a glimmer of hope that other artists with a public following may be persuaded to stand with Palestine. 

The story also illustrates how the lure of capitalist reward is instrumentalised by violent regimes to try to tame artists into compliance. O’Connor reiterated in the Hot Press interview the financial concerns she had raised regarding this concert. She added that she was offered ‘a hundred grand’ to play in Israel in 2014, whereas normally she received ‘about ten grand for a gig.’ In accepting the price of resistance, O’Connor was a rare example of a commercial popular musician with real moral integrity. She lived by the credo ‘some things are worth losing your job for.’ 

Sinéad O’Connor, protest singer and songwriter

‘I am a protest singer,’ O’Connor wrote in her memoir Rememberings. A comprehensive survey of her protest music is beyond the scope of this article, but to better understand her stance on Palestine let’s recall a few examples. O’Connor wrote and performed songs confronting some of the worst failings of Western capitalist society: she addressed racism, child abuse, organised religion’s systemic abuse of women and children, misogyny, and imperialist violence. Her anti-racist stance was fundamental to her Palestinian sympathies, while converting to Islam in 2018 gave her some insight into the Islamophobia directed at Palestinians. 

One of O’Connor’s first hits, ‘Mandinka’ (1987), is a song she wrote after feeling moved by Roots, a television series based on Alex Halevy’s novel about slavery. Conscious of injustice closer to home – at a time when she lived in London – she wrote ‘Black Boys on Mopeds’ (1990) about the scourge of police brutality and racism in Thatcher’s Britain. During these early years in the public eye she also rebuked racist gatekeepers in the music industry. ‘MTV won’t play Black artists […] unless [a video] is in black and white or the artist looks white,’ she claimed in 1988. Particularly incensed by the industry’s racism towards rappers, she shaved and dyed the logo of hip-hip group Public Enemy into her hair for the 1989 Grammy Awards, to protest the organisation’s decision not to televise the rap award category. Three years later, O’Connor performed Bob Marley’s anti-racist anthem ‘War’ on the US television show SNL. That appearance is now mostly remembered for an infamous coda in which she ripped up a photo of Pope John Paul II and rallied viewers to ‘fight the real enemy.’ She foreshadowed that gesture by modifying the closing lyrics of ‘War’ to condemn child abuse. This revision expanded the song’s fundamental anti-racist theme to raise awareness of another form of violence. The singer unapologetically and forcefully reprised her version of ‘War’ in front of a hostile crowd at a Bob Dylan tribute show in New York two weeks later in October 1992. That courageous act was indicative of commitment to using her public platform to demand a more just world.

‘Famine’ – then and now

Perhaps the O’Connor song that speaks most powerfully to the current situation in Gaza is her composition ‘Famine’ from the 1994 album Universal Mother. It is a predominantly spoken-word piece underpinned by a hip-hop style instrumental groove. Her lyrics begin by rejecting the colonial historical consensus regarding the mid-nineteenth-century Irish famine: 

Okay, I want to talk about Ireland
Specifically, I want to talk about the famine;
About the fact that there never really was one;
There was no famine.

Clarifying her position in an interview with Q magazine, she said: ‘I’m not saying people didn’t starve.’ But she asserted that Ireland’s mass hunger during the 1840s was primarily caused by British economic policies and imperialist indifference to how the failure of the potato crop left millions of people to starve. As the verse continues, she elaborates:

Meat, fish, vegetables
Were shipped out of the country under armed guard
To England while the Irish people starved

That the British government could have mitigated catastrophic suffering by halting exports and properly managing food distribution is now accepted by historians and politicians. However, the truth made for uncomfortable listening in 1994. UK television producers tried to dissuade O’Connor from speaking it, although she performed the track on the BBC’s Jools Holland show.

Her preference for spoken word rather than singing on ‘Famine’ is striking. I hear it as a refusal to capitulate to the market demands of a music industry that profited from her mighty voice. While it is not a rap, the accompaniment aligns the track with the hip-hop genre. Her creative choices signal political rather than commercial intent. Combined with how she mostly eschews the pop/rock convention of catchy melody, the spoken vocal unsettles fans who assume they ‘know’ Sinéad O’Connor. Here, she denies listeners the comfort of a familiar musical experience. Instead, the soft-spoken conversational delivery of her lyrics demands close attention. What renders this track subversive is how the reserved, eloquent vocal surface belies a ferocious critique of British colonialism and an analysis of ‘famine’ rhetoric as disingenuous and profoundly traumatic to the Irish psyche. 

This brings us from 1840s Ireland to Gaza in 2025. Even as the most hardline nationalist would not ascribe genocidal intent to the British treatment of Irish people then, there is a thread connecting the historic Irish situation to Gaza today, in that the Israeli regime is allowing the mass starvation of the oppressed population. Another point of commonality between 1840s Ireland and Gaza today is the disputed nature of events. Whatever this starvation is labelled is largely immaterial to the suffering of Palestinians. Yet, as O’Connor illustrated regarding Ireland, discourses about what constitutes famine can be bitterly contested. Now, let us recall what unfolded over the summer of 2025. 

Sinéad O’Connor’s legacy: Kneecap and Palestine

Kneecap are a hip-hop trio from Belfast. On 18 June 2025, band member Mo Chara (Liam Óg Ó hAnnaidh) was released on bail from Westminster Magistrates’ Court, having been charged with terrorism offences for allegedly displaying a Hezbollah flag on stage. Ten days later, on 28 June, Kneecap played Glastonbury. They were effectively censored by the BBC and British political establishment. Bowing to extraordinary interventions days before the festival – Prime Minister Keir Starmer denounced the group’s presence as ‘inappropriate,’ while Conservative party leader Kemi Badenoch insisted the broadcaster ‘should not be showing Kneecap propaganda’ – the BBC excluded Kneecap’s performance from their televised Glastonbury coverage and iPlayer live stream. But two million people tuned in to watch a livestream that a concertgoer uploaded to TikTok via her phone. Official censorship did not deter the group from using their platform to call for Palestinian liberation. On the contrary, they became more explicit, asserting that the British and US militaries are ‘complicit in this genocide.’

From the moment Ó hAnnaidh was charged in May 2025, Kneecap condemned the focus on them as a ‘carnival of distraction’ when Gazans were starving. Quoting a UN official, the group said then: ‘14,000 babies are about to die of starvation in Gaza, with food sent by the world sitting on the other side of a wall.’ Still, it was only in late July 2025 – when photographer Ahmed al-Arini captured the appalling image of Muhammad al-Matouq, a skeletal one-year-old Gazan boy swaddled in a bin-bag nappy – that British and US establishment media began to acknowledge the catastrophic hunger. The New York Times finally reported that Israel’s blockades were causing mass hunger and death. On 31 July the UN warned ‘famine conditions are tightening their grip on the Gaza strip,’ phrasing it that way because a lack of data prevented a definitive declaration of famine. By 22 August there was no more ambiguity: ‘more than half a million people in Gaza are trapped in famine,’ the UN confirmed, in a ‘man-made disaster’ that Israel still denies.  

What we are seeing is a twenty-first-century version of the famine discourse politics O’Connor explored in 1994. She had objected to the term ‘famine’ in the Irish context, as it exculpated the ruling powers and implied that natural disaster alone had decimated the population. With Gaza, there is no argument that this is a man-made famine, but the delayed acceptance of that reality has been ruinous. ‘It is a famine we repeatedly warned of,’ said the UN’s relief coordinator. Many chose not to listen. Denying the truth about starvation is, as Sinéad O’Connor showed us, a political strategy and tool of oppression. This is why radical resistance by musicians matters. By amplifying the message of humanitarian organisations, performers such as Kneecap raised awareness of how the Israeli regime is starving civilians. 

Sinead O’Connor’s legacy: resisting censorship

Artists are core to the global transnational Palestinian solidarity movement. In Ireland alone we can cite countless examples: among them, the coalition Irish Artists for Palestine and individuals such as actor Liam Cunningham, composer Raymond Deane, novelist Sally Rooney, and performers such as Frances Black, Christy Moore, Mary Coughlan, Pauline Scanlon, Fergal Scahill, Eoghan Ó Ceannabháin, Lankum, the Mary Wallopers, and Kneecap. Some have been subjected to alarming censorship on the international stage. A Lankum concert was cancelled in Germany in 2023. Kneecap were silenced by the BBC. The Mary Wallopers were cut off mid-performance at a UK festival on 22 August for displaying a Palestinian flag. In August, too, Sally Rooney published an article supporting Palestine Action, a group proscribed as ‘terrorists’ in Britain – and immediately became persona non grata with the BBC, despite a history of hugely successful partnerships when the broadcaster adapted two of her novels for television. What can Sinéad O’Connor’s work teach us about such situations? 

After she denounced the Catholic Church on SNL in 1992 the broadcaster NBC banned her from future appearances. That made zero difference to her efforts to protest the widespread cover-up of child abuse in Church-run institutions. She continued to speak, compose, write lyrics, and perform songs about subjects too incendiary for US television. Systemic child abuse is one of the themes in the lyrics to ‘Famine,’ while the Church’s wrongdoings are alluded to on ‘Take Me to Church’ (2014). Although the act that prompted NBC to ‘cancel’ O’Connor had nothing to do with Palestine, the censorship of the musician in these circumstances is relevant to contemporary artists engaged in pro-Palestine activism. It serves as a reminder that Western media has a history of policing artistic resistance to hegemonic powers. O’Connor’s perseverance despite such censorship should also inspire today’s artist-activists. 

She bequeathed further legacies to musicians campaigning for an end to the Gaza genocide. There is the anti-racist stance expressed in her lyrics, in songs by other artists that she chose to cover, and in her confrontations with an overwhelmingly white music industry. There is also her evolving position on Palestine, the adherence to the BDS boycott, and public solidarity with people living under occupation. Her critique of imperialist violence on ‘Famine’ exemplifies radical songwriting. Regardless of the lyrics’ specificity to a time and place, the message that we must challenge the dominant narrative about the starvation of a colonised people is one that resounds as Gazans suffer a man-made famine. As a songwriter, performer, memoirist, advocate for survivors, anti-racist ally, and right-wing adversary, O’Connor modelled several ways in which musicians can continue to call for an end to the genocide. Even when – perhaps especially when – the establishment forces are against them, popular musicians can find creative ways to reach their audiences and raise consciousness.