On 16 September 2025, the United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory issued a report concluding that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza, finding reasonable grounds to conclude that several acts under the Genocide Convention have been, and continue to be, carried out with genocidal intent. 

In the 1980s, musicians and recording artists rallied to the call of Live Aid, transforming their voices and celebrity into vehicles for famine relief in Ethiopia. Today, as Gaza faces similar devastation, can artists rally together to support the Palestinian cause? The age-old question arises of whether artists have a duty of moral urgency to respond to political conflicts. A balanced view holds that every individual is entitled to personal privacy, and no artist should be compelled to turn their life’s work into a manifesto. After all, is it not an artist’s primary responsibility to create art? Yet, art does not exist in a vacuum. 

Art is shaped by the cultural and political landscape of the times in which it is forged. When artists achieve a significant public following, their voices become more than personal: they become cultural currency and can directly influence public opinion. Artists, with their visibility, reach, and cultural influence, continue to occupy a unique position in calling out the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza. 

The challenge posed to artists is how they can transform their social responsibility into tangible, real-world impact. Symbolic gestures, such as social media posts, carry weight, often dissipate quickly amid the relentless, live-streamed news cycle of atrocities in Gaza. More enduring forms of solidarity involve partnering with and financially supporting established humanitarian organizations, and direct action through participation in public protests. 

English folk musician Alexi Murdoch has used his social media platform to publicly criticise actions taken by both Israel and the US in relation to Gaza. In particular, he used his platform on X (formerly Twitter) to share literature concerning the ongoing “ethnic cleansing” of the Gaza Strip. Murdoch most recently performed at Voices of Solidarity, one of the largest cultural fundraisers in the UK in support of Gaza’s healthcare system. Held in July 2025, the music and comedy event aimed to raise £1 million for health workers and vital infrastructure under siege in Gaza. Murdoch believes the role of the artist in times of political conflict is “to wake people up to their own sense of agency and consciousness, to see what is rotten around them”. The artist’s responsibility in solidarity with the people of Gaza is not only to speak about injustice but to pierce the fog of distraction that permits such injustices to persist.

Artists who practice this form of consciousness-raising do not, however, escape the personal costs. Murdoch recalls being dropped by his management, an experience that made clear the risks artists face when engaging their art and public voices with political conviction. The passivity of many peers who avoid political commitments under the guise of brand management, becomes symptomatic of careerism in late capitalism. Even figures as globally recognized as Madonna, famously at the vanguard of cultural and political trends, illustrate the problem of delayed urgency. In an Instagram post this August, nearly two years into the conflict, she urged Pope Leo XIV to bring “light to the children of Gaza.” Though sincere, her reaction highlights just how slowly many high-profile individuals have responded, long after artists more inclined to moral urgency, like Murdoch, have raised their voices.

In this climate of constant risk assessment, artists fear being branded antisemitic, facing industry blacklisting, or losing out on professional opportunities. In Germany, for example, artists and cultural institutions critical of Israeli military policy are now threatened with the withdrawal of government funding. In London, the mass arrests of Palestine Action supporters have criminalized the act of solidarity itself. Sally Rooney, author of the bestselling novel Normal People, has pledged to donate the proceeds from BBC royalties and book sales in response. As Palestine Action remains a proscribed terrorist organization under UK law, does Rooney’s pledge mean the simple act of buying one of her books in Britain could be construed as supporting a terrorist organization? Is it possible that it is not just artists but also ordinary consumers of culture who are being coerced into silence on Palestine?

Artists who stand in solidarity with Palestine do so in recognition of a long struggle, not a fleeting cause. As Murdoch rightly insists, the October 7 attacks were neither an isolated event nor the genesis of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, but part of a settler-colonial project that has spanned more than a century. In 2021, more than 600 artists signed the #MusiciansForPalestine open letter. Based on the earlier model of Artists United Against Apartheid during white-minority rule in South Africa, its signatories included globally recognized figures across genres and affirmed that Palestine is not a passing trend but a defining moral question for contemporary artists.

History offers abundant evidence that art has never been separate from politics. Pablo Picasso’s Guernica, in which the artist laid bare the horrors of the Spanish Civil War; and Bob Dylan’s protest songs in the 1960s, which became anthems for the civil rights and antiwar movements are iconic instances of art in service of activism seared into collective memory. History also warns of the dangers of the depoliticisation of art. The Guerrillero Heroico photograph, the iconic image of Che Guevara, taken by Alberto Korda, has undergone a transition into a lifeless emblem on posters and coffee mugs. Its once revolutionary zeal has been reduced to mere surface. The same unfortunate fate has befallen Keith Haring’s graphics, once vital in a campaign against the silence surrounding the HIV/AIDS crisis under the Reagan administration. His colourful barking dogs and dancing figures, for instance, are now packaged into mass-produced T-shirts at Uniqlo. Such examples reveal how art’s radical edge is stripped of its original context, with politics reduced to mere aesthetics. For artists who express solidarity with the people of Gaza, the challenge is to resist that same hollowing out─to resist letting solidarity be flattened into hashtags or fleeting trends, and instead preserve art’s political weight as direct action, witness, and resistance.