Bob Dylan, Gaza and the moral bankruptcy of the sixties protest icons

Kua Kia Soong

There was a time – so the story goes – when the young rebels of the 1960s believed they were remaking the world.

When every guitar chord was a strike against war, every campus sit-in a blow for justice, every song a prophecy of liberation. They marched, they sang, they preached, and they built a mythology around themselves as the conscience of modern civilisation.

I was one of them but it would seem some of these priests and priestesses of protest have left for greener pastures…

The Israeli-perpetrated genocide in Gaza with the complicity of the United States has exposed the fragility of the moral fibre of the baby boomers. The protest icons who once claimed to speak for peace, justice and human dignity have been revealed, in the twilight of their lives, as a cosy, comfortable class of glorified elite. 

Make no mistake: what has unfolded in Gaza is not merely another conflict. It is, by many scholarly assessments, one of the most horrifying assaults on a civilian population in the modern era.

It is a calamity of staggering human suffering, broadcast in real time, with nowhere to hide from the images of buried children, tattered women, murdered journalists, flattened hospitals, annihilated universities and families erased in seconds.

The idol who turned to stone

For decades, Bob Dylan was treated like a secular prophet – the embodiment of youthful moral clarity. He taught the world to rage against warmongers, to distrust empire, to stand up to injustice including the ethnic cleansing of the Native Americans, to recognise the human cost of violence.

Now, when one of the most devastating atrocities of the 21st Century unfolds – broadcast daily in images of mass death, displacement and civilian annihilation – Dylan stands mute. Not a condemnation. Not a whisper. Not even a hint of discomfort.

His silence is not just personal. It is emblematic of a generation that has been sucked into the ‘end of history’, when ‘postmodernism’ provides a cloud to hide under.

The elders of the 1960s, those self-anointed guardians of humanity, have overwhelmingly chosen comfort over courage, nostalgia over moral responsibility, reputation over truth. They have, collectively, failed the very world they once claimed they would save.

Remember the cluster of rock icons proclaiming “We are the world…” thinking they were saving Africans from starvation?

The same people who once declared that “the whole world is watching” now avert their gaze. The generation that held teach-ins about Vietnam cannot muster even a Facebook post on Gaza. The activists who screamed “Never again” at Kent State now mumble excuses. The poets who claimed a monopoly on conscience now retreat into silence.

They have become what they once despised: apathetic, timid and complicit in the face of brutal power. The generation that styled themselves as heroic resisters of state violence now shrink from confronting state violence when it is inconvenient – when the perpetrator is a US ally, when the victims are Palestinian, when the implications strike too close to home.

The 1960s generation wanted to be remembered as heroes. They wanted to be remembered as the ones who saw the future clearly, who carried the flame of justice into a dark world. Dylan was rewarded with the Nobel Laureate.

But history will judge them differently. It will remember their silence on Gaza as the moment their lofty ideals dissolved into self-protective nostalgia. It will remember that they abandoned the living victims of empire to polish the halos they fashioned decades ago. It will remember that when confronted with fresh injustice, they flinched.

Some will defend Dylan. They will say he has never been explicit, that he has never been a ‘political figure’, that he has retreated into privacy. They will point to his disdain for being cast as a protest singer.

But these excuses collapse under their own weight. Dylan’s legacy depends on the mythology that he once did speak when it mattered, that he once held America’s mirror up to its own face. That myth is precisely what he trades on –the reason he is revered, anthologised, canonised.

And so, his silence is not neutral. It is not apolitical. It is not merely personal. It is a choice and a deeply consequential one. It is a choice to refuse moral clarity at a moment when clarity is all that separates complicity from resistance. It is a choice that aligns, however unintentionally, with the very forces of empire and war he once condemned.

There is also the hidden question of his stand on Zionism. It is surely not beyond him to make his stand and beliefs clear, especially when the world has just witnessed what Zionism has wrought.

Artists who refuse to be silent

History will have little patience for those who averted their gaze from Gaza.

Artists, thinkers, scholars, ordinary people – many have risked career, reputation and safety to speak with clarity and conviction. They understood that neutrality in the face of mass death is not an option.

Notable among these are Roger Waters of Pink Floyd, Yusuf Islam/Cat Stevens, Annie Lennox, Lowkey and Kneecap.

Bob Dylan, regrettably, chose not to stand among them. And that choice will follow him far longer than any song he ever wrote.

Now, when the world once again cries out for artists willing to confront brutality, he has stepped away, offering a silence that feels less like neutrality and more like abdication or even complicity. It casts a long shadow over his integrity and consistency. It demands uncomfortable questions about what his legacy truly stands for.

This is not about forcing a man to adopt a political position. It is about recognising that when an artist has been elevated to moral icon status, his silence in the face of catastrophic injustice is itself a statement – and a devastating one.

The 1960s generation icons no longer own the moral vocabulary of protest. They no longer define resistance. They no longer determine what justice looks like. Their myth is collapsing under the weight of Gaza’s rubble. 

It is the young as well as older people who fill the streets today, who endure police crackdowns, who face institutional discipline, who risk employment and reputation to demand an end to the genocide in Gaza.

Thankfully, they have inherited the mettle of humanists, socialists, anti-racists and anti-imperialists in the struggle for a better world.

Kua Kia Soong, a former MP, is the director of the human rights group Suaram.

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