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Bono has criticised Hamas, Benjamin Netanyahu and Israeli “far-right fundamentalists” at this year’s Ivor Novello awards.
U2 were present at the songwriting awards ceremony to receive the Fellowship of the Ivors Academy, the institution’s highest honour.
Collecting the award, Bono introduced an acoustic performance of Sunday Bloody Sunday and said: “I used to introduce this next song by saying it was not a rebel song. It was because believing in the possibilities of peace was then, and is now, a rebellious act; and some would say a ridiculous one.”
Speaking in London, he said: “To believe peace was attainable between your country and ours, between our country and itself was a ridiculous idea because peace creates possibilities in the most intractable situations and lord knows there’s a few of them out there right now.”
He added: “Hamas, release the hostages, stop the war. Israel, be released from Benjamin Netanyahu and the far-right fundamentalists that twist your sacred texts.”
He also called for the protection of aid workers: “The best of us. God, you must be so tired of us, children of Abraham, in the rubble of our certainties. Children in the rubble of our revenge. God forgive us.”
Sunday Bloody Sunday was released in 1983, and takes its theme from the 1972 massacre in which the British army shot and killed 14 unarmed protesters, the highest shooting death toll during the Troubles.
Bono has previously dedicated U2’s 1984 song Pride (In the Name of Love) to the victims of the Supernova music festival attack in October 2023. In January, he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Joe Biden.
Bono recently confirmed that U2 were recording a new album, and said “it sounds like the future to me. We had to go through some stuff, and we’re at the other end of it.” U2’s last album was Songs of Surrender. Released in 2023, it comprised stripped down re-recordings of 40 songs from the band’s catalogue.
A film of Bono’s stage show, Stories of Surrender, debuted last week at the Cannes film festival. “Impressively, Bono does his best to descend from rock god to rock human,” Guardian film critic Peter Bradshaw wrote in a three-star review.
