Benedict Cumberbatch, Florence Pugh, Damon Albarn and Paloma Faith were among the artists who gathered for a sold-out charity concert raising funds for humanitarian efforts in Palestine.
Hosted by British comedian and actor Guz Khan, Together for Palestine at London’s Wembley Arena brought stars of British film, music and TV together with Palestinian artists, many of whom made impassioned speeches in between live music performances and poetry readings.
“This is what community looks like,” Oscar-winning actor Riz Ahmed said as he joined Khan to kick off proceedings on Wednesday. Noting that he had grown up in Wembley, he added: “What we have here is local voices but global solidarity.”
Outside, supporters held up huge Palestine flags, while the fans filing into the venue wore T-shirts, badges and jackets also bearing the flag and slogans in support of Palestine. By the time the concert was underway, it had already raised half a million pounds towards Palestinian-led charities, Choose Love co-founder and CEO Josie Naughton told the audience while urging those watching from home to donate as well.
For much of the evening, artwork by Palestinian artists – including the Gaza-born artistic director Malak Mattar, who survived several Israeli attacks before leaving Gaza on 6 October 2023 – was displayed on the huge screen onstage, during performances from artists including Faith, Bastille’s Dan Smith, Palestinian singer Elyanna, Cat Burns and Rachel Chinouriri.
Stephen Kapos, an elderly Holocaust survivor who was questioned by police after laying flowers during a Gaza protest in March this year, spoke of the parallels he saw between the plight of Palestinians and the horrors he witnessed while living under the Nazi regime as a child.
“I know what it means to be stripped of dignity, of land, of home,” he said. “That is why I remain steadfast in my commitment to the Palestinian people. Their struggle for freedom, justice and return is not separate from mine. It is a part of the same cry for humanity.”
Journalist Yara Eid gave a rousing speech on behalf of the 270 journalists killed in Gaza, speaking of her slain friends and peers who had taught her. Cumberbatch, playwright Amer Hlehel and Ruth Negga stood side-by-side, with Cumberbatch sharing a reading of “On This Land There Are Reasons to Live” by Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish.
“We have been lied to, manipulated, misled, gaslit,” a fierce-sounding Mehdi Hasan said. “Shame on those Western journalists who have said not a word about the mass killing of their Palestinian counterparts. Shame on them.”
“As a Western journalist myself, I can tell you all this, the Palestinian journalists are the best of us. They are the best of us because they are not just documenting a war, or a genocide, they are documenting their own annihilation, their own starvation. In real time. They have shown the world that you can’t bomb the truth away.”
Together for Palestine was held days after a two-year United Nations investigation found that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza.
The United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry concluded that Israel had “flagrantly disregarded” international law and “orchestrated a genocidal campaign for almost two years now”.
This marked the first time a UN body has reached such a conclusion, and was “the strongest and most authoritative UN finding to date”, the study’s authors said.
Israel’s foreign ministry dismissed the publication as an “antisemitic… distorted and false report” and added that Hamas’s 7 October 2023 attack was itself “attempted genocide”.
Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, who was recently sanctioned by the Trump administration, received a standing ovation from the audience as she gave an impassioned address.
Speaking around 20 miles from Windsor Castle, where Mr Trump and his wife Melania had earlier been welcomed by the King and Queen as part of his state visit – Albanese said that Israel “continues to destroy and kill, and to occupy land in Palestine”.
She accused “our governments” of either turning a blind eye or being complicit in Israel’s attacks on Gaza: “They trade weapons, they host Israeli officials…”
Oscar-nominated actor Florence Pugh echoed the sentiment of many other stars on the lineup by urging the public to speak up. “Silence in the face of such suffering is not neutrality,” she said. “It is complicity. And empathy should not be this hard, and it should never have been this hard.”
Meanwhile, actor Richard Gere drew boos as he mentioned Mr Trump by name, calling him the “one person” who could bring an end to Palestinian suffering, ahead of a moving performance by Paloma Faith of her song “Dangerous World”.
“My president, Trump, in one day he could stop all this craziness,” he said. “[Israeli prime minister] Netanyahu needs the US, needs Trump so badly. If [Trump] wants a Nobel Peace Prize, this is the way to get it.”
Writing for The Guardian earlier that day, co-organiser Brian Eno recalled how, in 2006, then-Conservative leader David Cameron said his party had been wrong in their approach to apartheid, while praising Nelson Mandela as “one of the greatest men alive”.
“Maybe one day future leaders of Western political parties will issue a similar mea culpa for their complicity in the brutal violence currently being inflicted on Palestinian families,” Eno said.
“It will be too late to save many tens of thousands of civilian victims of this war. But if there is a reckoning it might be, in part at least, because actors, artists, writers and musicians helped us to see Palestinians as human beings, as much deserving of respect and protection as their Israeli neighbours.”
Watch key speeches from star-studded Palestinian benefit concert at Wembley
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