It is getting harder and harder to remember a time when there wasn’t a war going on in the Middle East and when Israel didn’t dominate the headlines. And in the wake of yet another Eurovision where controversy over Israeli participation became the main story, it can be hard to remember a time, too, when the country wasn’t central to cultural politics.
I doubt that Ozzy Osbourne, who died less than a year ago, ever thought that his legacy would depend on his views on Israel. Whatever people thought of Ozzy—and he had no shortage of detractors—he wasn’t the guy you went to for incisive commentary on geopolitics. After all, on the first track of his first solo album, he was pretty clear that he didn’t want to be anyone’s guru:
Don’t look at me for answers
Don’t ask me, I don’t know
But that doesn’t seem to be good enough anymore. These days, stars are expected to take some responsibility for themselves and the platforms they occupy. That’s something to welcome when it comes to, say, the terrible things rock stars do under the influence of drink and drugs (which in Ozzy’s case included violence to both Sharon Osbourne and his first wife, Thelma). But does it make sense to view the prince of darkness’s legacy through a more political lens?
Some people think so. On 24th July last year, two days after Ozzy passed away, an Instagram account called “Zionists in Music” posted a picture of him superimposed on a background featuring the word “Zionist” in big letters, explaining as follows:
In 2010 and 2016, Ozzy Osbourne performed in “israel”, ignoring BDS activists calling on artists to boycott “israel” to end normalization and apply cultural and economic pressure on “israel”. In 2025 Ozzy Osbourne signed a letter to stop the BBC from airing a documentary chronicling Israel’s genocide in Gaza, citing “anti-Israel bias”.
The comments below the post were divided between those upset at this revelation, accusations of being disrespectful to the dead (without defending Ozzy’s alleged Zionism), and explaining the revelation away as a sign of his drug-addled past, his sickness-riddled old age and the pernicious influence of his wife:
If Ozzy had the same stance, it’s likely because the drugs, alcohol, and Parkinson’s all prevented him from thinking on his own, allowing Sharon to control him. Maybe Sharon needs to listen to War Pigs.
As we approach the anniversary of Ozzy’s death, so Sharon has been further vilified. She has never hidden her Jewish heritage on her father’s side (her dad was the rock manager Don Arden), but her Jewishness never seemed to be about more than a vague pride in her identity (although Ozzy and Sharon did once have their renewal of vows solemnised by a rabbi). The Hamas attacks of 7th October 2023, and the Gaza war that followed, changed things for her. She became increasingly outspoken about antisemitism, boycotts of Israel and the plight of Israeli hostages in Gaza, signing petitions and making statements online. Following Ozzy’s death, she seems to have gone further off the deep end, sending a widely publicised comment supporting Tommy Robinson’s “Unite the Kingdom” demonstration back in April.
Ironically, this kind of born-again activism amongst pro-Israel Jews is really just doing what pro-Palestinian activists have always wanted—to make everything about the issue. The conscious attempt to speak everywhere of Palestine, and to call anything else “complicitly”, has its pro-Israel corollary.
The opprobrium Sharon has faced was—in fact, still is—sometimes directed at Ozzy too. Clearly, as in the Instagram post, some pro-Palestinian activists do want to name and shame him, dead or not. Yet he remains a much-loved figure and, luckily, he had a Jewish wife—a manager to boot!—who perfectly fits the role of evil Jewish exploiter. What isn’t certain is whether Ozzy would be deemed beyond redemption, were he ever proved to have been a Zionist by genuine conviction.
Heavy metal culture has often had an aggressively apolitical ethos (an apolitics that has served to hide some very nasty politics indeed, including neo-Nazis in underground scenes). How much politics should be tolerated in metal is a hotly contested argument. So the question of whether Ozzy was a Zionist speaks to a much bigger question of whether—and how—this most contested of issues should be admitted into the culture, with the divisive impact this would inevitably entail.
At Ozzy’s final gig, at Villa Park on 5th July last year, Israel did end up causing controversy, but not because of Ozzy or Sharon. One of the many guest stars was David Draiman, vocalist of the US band Disturbed, who had been brought up an orthodox Jew and is a highly vocal supporter of Israel. A few months before, Draiman had taken a solidarity tour of Israel and signed a missile to be used against Gaza. When he took to the stage at Villa Park, there were scattered boos and the odd Palestinian flag in the audience, but it didn’t derail the concert. It would be hard to imagine that Glastonbury 2025—where Palestine was very much to the fore, thanks to performances from Kneecap and Bob Vylan—could have survived booking someone like Draiman.
I suspect that one reason why metal hasn’t yet been torn apart by the issue of Israel is that many pro-Palestinian activists may dismiss metal as irredeemable in the first place. How else do you explain that Orphaned Land, Israel’s top metal band, managed to tour Europe in 2024 while the Gaza war was going on, their shows unpicketed?
Sharon has poked the bear. Post-Ozzy, metalheads may be deciding that they can try and expel her from metal culture without it impacting on the late singer and his memory. I don’t know whether she cares. Either way, questions need to be asked about how much we want Israel-Palestine to be at the centre of everything. Relatedly, we might also ask whether we want some spaces in the world to be, if not apolitical (which is impossible), at least not battlegrounds where the war over Israel is waged endlessly.
For good or for ill, metal may arguably be such a space. Is it so wrong that it stays that way?
Keith Kahn-Harris’s latest book, The Beautiful Death of Ozzy Osbourne: How Metal Teaches Us To Live (Harper North), is available now
