Manufactured "Israeli-Palestinian" boy band is in really poor taste

"as1one" is a brand new manufactured boy band comprised of six young men from Israel, which conveniently (and strategically) includes a Palestinian Christian from Haifa and a Bedouin Muslim from Rahat.

The team behind as1one, led by longtime music executives Ken Levitan and James Diener, envisioned a Middle Eastern version of BTS, and in the effort to create it, Israeli and Palestinian casting directors had held auditions in major cities and tiny villages throughout Israel in 2021. The pair weren't seeking to create a group made up of Israelis and Palestinians — only to, as Levitan says, "leave no stone unturned" in their search for the country's very best talent. (Auditions could not be held in the West Bank or Gaza due to logistical challenges.) 

Billboard

For the most part, the Billboard article (and similar concurrent coverage of the group in places like People Magazine or ABC News) reads just like a carefully choreographed press release—which, to be fair, is precisely what it is.

But oof, that parenthetical is doing a lot of work. Especially coming after, "leave no stone unturned," considering that quite a few stones have been unturned in those areas!

There's also this extremely awkward paragraph:

"What if we just stopped the world/Hold the phone/Faced the hurt/Take me home/We're not built for this/We're built for more/Forget the score/Show me what it's like when we stop the world," the sextet sings over a pulsing beat. It's the kind of anthem that's vocally reminiscent of the Backstreet Boys' heyday and thematically evocative of — depending on how you're listening — either a tumultuous romance or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Whatever one's take on the relationship between Israel and Palestine, I don't know that a "tumultuous romance" metaphor really quite covers it. Especially when you've already acknowledged that your "unity band" literally could not recruit from actual Palestinian territories—even as those territories were being illegally settled at the same time, and even though your recruitment campaign took place well before Hamas's brutal attack on October 7.

(According to the band's narrative, they also made the trip from Israel to Los Angeles to begin their formal boy band training exactly one day before that same attack.)

The high level PR damage control work at play here is truly astounding. The band members each have their own tightly-branded public-facing instagram pages that come off like the kind of generic pretty boy model pages you'd find for a contestant on The Bachelorette. Meanwhile, the band's official, centralized social media accounts have barely any followers—less than 500 on Xformerlyknownastwitter, and about 20,000 on Instagram.

This kind of eye-roll-inducing, corporatized, centrist-heavy kumbaya musical outings have always existed because there's always an audience for "We Are The World" with sexy abs. But this band's debut single feels particularly crass (and not in the cool way). It's called "All Eyes On Us." You know, like that massively viral social media campaign from earlier this year that attempted to bring attention to the continued suffering of Palestinian civilians in the Gazan city of Rafah? While that campaign had its own share of controversies, the broader point of, "Please stop ignoring the plight of these human beings" was a valid one.

But to appropriate that slogan in order to bring attention to a manufactured boy band that presents itself as an Israeli-Palestinian Unity Project? That's a new depth of corporate cynicism I was not prepared for, even as a desperate distraction from the government's continued apathy towards its own citizens who are still being held hostage.