“For Our People”: An Interview with ARMY for Palestine
Photo by Andrea Acosta. Taken at the HYBE protest in Santa Monica, CA in March 2024.
I arrived at the protest an hour after it had already started. The event, organized by a collective of fans under the name “Boot The Scoot,” took place that day between 2:30–6:00 p.m. outside of the Universal Production Music offices in Santa Monica, California. It would be the first K-pop–specific, in-person protest to support Palestinian liberation, and the demands were clear: HYBE, BTS’s managing company, must cut its business ties with Scooter Braun, a Zionist music executive with a record of “actively supporting the colonial project of Israel,” primarily through propaganda, and “a growing reputation for unethical practice.” The informational materials circulated before the protest further state that Scooter Braun’s position as CEO of the US branch of HYBE operations (HYBE America) represents, for the South Korean company, an executive-level complicity in Israel’s “violence as an apartheid state” that “has displaced and killed Palestinians for nearly seven decades,” up to and including the violence that has devastated Gaza since October of last year.
BootTheScoot social media infographic advertising the HYBE protest scheduled for March 22, 2023 (left); screenshot from the official, now defunct, BootTheScoot website (right).
The protest had already amassed about two dozen people when I joined. It was a bright Friday afternoon, and the organizers immediately welcomed my friend and me into the fold. We were handed informational materials, offered water, and invited to take turns holding the Palestinian flag. The next few hours were spent chanting, marching up and down Colorado Avenue, ignoring the few detractors who shouted at us, and cheering with the many, many car honks in support—including one very memorable and enthusiastic ambulance.
As I marched with those few dozen fans, I couldn’t help but be reminded, quite viscerally, of the first time I ever attended an in-person ARMY event at the Highlight Tour in Houston in 2015. It had the same shocking transition from mediated connection and a digital screen to the sudden physicality of real life: of bodies, of voices, of three-dimensional movement with and against other people. Here, emergent and in the flesh, was a community of ARMY who had taken the discourse of online fandom as impetus to show up for in-person, community-oriented political work. And although the group was smaller than some other protests for Palestine I had attended in Los Angeles, this group felt not just welcoming but cohesive. These fans felt, yes, like political allies but also like potential friends: a group with the warmth of familiarity.
I know many people talk about meetups of people from fandom communities in this way—the experience of finally meeting mutuals at concerts, the solidarity of waiting in line with other fans—but I also know from experience just how often this community in fact fails to happen, how fan-to-fan interactions at events can get competitive, ugly, petty, or racist, just as easily as they can go well. In these times, the lack of political and personal value alignment decidedly interrupts the utopic political narratives so often told about ARMY and the fandom’s global force. Even now, ARMY’s social media spaces are marred by the ongoing harassment, doxxing, and obstructionism targeting fans who organize for Palestine—dynamics that powerfully dissolve the progressive narratives told about ARMY by media venues in the past. Today, in place of the formidable fan collective who broke through a xenophobic US music market and fundraised millions for social causes, we have a fractured, incoherent online ARMY community whose values are not only in question but, perhaps, in crisis.
Yet, precisely because the HYBE protest in Santa Monica emerged from a coherent political stance that went beyond the discursive—and because these politics informed everything about the gathering from its conception to its praxis—the event in Santa Monica felt like an articulation of what made ARMY such a powerful space to begin with. In fact, walking with my fellow protesters that day felt more genuinely relational for me than many recent BTS concerts have been, despite the ever-growing seas of coordinated ARMY lightsticks.
The most powerful argument for this same kind of value-driven ARMY identity in recent months has been the ARMY for Palestine collective (A4P). This group of Palestinian-led fan activists has been doing the sustained work of fundraising, protest, education, and organizing in HYBE’s online fandom spaces since October of 2023. A4P’s organizing work provided the backdrop against which the protest in Santa Monica emerged, and the political rigor they bring to the fandom keeps the spirit of that protest defiantly alive. Their leveraging of fandom as a collective force that can produce change has not only paved the way for the ARMY community this year but crafted a broader model for what organizing in fan spaces can, and perhaps should, look like at a time of global crisis.
A critical part of their efforts has been a material critique of HYBE for Scooter Braun’s presence in its executive ranks—one that has resulted in their call for a boycott of HYBE merchandise and music purchases. I say “material critique” here because A4P’s stance has not been to criticize HYBE simply for its proximity to Braun in a vague guilt-by-association way. Rather they have articulated a more specific and material rejection of the flow of artist revenue through Braun toward Zionist ends.
It has been the argument of some fans that Braun receives no revenue from BTS and has only become a target on the grounds of a general protest or dislike. But the flow of revenue from BTS-specific activities to Braun’s own profit is undeniable: in May of 2021, HYBE closed a deal with Braun that granted him personal HYBE shares valued at more than $103 million, in addition to what Forbes called “an undisclosed amount of cash” from HYBE to the producer. Just a year prior, BTS’s revenue represented no less than “87% of the KRW 290 billion ($260 million) Hybe reported for the first half of 2020,” making it difficult to argue that BTS’s (and other HYBE artists’) revenue has no material connection to Braun’s cash bonuses, share profits, and other undisclosed CEO benefits. In fact, the 2022 announcement of a military-service “hiatus” for BTS sharply devalued HYBE’s stock by 28%—equal to an overall decrease of $1.7 billion in HYBE’s market value—and prompted a backpedaling statement from the company to placate shareholder fears of losing BTS-specific revenue during the enlistment period. Market dynamics like these reveal that BTS’s earnings are, in fact, critical to HYBE—to its shareholders, its management, and its monetary power. Understanding this reality, A4P’s call for a boycott seeks to interrupt the company’s investments of artist-generated revenue in figures like Scooter Braun, who uses those resources in turn to support Zionist propaganda and do anti-Palestinian work.
AliceSparklyKat’s uncompromising observations from earlier this year echo this structural concern. They position BTS’s management as playing a central, rather than peripheral, role in the moral conversation at hand:
Fans are drawn to BTS because of the group’s messages about grief, about injustice, and about friendship. Now, Palestinian ARMY are dying. This is an injustice. These are our friends. I know that BTS wrote Spring Day because they care when young people are killed by unjust systems. And, still, fans are dying.
A manager is someone who is supposed to manage the relationship between a celebrity and their fans. For BTS and ARMY, who is in charge of managing the relationship between young people who are dying and those who claim to speak for them?
SparklyKat’s location of the managerial as a mediating and material force, rather than a symbolic, abstract, or invisible idea, reaches to the heart of A4P’s protest. A4P understand, like SparklyKat does, that when we talk about a HYBE boycott, we are talking about financial complicity in unjust systems. We are not talking about symbolic gestures of support, nor are we speaking theoretically or abstractly. We are talking about where the money goes, and to whom. We are talking about the ways individual purchases always move with or against wider systems—whether we want them to or not, whether we acknowledge it or not.
Under this rubric, the protesters know that BTS’s managerial ties are a part of BTS’s material impact on the world. The fantasy of a pure or direct artist-fan relationship may be compelling or seductive, but such fantasies ignore the corporate structure to which BTS belongs and through which the money must always move. This corporate structure is not secondary or auxiliary to the members but one that mediates the scope of their monetary impact. The executives of HYBE, in other words, are not a vague afterthought located somewhere to the side of BTS but the frame within which they move.
To protest the managerial work of Scooter Braun and to boycott HYBE, then, is ultimately a pressure strategy with a clear goal: disrupt the flow of money toward Zionist ends. Leverage fans’ purchasing power to redirect financial resources away from use against Palestinian liberation. Use the loss of revenue to send a message to HYBE. The debates that attend this kind of protest in fan spaces (Does this mean protesters don’t support the members? What about other groups or companies? What about donating elsewhere or using other strategies instead?) are often symbolic distractions that miss the fundamentally material point: to cut off fans’ personal investments in HYBE so long as HYBE is structurally complicit with ongoing violence.
This refusal is pragmatic. It is uninterested in the stan-culture logic of declaring loyalty or hate, of virtue signaling, or of fanwars for one group over another. The refusal simply withholds money from a managerial system invested in harm.
A4P’s work on this and other initiatives has been both thankless and tireless, yet it is also some of the most important work coming from the ARMY fandom today. To get a more detailed—and personal—perspective on how this work has been carried out, I spoke with one of the Palestinian administrators of A4P at length on a Saturday afternoon this past May. We discussed the origins of the A4P project, its intentions, and the work they have done thus far. The full interview is available below.
Note: the following answers from the representative A4P admins are informed by the additional thoughts of the other Palestinian A4P admins, who communicated on these questions before and after the interview.
What is the relationship between being a fan of BTS and your own activism? Does one inform the other, or do you understand them as two separate facets of your life?
We don’t really consider ourselves activists—we think this work should just be a form of humanity, not a job title someone should have. So, in that way, our activism, or our presence in activism spaces, very much predates our time as ARMY. Then, becoming a fan of BTS made sense as a concurrence in our lives.
Being Palestinian also really lends itself to general social awareness at a very young age, especially as your family teaches you about your history, your culture, and what happened to us—what the occupation has ripped from us. We think that reality is very much ingrained [in us] as a young child, especially living as a Palestinian American where there is a real break between who you are and the country you live in.
So we don’t necessarily think of [our activism and our relationship to BTS] as two separate things, because our activism affects everything we’re in: whether it be a book fandom, a movie or show fandom, or a music group. Our real life informs everything we’re a part of. And we think that this is a very natural thing: of course we’re going to make sure that groups we stan, and the people we’re involved with, share the same values as [us]. And that also involves pressuring them to be better.
In this way, we think being the persons we are and being raised as we were, yes, did lead us to BTS and led us to appreciate their music. But it’s also why we want better. That’s why it’s not completely separate. We think that our identity as Palestinians [makes us people] who [are] very globally conscious and care about everybody in the sense that we want liberation for folks. For us, that informs everything else.
Could you talk about how the ARMY for Palestine organizing project came together? What motivated it, what were the goals of the initiative, and how did the wider fan community factor into the idea of/conception of the project?
You know, we felt very by ourselves in October and especially so online. We’d had friends who knew who we were, but we didn’t know many online Palestinians—so we were very much searching for community. We felt there were probably others [like us] and, lo and behold, there are many of us: not only Palestinian ARMY but people who support the cause for a free Palestine, which was really lovely to see. Through that process of searching for folks, we found the group and team we have now.
The main Twitter (X) account was very quickly turned over to Palestinians—that was decided very early on, the idea that Palestinians would be the ones to administrate the account—and we had discussions in early November to plan. What did we want this [project] to look like? What do we want to do? And our first and main thought was: help our people.
We wanted to make sure things got directly into the hands of our people during this time with fundraising and mutual aid. We also saw pushes for government accountability, and because ARMY is such a global fandom, we knew that would be a good initiative to have people on board for as well. [ARMY] had the power to contact representatives around the world.
Another branch was the divestment project, which addressed Zionism within our fandom spaces. That’s not okay. What can we do about it?
And finally, we wanted to provide educational content about Palestine as a country: our history and our liberation tools in general. That was our brainstorming for the project, those tiers. The motivation and goal were always just helping our people. We all have family in Palestine. We all have really strong connections to Gaza. In terms of the wider community, we were just really hoping that folks would listen to us as Palestinians.
What specific projects or initiatives have been most important for ARMY for Palestine thus far?
Making sure donation and fundraising campaigns are active is one of the biggest things. This meant getting connected to grassroots [initiatives] on the ground. CareForGaza was one of these ground initiatives where families [in Gaza] helped their neighbors and could receive funds for aid. In October there was a lot of suspicion and doubt whether CareForGaza was trustworthy, but we were able to vet them through family friends in Gaza. Our goal [with this organization] was to make aid itself more equitable, especially for the places that needed to feed children and families, get formula, milk, and diapers for babies, and provide supplies like menstrual hygiene products.
We think it was very important here to find connections on the ground: CareForGaza is one; the Palestinian Children Relief Fund is another very accessible organization for donations, which we were also able to vet by verifying with our loved ones in Palestine. Our most recent campaign with the municipality of Gaza for water wells was important too. These were all direct impacts—donations to help a city maintain its foundations.
For contacting our representatives, whether in the US, Europe, or other powerful countries, we created a massive template with directions and instructions for every single representative we knew of. Then we contacted people who could translate into other languages—and that was huge. It happened early, and it’s now part of our resource carrd because it was something we knew would need to keep happening and happening. We can refer people back to it over and over and over again.
Finally, there was the divestment project around Scooter Braun and other producers working with HYBE. Here it was really important to us to figure out what works in this kind of situation. What does divestment look like? We really pulled on the BDS movement [that is, the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement that “calls upon international civil society organizations and people of conscience all over the world to impose broad boycotts and implement divestment initiatives against Israel similar to those applied to South Africa in the apartheid era”] to guide our path and figure it out. What have they done historically that has worked for them? What we were looking at was a very specific version of divestment. What does that look like?
These initiatives, what we do with them, and how we connect them [together] was our main work as a team. We wanted to be the source of directives and initiatives, by Palestinians for ARMY. Because when things happen in the world that are absolute crises and atrocities, we think people need direction. At the beginning, everyone’s like, we want to do so many things—but maybe they’re less informed or not educated and don’t know where to start. So we were hoping to be that force who said, okay. This is where you start. This is where you listen.
I appreciate your team’s emphasis, too, on direct aid that moves past nonprofit mediators as well.
Absolutely. We really want to highlight that because it’s something that we’ve been questioned on. We really think it’s a staple of white supremacy and Western imperialism that people needed a Western NGO for us to recommend before they could trust us. Direct aid, like you said, is so important, and this way we know that things are going into the hands of our people.
Palestinians learned very early not to trust NGOs. We’re sure a lot of colonized people feel the same way, for instance, about the UN and other NGOs. [Organizations like these] often don’t give aid to our people who need it. So we’ve always had a very healthy wariness of NGOs.
You have to kill the colonizer in your mind, especially when doing direct aid. You have to be comfortable giving mutual aid and sending money and trusting the process.
Let’s talk about the HYBE boycott. The boycott against HYBE for its ties to figures like Scooter Braun has been a very visible and important part of the organizing by ARMY for Palestine. What is the significance of the boycott for the cause? How does it connect to broader organizing efforts for Palestine in non-fandom or other political spaces?
We appreciate this being asked because it’s really important to talk about it and put the microscope on this. Yes, this [boycott initiative] is a microcosm of political organizing for Palestine. BDS has been around for decades. As diasporic Palestinians especially, we always ask how we can help our people abroad. Part of [the answer] is, “don’t fund the people killing our people.” And that can be so effective. You study movements like those against the Vietnam War and against apartheid in South Africa—really any justice movement—and you see [them all ask], if you’re not part of the resistance on the ground, what works? What do you do from far away? It’s money.
We already knew that boycotts have been historically effective for other causes. Actually, they have been effective for Palestine already; they’ve forced major corporations’ hands in both the past and present. And so we decided boycott and divestment can also work in music space and in fandom spaces.
If you look at entertainment, for instance, there’s a lot of Zionism. We asked, how do we make addressing this problem manageable and feasible? We love BTS. Who do we not want working with them? We knew from Scooter Braun’s track record, especially with Taylor Swift, that he’s not a good guy. And we also know from testimonies of his former artists that he’s done forcible Zionist harm when trying to influence these artists. So we really can’t separate [his presence] from our other organizing.
For Palestine, everybody has to do something, and this is just us doing our piece of divestment work. We can organize and protest, we can talk to our representatives. We can do all of these things. But if we are enjoying a fandom culture in a space that is directly giving money to Zionists whom we know have ties to atrocities around the world, including the occupation, that’s a direct funding of money in that direction.
We need to be loud about anti-Zionism in every space and every aspect of our lives, because Zionism is ingrained in every aspect of our lives. It’s everywhere and must be fought everywhere. That’s part of the decolonial process of de-normalizing Zionism, especially in the music industry and art world. We need to be protesting and fighting it everywhere and doing multiple things at the same time. Our activism isn’t only centered around our favorite bands and special interests; that work is only a small part of it. But the fact that some people see it as the center says a lot about them and the bubble they’re stuck in.
Regardless, we have a responsibility to make sure this is divested from our lives. Nothing about this time can be normal: if you’re going to organize, you have to be mindful about your life. You have to do it all the way: to not buy new technology, to build solidarity with folks in the DRC. You have to make sure that you’re not traveling to the UAE, in solidarity with Sudan. You have to make sure you’re not streaming Zionist music, for Palestine.
These things show up in liberation fights every which way. And you have to apply it to your whole life, you have to do it all the time. So for us this [boycott] was an extension of our work.
So it’s a call to address our own personal, material investments in Zionist harm. Some people who don’t understand why this is necessary have asked, why aren’t you boycotting other artists? Why BTS? And the answer seems to be, well, maybe you’re boycotting others too. But the one I personally listen to the most is BTS. So that specific consumption is my tie to the system that needs to be interrogated. BTS is my personal piece of the divestment puzzle.
Yes, we completely agree with that; we second that.
ARMY for Palestine has released a priority-tiered list for fans to use to guide their boycotting decisions and activities. Could you talk about the reasoning behind this priority list? How does this approach work for accessibility and/or compatibility with BTS’s existing fan community and their purchasing/streaming habits?
The tiered list was created and posted by Rooh (@btsprodsuga) with support from our community members. We fully agree with it and constantly share it on our page because the list was made in accordance with all of A4P’s HYBE campaigns and demands.
In using this tiered list, we again followed other boycott and organizing movements that we’ve seen in the past, like BDS. BDS has consumer boycotts of specific goods. They have divestment campaigns—which target universities, companies, and government-scale investments—and then they have pressure targets like, for instance, Google. Something like Google is impossible [to boycott fully as consumers] in our daily life because something will always be tied to Google and sometimes you don’t even know it. But if you could be conscious about it, that’s good.
[Editor’s Note: The BDS Movement stresses that “BDS isn’t just about consumer boycotts. More important than our own personal investments and purchases is working within an organization, union, or coalition to organize effective, strategic campaigns and build power globally to support the Palestinian struggle.” For this reason, BDS differentiates between various boycott and divestment strategies that one can choose to participate in (see a representative infographic below).]
Image from the BDS website
So we see the list here as something like BDS’s strategy. It makes sense especially for people who have not been involved in movements like this before. Ideally you do everything if you’re conscious of your individual material life. But for people who are new to movements, things like accessibility and other factors come into play. So, we wanted to create tiers that said, okay, this is the most important focus. And then we considered what the real money makers were for the corporation: things like merchandise, tours, and other things.
We basically prioritize the most important things, and in that way [our strategy] is very similar to the pressure versus boycott targets of BDS. The tier list also was born in companionship with some of our community mates and friends.
This organizing work has not always been easy for your team: how would you describe the backlash you or your supporters have received? What has been the most difficult part of the pushback?
This is a good question: heavy but good. Describing the backlash and identifying the hardest part go hand in hand, so we’ll answer it together. What the hardest part has been is truly the way you hope that people would listen to the people being affected in this time. ARMY for Palestine is administered by Palestinians; it is a Palestinian-led movement—but that’s not enough for people to get on board.
What we’re saying is really hard to stomach—that is the case of resistance in any organizing movement—but people are being really disrespectful, dehumanizing, and racist toward folks being affected. That’s what struggle is, and it sucks. But it’s very real. The hardest part for us has been taking in all of this vitriol, the verbal harm, the threats, and all the things that have happened to us and the other admins.
We all agree that the hardest part has been having to deal with the devastating news coming out of the land every single day, every single hour—and then still having to deal with bigotry and ignorance and hatred in a community that’s been purported to be a very diverse and safe space.
We think a lot of that comes from the dehumanization of Palestinians in general. Dehumanization has always been a part of our lives. What we saw in ARMY spaces really checks out because that’s how society has traditionally been towards us: speaking at us instead of to us. Speaking about us like we’re some kind of fictional story, or people purporting to know what we want more than what we’re actually saying we want and need in terms of support and allyship.
So we think the hardest part is where, regardless if somebody uses a strong argument for the boycott, they decide they’re not boycotting. But not only are they not doing that, they’re telling us in harmful ways why they’re not. They’re telling us in harmful ways that we’re not doing the “right” thing for our people, while also not participating in donations and aid—or even actively sabotaging aid.
Can I ask what you mean by “sabotaging aid”?
There have been incidents where platforms like CareForGaza have been reported and had their PayPal account shut down. Things like that are just really terrible. If you were a person who cares about human lives, you wouldn’t do that kind of thing. It’s so harmful, and it goes beyond the bounds of not participating in the boycott movement.
Like, if you don’t get on board with this boycott, we don’t agree [with that], but you’re a human with free will. But to not stop there and to go beyond that to the dehumanization of Palestinians, to sabotaging aid, and to sabotaging other parts of the movement, that’s the worst.
How has your experience of fandom changed over the course of your work with ARMY for Palestine?
Our perception of ARMY fandom has changed mostly not for the better, which is hard. It’s hard to not feel jaded when we entered the fandom proper and were told all of these things about the work the guys have done and the fandom’s track record of getting things done, but then not seeing that same thing extended to certain marginalized groups—whether Palestinians or other marginalized groups [in the fandom]. We’ve seen an uglier underbelly, and it’s tough to see that.
Actually, the pushback we have received has mostly been from our own fandom. People outside of the community have been much more supportive and positive, praising our efforts and saying that this is the BTS ARMY they know. But it’s also shown us that people in the fandom are learning and growing in a way that people in our own real life couldn’t after October. So we try to find those positives in fandom as an organizing tool amidst the negative. It can be a space of more socially aware people than we would encounter just walking around in our actual lives.
So, despite the pushback, we have still built a beautiful community with empathetic, caring ARMYs, who are willing to organize, use their voice for oppressed people, and push for change. Our movement keeps growing, and the community bond keeps getting firmer, as does our commitment to the cause. We’ll continue being loud.
How does your connection to BTS and the broader ARMY community inform your will to do and continue this work?
It’s not only the allyship that you find in ARMY spaces that we can cling to; it’s also the messages and values of being a fan of BTS’s music. You have to have something that gives you motivation to continue with this work, and we think divestment work and the broader movement for our people would be much harder to do without community in real life, community online, community within our team, and the people who support our team and us as administrators.
We, who have known loss through all of this, continue to have support, and we think that’s the most important thing. It’s the reason why organizing within this space has been so helpful. We are strong, we could do it for our people alone—but ARMY for Palestine brought us together to work as a team. It feels like what we’re doing here does matter. So yes, we will do anything for our people, but having ARMY quite literally behind us is so motivating.
The core of ARMY, those people who took the same values away [from BTS] just like we did and are supporting our cause . . . it’s so good to know they’re there. It’s not in vain.
Any final words, or message, you’d like to emphasize to a general audience?
Our biggest thing, regardless of what space you’re in, fandom or not, is just listening. Listening to Palestinians and thinking of us as unique human individuals, it’s so important. That remains the most important thing.
If you want to be involved, even if you didn’t know much about us and our people before now, take the time to educate yourself, learn, research, and get involved with local organizations or online communities. ARMY for Palestine is not the only community that’s organizing; K-pop is not the only community either. You’ve got people in animation, people who are Taylor Swift fans—find your community, find your niche, and start raising your voice. Start listening to Palestinians and our voices. And we hope that this movement helps people understand that if you have a community, you can always organize with people who have like-minded values.
We’re stronger together. That’s been really hopeful for us. Ə
You can find the links to donate to any of ARMY for Palestine’s direct aid initiatives here.
