Roger Waters Repeatedly Tried to Discuss Israel and BDS with Thom Yorke
“They’re still killing the children Thom under your Radiohead flag. Come out of your dark basket Thom and stand with me and Ken Loach and Brian Eno out here in the light.”
Famed English rock band Radiohead is no stranger to controversy – at least around one subject: Israel.
In 2017, for instance, they notoriously rejected calls from the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement to cancel their planned gig in Tel Aviv, drawing widespread backlash.
Last year, the band’s guitarist, Jonny Greenwood, who is married to an Israeli, played a show in Tel Aviv with Israeli musician Dudu Tassa, a day after reportedly attending “protests calling for the release of the hostages in Gaza.”
“Last Sunday night, while Israeli forces bombed displaced Palestinians sheltering in tents in Rafah, Gaza – burning men, women, children and babies alive – a short drive away, Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood performed a concert in apartheid Tel Aviv,” said the BDS movement in a statement at the time.
“Regardless of excuses, crossing the Palestinian picket line and performing in apartheid Israel during its genocide against 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza is to consciously whitewash – or artwash – Israel’s genocide and underlying 76-year-old regime of settler-colonial apartheid,” the statement said.
“Palestinians unequivocally condemn Jonny Greenwood’s shameful artwashing of Israel’s genocide,” they continued. “We call for peaceful, creative pressure on his band Radiohead to convincingly distance itself from this blatant complicity in the crime of crimes or face grassroots measures.”
Greenwood, for his part, put out a response accusing them of “urging the silencing” of “this – or any – artistic effort by Israeli Jews,” and stating that it “feels unprogressive” to him.
A few months later, in October 2024, an audience member at one of Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke’s solo shows in Melbourne, Australia, shouted out to him:
“What will it take for you to condemn the Israeli genocide of Gaza? Already 200,000! Half of them are children! How can you be silent!?”
“Come up here and say that,” Yorke said. “Come up on the f**king stage and say what you wanna say. Don’t stand there like a coward. Come here and say it.”
He then accused the protestor of wanting to “piss on everybody’s night,” and walked off the stage. (He returned several minutes later and performed the song “Karma Police.”)
Thom ‘Fills in the Blanks’
On Friday, roughly seven months after the “Australian incident,” Yorke posted a new statement on Gaza to the social media platform Bluesky. It begins:
Some guy shouting at me from the dark last year when I was picking up a guitar to sing the final song alone in front of 9000 people in Melbourne didn’t really seem like the best moment to discuss the unfolding humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza.
Afterwards I remained in shock that my supposed silence was somehow being taken as complicity, and I struggled to find an adequate way to respond to this and to carry on with the rest of the shows on the tour.
That silence, my attempt to show respect for all those who are suffering and those who have died, and to not trivialise it in a few words, has allowed other opportunistic groups to use intimidation and defamation to fill in the blanks, and I regret giving them this chance. This has had a heavy toll on my mental health.
From there he says it should be “self evident” from his music, artwork, and lyrics that he “could not possibly support any form of extremism or dehumanisation of others,” and that his band’s work encourages “critical thinking beyond borders, the commonality of love and experience and free creative expression.”
He then states that he is going “fill in the blanks now, so we’re nice and clear,” and proceeds to spend about fifteen paragraphs weighing in on the genocide in Gaza (although he doesn’t call it that), Netanyahu, Hamas, “online manipulation,” “deliberate polarization,” “social media witch hunts… on either side,” and so on.
Many people “online” are not impressed.
“The full Thom Yorke statement after 20 months of genocide is pretty much what you’d expect,” said writer Caitlin Johnstone on X. “Shitlib both-sidesing, victim LARPing, blaming Netanyahu for Gaza while whining and denouncing ‘the unquestioning Free Palestine refrain that surrounds us all’ for being too nice to Hamas.”
“Yes, Thom Yorke, you are the real victim of the extermination campaign of all Palestinians because your own fans wanted you to use your immense privilege to say Israel should stop,” said streamer and political commentator Hasan Piker in another viral post.
“Turns out all the profound meaning I projected into Radiohead’s music was my own,” wrote musician Saul Williams. “F**k this dude to all eternity. What a creep.” The post currently has over 21,000 likes.
“I thought that ‘I’m a creep’ was a poetic take on the adolescent experience of loneliness, heartache and alienation,” commented human rights activist and barrister Ousman Noor. “Didn’t realise it was Thom Yorke just making an announcement.”
Waters and Yorke
Pink Floyd co-founder Roger Waters – a longtime supporter of the BDS movement – tried years ago to get Thom Yorke to use his “important voice” to help the Palestinians, or to at least stop playing shows in Israel and giving “tacit approval” to their system of apartheid, subjugation, occupation, and colonization.
In February 2017, he sent Yorke the following email:
Dear Thom
I don’t know you personally, but I know you because of your work; you have an important voice. Some of my Palestinian friends know I’m working with Nigel Godrich and have figured out that in consequence I can get a message to you. The word is out that you’re planning to do a gig in Tel Aviv. My friends have asked me to write to you before they start their public campaign.
We in the human rights movement are deeply concerned that Radiohead plan to cross the BDS picket line and perform in Israel. To do so gives tacit approval to the Israeli government’s systematic colonization of Palestinian land and subjugation of the Palestinian people, formalizing the status quo of the occupation into a unified apartheid state.
Eli Wiesel, the famous Jewish writer, holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace Lauriat who died last year said many things of note. Here are a few:
“We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.”
“There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.”
“No human race is superior; no religious faith is inferior. All collective judgments are wrong. Only racists make them.”
“To remain silent and indifferent is the greatest sin of all.”
I won’t bang on, but as far as we know we only get one go at life, only one chance to stand up for human rights, in solidarity with all our brothers and sisters, irrespective of their nationality, race or religion. The lives of a Jewish child and a Palestinian child are equally precious.
It’s a funny old life and no mistake.
Love and respect
Roger Waters
Yorke replied:
Duly noted
i can’t wait for their campaign to start
Normally i would expect a conversation first
Rather than a tacit threat of an imminent campaign
which has now started
I too am familiar with human rights
but i knew nothing about this line we have now crossed
Yes isn’t life funny
ill start drawing my own lines
since no-one on their side wants to show us the respect of a discussion(spell checked by GCHQ)
“I drafted a second email in reply,” Waters says, “but was warned off from sending it by someone who knows Thom well.”
Instead, he sent this on February 13, 2017:
Hey Thom
I’m sorry, my letter wasn’t meant to be confrontational. I was reaching out to see if we could have the conversation that you talk about in your reply. Can we?
Love
R.
“Thom did not reply,” according to Waters. After waiting over two weeks and, he says, feeling “somewhat exasperated,” he followed up on March 3, 2017….
READ THE REST OF THIS ARTICLE FOR FREE HERE: https://decensored.news/roger-waters-thom-yorke-emails-israel-gaza-bds/
The full story contains more emails between Waters and Yorke, an open letter that Waters and dozens of other prominent figures sent to Radiohead (Desmond Tutu, Thurston Moore, Ken Loach, etc.), and some of Waters’ more recent thoughts as he reflects on their exchanges.
Image Credit: Henry Laurisch (CC BY-SA 3.0). May be modified from original. For more reporting like this, please follow Decensored News on multiple platforms, bookmark the website, and subscribe here on Substack:
Good job, Roger. I don't listen to Radiohead.
Got to wonder, what special kind of compromat do the Zionazi's have on Thom for him to be so in lockstep with them.