Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood performed a concert in the Israeli capital Tel Aviv, a day after reportedly taking part in protests calling for the release of hostages held in Gaza and new elections.
According to the Jerusalem Post, Greenwood performed with Israeli musician Dudu Tassa at Barbie on May 26. The two performed songs from “Jarak Qaribak,” a collaborative album of Arabic love songs released last year.
Calls for peace were heard repeatedly throughout the concert, with Tassa reportedly saying, “We are musicians here, not politicians. Music has always worked miracles. I pray for better days and for everyone to return home safely.”
Greenwood’s wife, the artist Sharona Katan, is Israeli, and the family had a nephew who served in the Israel Defense Forces but was killed in the war with Hamas.
Greenwood’s performance was condemned by pro-Palestinian activists as “genocide artwashing”.
Jonny Greenwood. Photo by Burak Cingi/Getty
The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI), a founding member of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, called for “peaceful and creative pressure on his band, Radiohead, to credibly distance themselves from this blatant complicity in crimes or face grassroots action.”
PACBI also noted that at the same time as Greenwood’s concert, Israeli forces were bombing Palestinian refugees sheltering in tents in the Rafah district of the Gaza Strip, sparking widespread outcry on social media last week. For the past two decades, activists have called on musicians to “refuse to collaborate with Israeli cultural institutions that are complicit in Israel’s apartheid regime.”
Radiohead has performed in Israel many times throughout their career, with a particularly controversial show in 2017.
The band have faced calls to cancel the shows and Artists for Palestine UK recently published an open letter, signed by musicians including Roger Waters, Thurston Moore and Young Fathers, as well as Archbishop Desmond Tutu, urging the band to “reconsider” their decision amid a widespread cultural boycott of the country.
Radiohead’s Fans for Palestine also wrote an open letter to Yorke, saying: “It is the Palestinian people who are asking you to boycott them and you should appeal to them if you are to justify playing in Tel Aviv.”
PACBI added: “Whatever the excuse, crossing a Palestinian picket line and performing in the apartheid state of Israel in the midst of the genocide of 2.3 million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip is a deliberate whitewashing or whitewashing of Israeli genocide and the 76-year-old settler-colonial apartheid regime that underpins it.”
Yorke also got into a Twitter spat with director Ken Loach over their Israel show, in which Loach asked the band “Are you on the side of the oppressed or the oppressors?”
Drummer Philip Selway responded that the show “felt like the right decision.” When asked by NME if the band felt like they had severed ties with the band after the show, Selway said: “I honestly don’t know. It wasn’t the basis for our decision to play here. We stand by what we say and we feel like it was the right decision.”
Activists also organised a protest at Glastonbury in 2017, aiming to wave 100 Palestinian flags in front of the Pyramid Stage during the performance.
Meanwhile, Radiohead guitarist Ed O’Brien called for a ceasefire in Gaza in January: “Like all of you, the events of October 7th and its aftermath have been horrific beyond words. I feel that anything I have attempted to write is completely inadequate. Ceasefire now. Return the hostages,” he wrote on Instagram.
