Thom Yorke defends the Tel Aviv show, and Roger Waters answers him

Thom Yorke has spoken about Radiohead's Tel Aviv show for the first time, telling Rolling Stone that the band do not agree with BDS, the movement for boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel, and that he is against a cultural ban. The magazine put the question to him during its cover interview on OK Computer and printed his answer on 2 June.

The show, at Park HaYarkon on 19 July, is the last of the A Moon Shaped Pool tour's 2017 dates. Radiohead have played Israel eight times before, most recently in summer 2000. In April dozens of figures, Roger Waters, Desmond Tutu, Thurston Moore and Ken Loach with them, signed an open letter asking them to cancel. At one of the band's Greek Theatre shows in Berkeley that month, Jewish Voice for Peace activists held up a banner against the date.

It's deeply distressing that they choose to, rather than engage with us personally, throw shit at us in public.

Thom Yorke¹

Yorke says he admires Loach and would never tell him where to work, but he calls it patronising and offensive to assume the band are misinformed, and objects to a dialogue that is all black or white. Jonny Greenwood, in his view, knows the subject best in the band, with Palestinian and Israeli friends and a wife who is an Arab Jew.

Waters answered on 5 June in a statement to the same magazine, saying Yorke had not told the whole story. He says he emailed Yorke on 12 February about the band crossing the BDS picket line. Yorke replied within hours, angry, taking it as a threat; Waters apologised and asked to talk, heard nothing, and sent a long appeal on 4 March. That is not true, Thom. I have made every effort to engage with you personally, and would still like to have the conversation.³

The same day Artists for Palestine UK posted Loach's reply. Thom's is a simple choice: will he stand with the oppressor or the oppressed?⁴ Radiohead Fans for Palestine, in an open letter from Seamus O'Brolchain, say they posted letters to the band, tried to hand one to a member at a public event and rang the band's agents and publicists, with no acknowledgement. PACBI, the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, compares the call to the artists' boycott of Sun City in apartheid South Africa.

Yorke says the row has strained his friendship with Nigel Godrich, who produced Waters's latest album. Godrich, who does not believe in cultural boycotts, says he is not in the middle of Yorke and Waters. Thom and Roger are two peas in a pod, really, in certain respects. They just have a disagreement about this, but they've never even met.¹