Jonny Greenwood defends his work with Dudu Tassa

Jonny Greenwood posted a long statement on X on Tuesday defending his work with the Israeli musician Dudu Tassa, after a Palestinian boycott campaign called for pressure on Radiohead over the pair's concert in Tel Aviv.

The concert was at the Barby Club on Sunday 26 May, with songs from Jarak Qaribak, the pair's 2023 album of Arabic love songs. The Jerusalem Post reported that Tassa called for peace from the stage, saying there were musicians in the room, not politicians, and that he hoped everyone would come home safely. The paper also reported that Greenwood had been seen the night before at the weekly Saturday rally on Kaplan Street, a protest against the Israeli government that calls for the hostages held by Hamas to be returned and for new elections.

In a statement dated 29 May, the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI), a founding member of the BDS movement, accused Greenwood of artwashing genocide⁶. It noted that Israeli forces had bombed displaced Palestinians sheltering in tents in Rafah while the concert went on, and called for pressure on Radiohead to distance itself from him. Radiohead last played Israel in July 2017, at Yarkon Park in Tel Aviv, over an open letter from Artists for Palestine UK and a public row between Thom Yorke and Ken Loach.

Greenwood opens by saying he is playing European festivals this summer with Tassa and the Kuwaitis, and that people have been asking why. Tassa's grandfather, he points out, was one of the Al Kuwaity brothers, perhaps the most famous of all Iraqi composers, whose songs are still played across Arab radio though their Jewish heritage is no longer mentioned. He has released music with Tassa since 2008, and calls a project that recalls Jewish roots in Iraq and Yemen going back thousands of years important. Really, he writes, it is musicians from across the Middle East sharing a love of Arabic songs by Muslim, Jewish and Christian composers.

He cannot join calls to silence Israeli film-makers, musicians and dancers touring abroad, he writes, and finds them unprogressive, especially from their Western peers, since such artists are invariably the most progressive people in any society. And silencing Israeli artists for being born Jewish in Israel doesn't seem like any way to reach an understanding between the two sides of this apparently endless conflict.² He calls the musicians he works with braver than those trying to shut the band down, and of any hidden motive he writes, There isn't one: we are musicians honouring a shared culture, and I've been involved in this for nearly 20 years now.²

He ends by saying that no art matters as much as stopping the death and suffering, but that doing nothing seems worse, and that he hopes people can hear the music without suspicion or hate. PACBI told NME it rejected what it called his misleading excuses, called for more pressure on both Radiohead and The Smile, and accused Tassa of having performed for Israeli forces again and again.