Thom Yorke vs the anti-Israel bigots

Radiohead’s Thom Yorke has had enough of the anti-Israel bigots. Towards the end of his solo set in Melbourne, Australia this week, Yorke was heckled by a protester. ‘How many dead children will it take for you to condemn the genocide in Gaza?’, shouted the man, for the umpteenth time that evening. ‘Okay, you do it, see you later’, said Yorke, before walking off stage. Point made, he returned a few minutes later to perform his final song of the show.

This wasn’t Yorke’s first run-in with the ‘pro-Palestine’ set. Over the past decade, as the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel has taken off, bourgeois leftists have turned on Yorke and his Radiohead bandmates for refusing to stop playing in Israel and collaborating with Israelis. For having the temerity, that is, to treat Israel as a country like any other.

Matters first came to a head in the summer of 2017. Radiohead were due to conclude their ‘A Moon Shaped Pool’ tour in Tel Aviv. This prompted the BDS campaign, backed by veteran Israelophobes like film director Ken Loach and Pink Floyd musician Roger Waters, to call on Radiohead not to perform in Israel so as ‘to help pressure Israel to end its violation of basic rights and international law’.

But Yorke refused to cave in to their demands. Instead, he told Rolling Stone magazine that he didn’t agree with boycotting, isolating and damning an entire people because of the perceived crimes of their government. As he later put it: ‘We don’t endorse [Benjamin] Netanyahu any more than [Donald] Trump, but we still play in America.’ What’s more, he called out the ignorance of the BDS crowd, who just ‘throw the word “apartheid” around’ despite knowing nothing about the nature of Israel. It was a brave stand, given the intense conformism and allergy to dissent among today’s cultural elites.

Since the start of the war in Gaza last year, the Israelophobia of the ‘progressive’ left has exploded. Yet, much to the chagrin of Western leftists, Yorke and his bandmates have maintained their principled objection to the BDS movement. Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood, who is married to Arab Israeli visual artist Sharona Katan, played a gig in Tel Aviv earlier this summer with Dudu Tasa, an Iraqi Jew, before attending a protest the following day calling for the release of the hostages held by Hamas. For this, the BDS campaign accused him of ‘artwashing genocide’, but Greenwood stuck to his guns, arguing that there was nothing ‘progressive’ about ‘silencing Israeli artists’ purely for ‘being born Jewish in Israel’.

It’s a neat summary of the unbridled bigotry of BDS. After all, this is a campaign driven by a disturbing desire to denormalise and stigmatise an entire population – to present Israeli Jews as a tainted people, to be sanctioned, shunned and excommunicated. It’s a campaign that would be roundly condemned were it being levelled against any other nation.

It might not look like much. But just by playing gigs in Israel and continuing to work with Israeli Jews, Yorke, Greenwood and the rest of Radiohead are delivering a righteous blow to BDS. Here’s hoping more musicians pluck up the same courage.

Tim Black is a columnist at spiked.