A Band Split by Belief, Not Sound
Radiohead’s latest public argument isn’t about tuning or tempo. It’s about territory and terror. In a new Sunday Times interview, Thom Yorke said the band will never again perform in Israel “under the Netanyahu regime.” The phrasing is deliberate, the refusal absolute. “I wouldn’t want to be 5,000 miles anywhere near it,” he says, equal parts conviction and fatigue.
Jonny Greenwood, the band’s other quiet architect, disagrees. Married to Israeli artist Sharona Katan and long immersed in Middle Eastern collaborations, Greenwood believes absence can wound as much as endorsement. “Boycotts make people retreat,” he says, “and that’s more dangerous.”
Yorke recoils, Greenwood reaches. The band’s harmony now sounds like an argument set to reverb.
Ghosts of Tel Aviv
Yorke’s hesitation dates back to 2017, when Radiohead played Tel Aviv amid boycott calls from the BDS movement. The night should have been triumphant; instead, it curdled. “I was in the hotel,” he recalls, “when some guy, clearly connected high up, approaches me to thank me. It horrified me. The gig was being hijacked.”
That sense of moral trespass never left him for a man whose music has consistently railed against systems, corporate, political, and spiritual, being co-opted by one felt like contamination. “At the time I thought the gig made sense,” Yorke admits. “Then I got there and thought, get me the f*** out.”
Faith in the Feedback
Jonny Greenwood’s counterpoint is neither naïve nor nationalistic. He’s spent years working with Israeli and Arab musicians alike, creating Jarak Qaribak, an album that stitched the region’s shared musical DNA into something gently utopian. “I’ve been to protests in Israel,” he says. “You can’t move for the ‘F*** Ben-Gvir’ stickers. I have no loyalty to their government, but I have both to the artists born there.”
For Yorke, art is protest through absence. For Greenwood, it’s protest through presence. The difference isn’t about politics—it’s about theology. Yorke’s creed is withdrawal, Greenwood’s is communion.
During the interview, Yorke deadpans: “But you are whitewashing genocide, mate. And so am I, apparently, just by sitting next to you.” It’s gallows humor that lands like a confession.
The Cost of Being Right
Yorke admits the constant confrontation wears on him. He’s been shouted at on the street—“Free Palestine!”—and heckled mid-performance. He tried explaining once, only to realize the futility. “The true criminals,” he said, “are laughing at us squabbling while they carry on murdering people.” To him, the outrage feels like a “purity test…a low-level Arthur Miller witch-hunt.”
Ed O’Brien, forever the peacemaker, reflects that they should have also played Ramallah. Phil Selway calls BDS’s demands “impossible.” The band that once moved as a single body now splinters into conscious fragments.
Ethics and the Echo Chamber
If U2 turned faith into theatre and The Clash made politics danceable, Radiohead translates conscience into code. Yorke’s moral equations have always hummed beneath the circuitry—Paranoid Android, Idioteque, The Numbers. Each song wrestles with what happens when human feeling gets processed by power. The Israel debate is that same conflict made literal: can art exist unsullied inside systems of control?
Greenwood’s answer is yes, if you build bridges. Yorke’s is no, if the bridge leads to complicity. Both approaches are human, just differently hopeful.
Exit Music (For the Moral)
Radiohead’s upcoming tour, its first since 2018, will begin in Madrid, far from Tel Aviv, far from absolution. Their music has always thrived on contradiction: beauty laced with dread, empathy entangled with guilt. This latest fracture isn’t the end of Radiohead; it’s their thesis renewed.
They’ve never written songs for the comfortable. They write for the conflicted—for listeners who know that certainty and salvation rarely share the same stage.
Because Radiohead’s truest subject has never been politics or protest, it’s the unbearable noise of trying to be good in a world wired for bad.
Further Reading for Fans
- Is This *OK Computer* Book a Must-Read for Radiohead Fans?
- Radiohead Revealed: Greenwood’s Photo Odyssey
- 29 Years of *Radiohead*’s *The Bends*
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