Roger Waters has attacked Radiohead’s Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood for their stance on the Israel-Palestine issue.
The Pink Floyd co-founder has been a vocal supporter of the BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) movement since 2011, and has spoken out in the past against Radiohead’s decision to play a gig in Tel Aviv in 2017.
He signed an open letter at the time, alongside the likes of Thurston Moore, Young Fathers and Ken Loach, urging the band not to play in Israel as “a system of apartheid has been imposed on the Palestinian people”.
In a new interview, Waters has returned to the debate, revealing that he had an email exchange with Yorke after signing that letter. He has also renewed his criticism of the band’s position on the highly contentious situation.
Speaking to The Empire Files podcast, Waters said: “I wrote [Yorke] a sort of email that went, ‘I’m sorry if you thought I was being confrontational’. He wrote back and he said, ‘Normally, people on one side of an argument at least have the decency or the grace or the something to have a conversation.’”
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“So then I wrote him back, and I said, ‘Thom, the people in BDS have been trying to have a conversation with you for months! And so have I!’”
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Asked how the conversation concluded, Waters replied: “That the guy’s a complete prick!”
The interview went on to more recent issues, including an incident where Yorke clashed with a pro-Palestinian protester and left the stage at a show in Melbourne in October.
“I think he’s damaged,” Waters said about the Radiohead frontman. “He’s very damaged. He’s obviously very, very deeply insecure. He obviously thinks he’s very bright but he’s not. So he can’t actually have a conversation.”
He also addressed the criticism Greenwood faced when working on a musical project with Israeli musician Dudu Tassa this summer. “It’s complete bullshit,” he said.
“There is no argument to be made. There is the oppressed and the oppressor. The oppressed are the indigenous people of Palestine, the oppressor are the settler-colonial visitors from North America and North Europe… There is nothing difficult to understand. It is not a conflict. It is a genocide, Thom and Jonny!”
Greenwood performed with Tassa in Tel Aviv in May, and the day before, he reportedly participated in protests calling for hostages held in Gaza to be released and new elections to be held.
The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI), a founding member of the BDS movement called for “peaceful, creative pressure on his band Radiohead to convincingly distance itself from this blatant complicity in the crime of crimes, or face grassroots measures.”
PACBI also pointed out that at the same time that Greenwood’s concert was taking place, Israeli forces were bombing displaced Palestinians sheltering in tents in Rafah, Gaza, which had prompted a large outcry on social media in the last week. In the last two decades, activists have called for musicians “to refuse to work with Israeli cultural institutions that are complicit in Israel’s apartheid regime.”
Greenwood defended his decision, writing: “I’ve been collaborating with Dudu and releasing music with him since 2008 – and working privately long before that. I think an artistic project that combines Arab and Jewish musicians is worthwhile. And one that reminds everyone that the Jewish cultural roots in countries like Iraq and Yemen go back for thousands of years, is also important.”
“Anyway, no art is as ‘important’ as stopping all the death and suffering around us,” he continued. “How can it be? But doing nothing seems a worse option. 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.
“So: that’s why I’m making music with this band. You’re welcome to disagree with, or ignore, what we do but I hope you now understand what the true motivation is, and can react to the music without suspicion or hate.”
Earlier this year, Waters also got into a war or words with Nick Cave over his support of BDS, with Cave describing Waters’ stance as “embarrassing” and “deeply damaging”.
Waters has been accused of anti-Semitism for many years, including recently by his former Pink Floyd bandmate David Gilmour, who has said he will “absolutely not” ever perform with Waters again.
Gilmour’s wife Polly Samson said Waters was “anti-Semitic to his rotten core”, adding: “Also a Putin apologist and a lying, thieving, hypocritical, tax-avoiding, lip-synching, misogynistic, sick-with-envy, megalomaniac. Enough of your nonsense.” Gilmour shared the post, saying that “every word is demonstrably true”.
Waters himself issued a statement in response, which saw him describe Samson’s comments as “incendiary and wildly inaccurate” and continued that he “refutes [them] entirely”. He added that he was “taking advice as to his position” regarding the claims.
Samson’s comments came after Waters took part in an interview with German newspaper Berliner Zeitung, and shared his views on Israel and the Russian-Ukraine war.
Per a translated version of the interview on Waters’ site, the musician was at one point asked if he still believed – as he had said in the past – that the state of Israel was comparable to Nazi Germany. “Yes, of course,” he replied. “The Israelis are committing genocide. Just like Great Britain did during our colonial period.”