Amid all the horror, we neglected to keep the feelings of a very important person in mind. As many of us across Europe and America have been blindly protesting what, early on, we perceived to be Israel’s genocide of the people of Gaza and our own governments’ complicity in it, Thom Yorke, the Radiohead frontman, has been quietly reflecting—and hurting. It’s been difficult, but Yorke, utilizing his profound ability to “think critically,” has weighed up the nuances of the situation and concluded that he shall not yield to those who unthinkingly support the people of Palestine without due consideration of context. He cares too much for that. He is humble in the face of such hopeless complexity, and, frankly, he would like us to recognize that.
This is, admittedly, a glib way of reading Yorke’s recent statement finally addressing Israel’s war on Gaza, but it captures the gist. His words were as self-pitying as they were self-aggrandizing, and, amid the liberal use of the phrase “critical thinking,” they hit all the standard points that defenders of Israel’s war tend to aim for: the situation is just way too complicated for anyone to really comment on, but, on the other hand, what about the war crimes committed by Hamas? Are they not bad, too?
The statement opened by addressing something that happened at one of Yorke’s solo gigs in Australia last October, when someone in the crowd called him out for his refusal to speak about Gaza. “How could you be silent?” this person shouted, which Yorke did not like at all. He responded from the stage, “Don’t stand there like a coward, come here and say it. You wanna piss on everybody’s night? Okay, you do. See you later, then.” He fucked off stage for a while, but soon came back for an angry encore.
Speaking about that sordid episode, Yorke’s Instagram post begins, “Some guy shouting at me from the dark last year when I was picking up a guitar to sing the final song alone in front of 9,000 people in Melbourne didn’t really seem like the best moment to discuss the unfolding humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza. Afterwards I remained in shock that my supposed silence was somehow being taken as complicity…”
The problem is not just that Yorke’s silence is perceived as complicity. Radiohead have played in Israel several times, with their Tel Aviv gig in 2017 probably attracting the most negative attention. Critics at the time pointed out that the venue they played stood upon the ruins of the Palestinian village of Jarisha, which was ethnically cleansed in the wake of the Nakba. That gig, incidentally, took place around the same time that Israeli forces were attacking Palestinians who were worshipping at the al-Aqsa Mosque compound, so it’s not as if this was a time of peace. Yorke’s bandmate Johnny Greenwood, meanwhile, played in Tel Aviv as recently as last year, while the genocide was unfolding in Gaza.
These are not just passive acts on Radiohead’s part. These performances artwash Israel’s human rights abuses, and they have explicitly been celebrated by members of the country’s government, who see great value in the use of culture as a smokescreen for their crimes. Radiohead aren’t merely silent. They’re cheerleaders.
Yorke’s statement tried to frame his refusal to acknowledge the genocide as “my attempt to show respect for all those who are suffering and those who have died, and to not trivialize it in a few words.” But that, according to him, allowed “other opportunistic groups to use intimidation and defamation to fill in the blanks… This has had a heavy toll on my mental health.” He wants us to know how tough things have been for him, gesturing, at the same time, towards his own enlightened humanity. “I would hope,” he wrote, “that for anyone who has ever listened to a note of the music of my band or any of the music I have created over the years, or looked at the artwork or read any of the lyrics, it would be self-evident that I could not possibly support any form of extremism or dehumanization of others.”
It should be self-evident, he tells us, but perhaps this isn’t a time to be quite so presumptuous? In the event of a genocide supported by Western governments—Yorke is British, and his government in particular is a direct and eager participant in the slaughter—it maybe is worth stating very clearly one’s opposition, particularly if you occupy an important position within the culture. Absurd as it may be, celebrities are influential people and their words bear weight. Plainly opposing genocide, in that context, is probably worth doing.
When Yorke’s statement does eventually get around to the tricky business of violence, he does what Israel’s liberal defenders tend to do: like Bono before him, he highlights the specific role of Netanyahu and his government allies. “I think Netanyahu and his crew of extremists are totally out of control and need to be stopped,” he says, “and that the international community should put all the pressure it can on them to cease. Their excuse of self-defense has long since worn thin and has been replaced by a transparent desire to take control of Gaza and the West Bank permanently.”
It is all well and good, 20 months into the genocide, to criticize Benjamin Netanyahu, but it requires “critical thinking” to recognize that racism and violence in Israeli society run deeper than this one man and his extremist cabinet. Quite aside from the fact that the self-defense excuse was, as Yorke may say, “self-evidently” nonsense from the point Israel started mass-slaughtering children, this wider framing of Netanyahu as puppet master is problematic. It is true that he is a war criminal with a terrible hold over Israel, but the awkward fact of the matter is that he is not an aberration. While there are, of course, some extremely brave Israelis speaking out, the bleak truth is that Netanyahu’s genocide has been extremely popular with the public.
A Pew Research Center survey conducted in March and early April 2024—a period when the scale of Gaza’s destruction was already apparent—found that 39 percent of Israelis believed that the country’s response to October 7 had been proportionate. A further 34 percent thought it hadn’t gone far enough, while a small minority of 19 percent said it had gone too far. In other words, the vast majority of people in Israel thought the incessant bombing of schools, hospitals and homes, not to mention the targeting of children, was legitimate. This indicates a problem far greater than Netanyahu’s hold on power. Israel is a deeply racist society built on ethnic cleansing. Every government in its history has oppressed the Palestinians. Pinning everything on Netanyahu, uniquely despicable as he may be, obscures that fact. Israeli society itself needs to change, which, in its limited way, the cultural boycott that Radiohead choose to ignore seeks to encourage.
Yorke’s statement also engaged in some classic whataboutism. The “unquestioning Free Palestine refrain,” Yorke says, “does not answer the simple question of why the hostages have still not all been returned? For what possible reason? Why did Hamas choose the truly horrific acts of October 7th? The answer seems obvious, and I believe Hamas chooses too to hide behind the suffering of its people, in an equally cynical fashion for their own purposes.”
Putting aside the fact that Netanyahu’s government repeatedly refused a hostage deal, Yorke is drawing an equivalence between Hamas’ actions and that of Netanyahu’s government. It’s true that both sides have committed atrocities. It’s true that October 7 was abhorrent and that the targeting of civilians is never justified, no matter which side does it. It’s true, too, that Hamas does cynically gain its power from the suffering of its people.
But that suffering isn’t incidental. It’s not random. It is suffering enforced on Palestinians by the expansionist ethnonationalist project of the Israeli state. In indirect and direct ways both, Israel has empowered Hamas. The group’s actions are not inexplicable, even if they are appalling. They are responding to Israel’s project of ethnic cleansing, and recognizing that should not weaken one’s ability to condemn Hamas for their war crimes. The fact remains that Israel’s ethnic cleansing must be stopped.
People like Yorke will always seek to convolute the conflict as a way to cover their shaky stance on it. As he puts it, “Social media witch-hunts (nothing new) on either side pressurizing artists and whoever they feel like that week to make statements etc do very little except heighten tension, fear and oversimplification of what are complex problems that merit proper face to face debate by people who genuinely wish the killing to stop and understanding to be found.” Basically, he’s saying that supporters of the cultural boycott do not know what they’re talking about. There is no right and wrong in this conflict, only unthinkable complexity, and Thom Yorke himself, the sensitive songwriter and deep “critical thinker” that he is, possesses the humility to recognize this.
The comedian and musician Reggie Watts posted a good response to this nonsense on Instagram, saying, plainly, “You don’t need to be a geopolitics scholar to know that starving children and slaughtering families is wrong.” Even when people like Yorke try to make us doubt it, it is very important to hold on to that simple thought. Our basic humanity tells us what Israel is doing is wrong, and there is nothing complicated about that.
Yorke’s statement ended with a fittingly weak whimper. “I have written this,” he said, “in the simple hope that I can join with the many millions of others praying for this suffering, isolation and death to stop, praying that we can collectively regain our humanity and dignity and our ability to reach understanding… that one day soon this darkness will have passed.”
Therein lies the crux of Yorke’s stance. Pray the violence away. Hunker down and wait for the darkness to pass. Don’t actually take a stand. Don’t call a genocide for what it is. Don’t listen to the voices of the oppressed. Keep as quiet as possible, but if you must speak, be sure to make it clear how sad you are and how terribly complicated everything is. Speak without really saying anything at all, and hope it suffices so that people of conscience stop calling you out as the coward you are.
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