Roger Waters insults Thom Yorke over stance on Israel-Palestine

Roger Waters, a prominent supporter of Palestine and the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel, has attacked Radiohead members Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood for their stance on the Israel-Palestine issue.

In conversation with American journalist Abby Martin for The Empire Files, Waters was asked about Yorke clashing with a pro-Palestinian protester and leaving the stage in a Melbourne show in October.

Waters admitted he was not surprised, and recalled how he and Yorke had “a good exchange of emails” after he and other musical peers asked Radiohead to reconsider performing in Tel Aviv in 2017.

In an open letter to Radiohead that year, Waters and signees wrote that “by playing in Israel you’ll be playing in a state where, UN rapporteurs say, ‘a system of apartheid has been imposed on the Palestinian people.'”

Yorke argued that “playing in a country isn’t the same as endorsing its government”.

“I wrote him 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 the other side of an argument at least have the decency or grace to have a conversation.’ So then I wrote him back and I said, ‘Thom, the people in [the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement] have been trying to have a conversation with you for months, and so have I!” 

Waters added: “The guy’s a complete prick. He is! But I think he’s 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. That’s why he did an interview with Rolling Stone where he accused me and Ken Loach and Brian Eno of being cowards.”

Martin and Waters also discussed Yorke’s Radiohead bandmate Jonny Greenwood whom, after performing in Tel Aviv this June, shared his belief that “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.”

Waters found that particular line to be “complete bullshit.”

“There is no argument to be made,” he continued. “There is the oppressed, and the oppressor; the oppressed are the Indigenous people of Palestine, the oppressor [is] the settler Colonial visitors from North America and Northern Europe. The oppressors are murdering all the oppressed people so they can steal their furniture, and their houses, and their olive trees, and their hills, and their water, and their land, and their birthright.”

“There is nothing difficult to understand. It is not a conflict. It is a ge-no-cide, Thom and Jonny, and you are supporting it.”

Check out the interview below:

Waters has been accused of anti-Semitism for many years, including recently by his former Pink Floyd bandmate David Gilmour, who stated he will “absolutely not” play with Water again.

Polly Samson, Gilmour’s wife, said that Waters was “anti-Semitic to his rotten core.” After Waters equated the state of Israel with Nazi Germany in an interview with German newspaper Berliner Zeitung, Samson added that Waters was also “a Putin apologist and a lying, thieving, hypocritical, tax-avoiding, lip-synching, misogynistic, sick-with-envy, megalomaniac.”

Waters issued a statement in response, which saw him describe Samson’s comments as “incendiary and wildly inaccurate” and continued that he “refutes [them] entirely”.