Radiohead guitarist Johnny Greenwood has criticized the cultural boycott of Israel and the cancellation of two 2025 concerts he had planned with Israeli musician Dudu Tassa in Bristol and London. In an interview with El País, Greenwood said the cancellations followed pressure from pro-Palestinian activists and compared the move to cultural censorship.
Greenwood, who performed with Tassa in Tel Aviv in May 2024 and again in March 2025, said he had faced criticism from the BDS movement. “I admire many Israeli films, writers and musicians,” he said. “The music I make with Dudu revives older songs than most of the countries fighting each other right now. That will always matter more to me. There are bookstores in Madrid openly selling novels by Amos Oz, and he is Israeli. To me, canceling music is like taking books off the shelves.”
PACBI, the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, said the shows were canceled after “non-violent BDS pressure.” The group accused Greenwood and Tassa of having “clear and undeniable ties to the laundering of Israel’s genocide in Gaza,” and said Tassa had repeatedly “entertained murderous Israeli forces” and had willingly served as a “cultural ambassador for apartheid in Israel.”
At the time of the cancellations, Greenwood wrote that the venues and crews, who had no fault in the dispute, had received enough credible threats to conclude it was unsafe to proceed. “Forcing musicians not to perform and depriving people who want to hear them of the ability to do so is obviously a method of censorship and silencing,” he said, adding that intimidating venues into canceling would not help bring “the peace and justice that everyone living in the Middle East deserves.” The dispute is the latest chapter in Radiohead’s fraught relationship with the boycott campaign: the band played Tel Aviv in 2017 despite pressure from Roger Waters, Desmond Tutu and others, and Thom Yorke said in October 2024 that Radiohead would “absolutely not” return to Israel, saying he would not want to be “within 5,000 miles of the Netanyahu regime.”
