Jonny Greenwood and Dudu Tassa say “censorship and silencing” led to the cancellation of their two UK concert events subsequent month below stress from the the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) marketing campaign. The Radiohead musician and Israeli singer are longtime collaborators, however have confronted renewed criticism over their willingness to maintain performing in Israel because the nation’s navy ranges neighboring Gaza. The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) supported protests towards the UK concert events on the grounds that Greenwood and Tassa have been “artwashing genocide.”
A statement on social media attributed to Greenwood, Tassa, and their musicians stated the 2 venues, Bristol Beacon and Hackney Church, had “acquired sufficient credible threats to conclude that it’s not protected to proceed.” These claims are unsubstantiated, PACBI notes, saying the reveals “have been cancelled following peaceable BDS stress.” Pitchfork has emailed the venues to make clear the character of any threats and the way they’ve been linked to the BDS motion, as Greenwood and Tassa suggest.
The duo’s assertion continues, “Forcing musicians to not carry out and denying individuals who need to hear them a possibility to take action is self-evidently a way of censorship and silencing. Intimidating venues into pulling our reveals gained’t assist obtain the peace and justice everybody within the Center East deserves.”
PACBI, which helped discovered the BDS motion, has argued in a string of statements that Greenwood and Tassa’s ties to Israel transcend cultural change. The marketing campaign to boycott their tour was prompted by a Tel Aviv live performance, in Could 2024, when the duo performed “on an evening that genocidal Israeli forces massacred displaced Palestinians of their tents in Rafah, burning them alive, only a brief drive away.” Greenwood, in a press release final yr, argued that BDS is “silencing Israeli artists for being born Jewish in Israel.”
Responding to at the moment’s assertion, PACBI famous that the duo lately carried out at Tel Aviv membership Barby, which, in 2014, handed out T-shirts to Israeli Protection Pressure troopers studying “Fuck you, we’re from Israel,” after the IDF’s massacre of Palestinians in Shejaiya. PACBI added that it’s calling for the boycott of “future reveals by Greenwood’s different initiatives, together with Radiohead, until they convincingly distance themselves, at a minimal, from his constant, shameful complicity in artwashing Israel’s genocide in Gaza.”
The file Greenwood and Tassa are touring—Jarak Qaribak, Arabic for Your Neighbour Is Your Buddy—is primarily an album of Arabic love songs, that includes singers from Syria, Lebanon, Kuwait, and Iraq, their very own assertion notes. Nour Freteikh, a Palestinian singer, additionally seems on the file, together with friends from Egypt, Dubai, and different Center Japanese international locations. Greenwood and Tassa say that whereas critics on the political proper say their music is “too inclusive, too conscious of the wealthy and exquisite range of Center Japanese tradition,” these on the left argue that they’re “solely enjoying it to absolve ourselves of our collective sins.” They proceed, “We dread the weaponisation of this cancellation by reactionary figures as a lot as we lament its celebration by some progressives.”
