Radiohead sings against authoritarianism but refuses to condemn war on Gaza

Thom Yorke, the British lead singer and songwriter of alternative rock bank Radiohead, stormed off stage in Australia this week after a protester interrupted his solo performance to call out Israel’s war on Gaza and the mounting civilian death toll.

Yorke challenged him to “Come up on the f**king stage and say what you want to say… Don’t stand there like a coward.”

The man in the back of the crowd was then heard saying: “How many dead children will it take for you to condemn the genocide in Gaza?”

To which, Yorke responded: “OK, you do it, see you later then”, and walked off stage.

This was not the first time Yorke openly expressed disdain over pro-Palestine voices calling for his band to break the silence on Israel’s actions against Palestinians.

A similar incident happened in 2017, three years before the current war broke out, when protesters waved Palestinian flags at a Radiohead show in Scotland to call for the cancellation of the band’s scheduled concert in Tel Aviv.

At the time too, Yorke muttered into the microphone in contempt: “Some f**king people” and made an obscene middle-finger gesture.

Later, he defended his reaction, describing the protests as “an extraordinary waste of energy” and particularly offensive to guitarist Jonny Greenwood, who has an Israeli wife.

“Imagine how offensive that is for Jonny,” Yorke told the Rolling Stone magazine in 2017.

The irony isn’t lost on Radiohead fans who find deeper meaning in the band’s themes: a songwriter renowned for tracks that confront unchecked power and authoritarianism is now resisting calls to speak up against a state accused of genocide.

To them, this refusal is an evident contradiction —one that’s hard to reconcile with lyrics they know by heart.

And Radiohead didn’t always shy away from speaking for war victims. In 1995, the band wrote “Lucky” as a contribution to The Help Album, a charity record intended to support children affected by the Bosnian War—“some of the world’s most vulnerable”.

“Imagine making this haunting song and video to shed a sorrowful spotlight on an ongoing genocide, then, 30 years later, haughtily shutting down debate on an even bigger atrocity,” one user posted on X, referencing the song and the Australia incident.

Today, more women and children have been killed by the Israeli military in Gaza within a single year than in any other recent conflict, according to Oxfam.

Yet, the closest Yorke got to faulting the Israeli government was in the aftermath of the incident in 2017, when he said his band ‘doesn’t endorse Netanyahu any more than Trump’ and asserted “playing in a country isn’t the same as endorsing its government.”

That came after dozens of high-profile artists signed an open letter urging Radiohead to cancel their upcoming show in Israel, with famous figures such as former Pink Floyd frontman Roger Waters encouraging Yorke to rethink his position.

At that time too, Yorke didn’t hold back.

“It’s deeply distressing that they choose to, rather than engage with us personally, throw sh*t at us in public,” he said of the signatories of the letter.

“It’s deeply disrespectful to assume that we’re either being misinformed or that we’re so retarded we can’t make these decisions ourselves,” Yorke added—a response deemed “arrogant” by many at the time.

In “2 + 2 = 5,” the opening track to Radiohead’s Hail to the Thief (2003), Yorke sings, “Don’t question my authority or put me in a box,” critiquing propaganda and the distortion of truth by those in power.

Yet, when it comes to deciding what is worth boycotting, it seems Yorke’s own authority isn’t up for debate either.

“When international artists perform at Israeli cultural venues and institutions, they help to create the false impression that Israel is a ‘normal’ country like any other,” according to a statement by BDS.

The movement continues to call for the boycott of activities, agreements, or projects involving Israeli cultural institutions or its lobby groups “just as South African anti-apartheid activists had called on international artists to culturally boycott South Africa, its website reads.

“Those who are now hesitant to support an institutional, cultural boycott of Israel while having in the past endorsed a blanket cultural boycott against apartheid South Africa are hard pressed to explain this inconsistency.”