Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood is currently embroiled in controversy after the BDS Movement protested his collaboration with Israeli musician Dudu Tassa, resulting in two of his UK shows getting cancelled. Now, fellow Radiohead guitarist Ed O'Brien has offered his own take on the issue.
Today (May 8), O'Brien shared a post from the Instagram account @breakingthesilenceisrael — an account that amplifies the voices of Israelis protesting the country's genocide of Palestinian people. The graphic shared by O'Brien simply reads, "Stop Looking Away." (Other panels in the gallery include "Stop the Killing of Children" and "Stop the Ethnic Cleansing.")
O'Brien is a longtime advocate for a ceasefire in Gaza, and it's unclear if his message was intended as a direct response to Greenwood.
Intentional or not, the insistence to "Stop Looking Away" does offer a retort of sorts to Greenwood's statement this week: Greenwood accused those who forced the cancellation of his shows of "censorship and silencing," saying that "art exists above and beyond politics." While Greenwood advocated for encouraging a "common identity across borders in the Middle East" — a message not wholly dissimilar from that of the unity vouched for by @breakingthesilenceisrael — his statement notably lacked any mention of the country of Palestine, or of the genocide taking place there, or that his collaborator Tassa performed for soldiers from the Israel Defense Forces fighting in Gaza in 2023.
Radiohead's Thom Yorke has had his own controversies on the subject of Israel and Palestine. Last fall, he paused a solo show to respond to a pro-Palestine protester who called on him to condemn the genocide, saying, "Don't stand there like a coward, come here and say it. You want to piss on everybody's night?"