"Prick" is how some would describe Thom Yorke after he chided an audience member for their pro-Palestine comments at a concert last month, and that's exactly the word Roger Waters has chosen in his latest criticism of the Radiohead frontman.
In conversation with American journalist Abby Martin, Waters was asked about Yorke's failure to, at an audience member's request, "condemn the Israeli genocide of Gaza" on stage in Australia in October.
Waters admitted he was not surprised, and recalled to Martin 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 would deem that open letter "an extraordinary waste of energy" and argued that "playing in a country isn't the same as endorsing its government," while also finding time to write back to Waters.
"He sent me back a slightly snide kind of answer, trying to be funny and clever and whatever," Waters recalled. "So I wrote a reply but I showed it to somebody who knows [Yorke]. They said, 'Don't send that. That'll go way over his head — and also it'll upset him, 'cause you're suggesting that it might be the wrong thing to do [to play Tel Aviv] ... there's no way you need to put on kid gloves.
"I wrote him a sort of email that went, 'I'm sorry if you thought I was being confrontational' ... and 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!"
While Waters noted that their exchange went on quite a while longer, Martin asked how it ended. Simply, Waters offered, "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 [British filmmaker] 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," explaining, "There is no argument to be made. 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."
Waters has long been a prominent supporter of Palestine and the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel, and has also long had his anti-Zionist, anti-Israel stance conflated with antisemitism.
You can watch Martin and Waters discuss Yorke and Radiohead's stance on Palestine in the player below, around the 28-minute mark.