Palestinian artists ask Thom Yorke of Radiohead, "Can you hear us?" | BDS Movement

18.7.17

Palestinian artists ask Thom Yorke of Radiohead, "Can you hear us?" | BDS Movement: Our call to boycott came in response to decades of Israel's human rights violations, its apartheid policies, ongoing ethnic cleansing, home demolitions, the denial of refugee rights, the 10-year siege of Gaza and the illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank. Israel’s regime subjects us to fragmentation, to occupation, and settler-colonialism.

As Palestinian artists our freedoms of assembly and of expression, as well as our other human rights, are severely limited by Israel’s regime. We are forced to wait for hours at one of the many military checkpoints dissecting the occupied West Bank, unable to travel to rehearsals and performances, let alone international engagements. In Gaza, we are held under a decade-long siege, a blockade designed to keep us “on a diet”.

Generations of Palestinian families remain refugees from the Nakba, “catastrophe”, when in 1948, through a planned campaign of ethnic cleansing, Palestinians were removed from Palestine. Which brings us to the concert you have scheduled on the ruins of a Palestinian village, Jarisha. Most Palestinians could not attend your show of course, trapped within the brutal machine of Israel’s occupation, and living in refugee camps outside of historic Palestine, still denied entry to their homeland through Israel’s racist laws, which prevent us from exercising our fundamental right to return.