The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) reiterates its longstanding call for the boycott of the Jerusalem International Oud Festival, to be held from 5-12th November 2026 in occupied Jerusalem. We also renew our common-sense 2024 and 2025 calls to boycott all live performances and commercial interests of festival participant Jonny Greenwood, including Radiohead concerts, due to his egregious individual complicity in artwashing Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza.
The festival appropriates Arab including Palestinian culture, presenting the oud, the quintessential instrument of our musical heritage, as part of apartheid Israel's settler-colonial culture. This erases the Indigenous Palestinian people who carry this heritage. It also whitewashes Israel's genocidal regime, which must be isolated and dismantled for the sake of humanity at large, just as apartheid South Africa was once isolated and shunned.
The organisation which runs the complicit festival, Confederation House, is funded by the genocidal Israeli government, the Jerusalem Municipality and the Jerusalem Foundation, which are all deeply involved in the ethnic cleansing of Indigenous Palestinian Jerusalemites. Israel calls this ethnic cleansing the “Judaization” of the occupied city. Israel’s illegal annexation and occupation of Jerusalem are war crimes under international law. The Jerusalem Foundation is directly complicit in the crimes of occupation and ethnic cleansing, including through supporting excavations in the so-called City of David, an illegal settler-colonial Israeli project in occupied East Jerusalem. The far-right settler organization Elad plays a key role in this project.
Alongside many partners, including the anti-colonial Israeli group Boycott from Within and the Indian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, PACBI has campaigned for the festival's boycott since at least 2011. After years of strategic BDS campaigning, Israeli cultural events at large are failing to attract any conscientious international artists.
We urge all international artists booked for this year's edition, including those invited from Greece, India, and Morocco, to follow the example of their colleagues and withdraw. The least they can do is not whitewash genocide and undermine the Palestinian struggle for freedom, justice, and equality by crossing its peaceful picket line.
In 1984, Enuga S. Reddy, director of the United Nations Centre Against Apartheid, wrote:
We have a list of people who have performed in [apartheid] South Africa because of ignorance of the situation or the lure of money or unconcern over racism. They need to be persuaded to stop entertaining apartheid, to stop profiting from apartheid money and to stop serving the propaganda purposes of the apartheid regime.
The same applies to those who now are knowingly artwashing Israel’s regime of genocide and apartheid. Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood, for instance, is set to open the festival on 5 November with Israeli musician Dudu Tassa. This will be the third time Greenwood crosses our picket line during Israel's genocide in Gaza, despite repeated Palestinian calls.
In May 2024, Greenwood performed in apartheid Tel Aviv with Tassa on the night that genocidal Israeli forces massacred displaced Palestinians in their tents in Rafah, burning them alive, a short drive away. Palestinians condemned this shameful artwashing of genocide and called for peaceful pressure on Radiohead to distance itself from it. The pair repeated their performance in Tel Aviv in March 2025.
Tassa has repeatedly entertained genocidal Israeli forces in between their massacres of Palestinians in Gaza, willingly acting as a cultural ambassador for Israel. In May 2025, following PACBI's call, Greenwood and Tassa's UK concerts were cancelled. Instead of ending his complicity, Greenwood presented himself as a victim, while Israel was killing Palestinian artists, journalists, and cultural workers in Gaza.
Greenwood claims to have no loyalty to the Israeli government. Yet he has agreed to headline a festival funded by its Ministry of Culture and its municipality in occupied Jerusalem, during a genocide that has killed more than 75,000 Palestinians in Gaza. Appropriating classic Arabic songs on a stage paid for by the state that is bombing, starving, and expelling the people of this region artwashes genocide.
We call on Palestinian and Arab musicians to boycott the Jerusalem International Oud Festival. We urge all artists to immediately withdraw to avoid harming our struggle and we urge supporters everywhere to take peaceful, creative, and strategic action: write to the festival's international guests, their agents and promoters, and spread this call far and wide.
We call on international festivals, venues, and promoters to adopt ethical programming and partnership policies in line with PACBI guidelines, and to join more than two thousand arts organisations and tens of thousands of musicians in endorsing and upholding the cultural boycott of Israel.
Boycott the Oud Festival! Boycott Jonny Greenwood’s live projects! Complicity must have consequences.