By Gabe Friedman/(JTA) – After dozens of high-profile artists, who advocate for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel, signed a letter in February urging Radiohead to cancel their upcoming concert in Tel Aviv, some might have assumed that the band would not respond to the criticism. After all, the British band’s lead singer, Thom Yorke, rarely gives interviews, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a particularly fraught issue to comment upon.

But oh, has Yorke responded. In an interview with Rolling Stone’s Andy Greene published June 2, Yorke fired back at his critics for assuming that the members of Radiohead are uninformed on the Israeli-Palestinian issue.

“I’ll be totally honest with you: this has been extremely upsetting. There’s an awful lot of people who don’t agree with the BDS movement, including us. I don’t agree with the cultural ban at all, along with J.K. Rowling, Noam Chomsky and a long list of others,” he said. “There are people I admire [who have been critical of the concert] like [English film director] Ken Loach, who I would never dream of telling where to work or what to do or think. … It’s deeply distressing that they choose to, rather than engage with us personally, throw s**t at us in public. 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. I thought it was patronizing in the extreme. It’s offensive.”

Yorke also pointed out that Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood is married to an Arab-Israeli woman – and is subsequently uniquely informed about the nuances of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Yorke added at the end of his statement that he is not a fan of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “Now if you’re talking about trying to make things progress in any society, if you create division, what do you get? You get f***ing Theresa May. You get [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu, you get f***ing Trump. That’s divisive.”