Roger Waters / Palestine Mixtape

Roger Waters: It's very hard to shine a light brightly enough that people go, oh, I get it. Yeah. And particularly if the leader of your great country is going, I don't want to hear anything. I'm not interested. I will be the greatest supporter of Israel, 3 million percent, that there's ever been, ever in the whole history of everything, whatever they do. I don't care.

Speaker 4: There's no political consequences for saying that, though. That's part of the problem. You can say that, and there's zero political consequences. But if you do talk about the Palestinian people and their rights and the plight of the Palestinians, then you are connected to Hamas. And then all of a sudden, you're connected to— this is a terrorist organization, and it doesn't matter about those people.

Roger Waters: Yeah.

Speaker 4: The narrative is, Support of Israel equals you're on the right side.

Roger Waters: Yeah.

Speaker 4: Yeah, regardless of how their policies impact individual human beings, through no fault of their own, just happen to be born Palestinian and been stuck in this apartheid state. And that's the other thing is that they, you know, it's very binary in that way. It's like you're either with Israel or you're with Hamas.

Roger Waters: Well, yeah, I know. I hear all of this just the same as you do.

Speaker 4: But they're just human beings.

Roger Waters: Well, they're also the democratically elected government of Gaza, Hamas. Okay? And there is an armed wing and whatever. But if you actually read international law at all or the Geneva Conventions, an occupied people have an absolute legal and moral right to resist the occupation. It's actually very— pretty depressing coming back here 3 years later and seeing that the political situation has changed very little. There are more settlements. There's been more grabbing of land. And it's actually quite depressing to witness. You know, when you stand in front of an edifice like this, whether it's here or Or, you know, outside a township in South Africa or in the Warsaw ghetto during the Second World War or in Berlin in the '60s and '70s. There's something— you know instinctively that this is wrong. This is wrong. This is a bad thing. This is wrong. This is not helping anybody, this thing. This is not here to stop Israelis being blown up on buses. It's here for other reasons. But it's not here for that reason. If it was here for that— If that's what the reason for this wall was, then what's it doing in the occupied territories surrounding settlements and cutting farmers off from their olive trees and so on and so forth? You know, if you could possibly make a case, if you felt that's the way you wanted to live your life, for building a wall around your country. Mr. Chairman, Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much. For receiving me at this moment of solidarity and crisis. I'm a musician, not a diplomat, and so I shall not waste this precious opportunity on the niceties of protocol. However, I will say that you must all be suffering from listening fatigue to a certain extent, so while I've been sitting there listening as well, I have been editing my rather long speech down to a rather shorter speech, but I believe the full text will be available to anybody who cares to read it at the end of this meeting. I appear before you as a representative of the Porth Russell Tribunal on Palestine, and in that capacity I am representing global civil society. By way of preamble, I should say my remarks here today are not personal or driven by prejudice or malice. I am looking only to shed some light on the predicament of a beleaguered people. The Russell Tribunal on Palestine was created to shed such light, to seek accountability for the violations of international law and the lack of United Nations resolve that prevent the Palestinian people from achieving their inalienable rights, especially the right of self-determination. One particular stimulus to our convening was the disturbing failure of the international community to implement and enforce the clear judgment of the International Court of Justice in 2004 contained in its advisory opinion on the Israeli wall, as requested by the UN. We met here in New York City 6 weeks ago on the 6th and 7th of October, having previously sent out invitations to all interested parties, and after listening to exhaustive testimony from many expert witnesses, and after careful deliberation, we arrived at the following judgments. We found that the State of Israel is guilty of a number of international crimes. 1, apartheid. The UN's International Covenant on the Suppression and Punishment of the crime of apartheid defines that crime as inhuman acts by any government that are committed for the purpose of establishing and maintaining dominations by one racial group of persons over any other racial group of persons and systematically oppressing them. This tribunal— this finding by the tribunal was endorsed earlier in the year by the HRC Committee for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination in Geneva after submissions by the tribunal made both orally and in writing. 2, ethnic cleansing. In this case, that crime includes the systematic eviction of much of the native Palestinian population by force since 1947-48. Collective punishment of the civilian population, explicitly prohibited by the Geneva Convention, Article 33. Israel has violated its obligation as occupying power throughout the occupied Palestinian territory, including the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem. Its most serious violations have occurred recently in Gaza, with the blockade and virtual imprisonment of the entire population The indiscriminate killing of Palestinians during the Israeli offensive Operation Cast Lead in 2008 and '09, and now the devastation wrought by the recent attack, Operation Pillar of Defense. As I speak, I can hear the tut-tutting of governmental and media tongues Trotting out the well-worn mantra of the apologists, but Hamas started it with their rocket attacks. Israel is only defending itself. Let us examine their argument. Did Hamas start it? When did it start? How we understand history is shaped by when we start the clock. If we start the clock at a moment when rockets are fired from Gaza into Israel on a certain afternoon, That is one history. If we start the clock earlier that morning, when a 13-year-old Palestinian boy was shot dead by Israeli soldiers as he played soccer on a Gaza field, history starts to look a little different. If we go back further, we see that since Operation Cast Lead, according to the Israeli human rights organization B'Tselem, 200 And 71 Palestinians were killed by Israeli attacks, and during the same period, not a single Israeli was killed. A good case can be made that it started in 1967 with the occupation of Gaza and the West Bank. This crisis in Gaza is a crisis rooted In occupation. Israel and its allies would contend that Gaza is no longer occupied. Really? The withdrawal of soldiers and settlers in 2005 changed the nature, not the existence, of occupation. Israel still controls Gaza's airspace, coastal waters, borders, land, economy, and lives. Gaza is still occupied. The people of Gaza, the 1.6 million Palestinians, half of them children under the age of 16, live in an open-air prison. That is the reality that underlies the current crisis. And until we not only understand that, but until you, Excellencies, your governments and your General Assembly take responsibility to end that occupation, we cannot even hope that that the current crisis is over. In October, on the last occasion jurors from the Russell Tribunal addressed this committee, we were assured that our representations and reports would be advanced on the floor of the General Assembly for general debate. If things go well today, we may hope to hold you, Excellencies, to that assurance. I have diverted briefly. Let me return to the Israeli violations which the Russell Tribunal identified. 4, contravention of the 4th Geneva Convention's prohibition on settlements, specifically Article 49. The settlements, all the settlements, are not simply an obstacle to peace; they are illegal. 5, use of illegal weapons. During Israel's Cast Lead operation 4 years ago, international human rights organizations documented Tel Aviv's use of white phosphorus in attacks on Gaza. Human Rights Watch found that, and I quote, Israel's repeated firing of white phosphorus shells over densely populated areas of Gaza during its recent military campaign was indiscriminate and is evidence of war crimes. White phosphorus burns at up to 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit. Imagine what happens when it comes into contact with the skin Yes. Of a child. Human Rights Watch called for Israel's senior commanders to be held accountable. But so far there has been no such accountability. There are more violations, Excellencies, but you know that. Your resolutions trace the history of Israeli violations. You regret, you deplore, you even condemn the violations. But when have your resolutions been implemented? It is not enough to deplore, condemn. What we need is for the United Nations, for you Excellencies, your governments, and the General Assembly in which you serve, to take seriously your responsibility to protect Palestinians living under occupation and facing the daily violation of their inalienable rights of self-determination and equality. The will of we the people of these United Nations is that all our brothers and sisters should be free to live in self-determination, that the oppressed should be released from their burden by being given recourse to the law, and that the oppressors should be called to account by that same law. In 1981, I wrote a song called The Gunner's Dream. It appeared on a Pink Floyd album, The Final Cut, and the song purports to express the dying dream of an RAF gunner as he plunges to his death from a stricken aircraft towards the corner of some foreign field. He dreams of the future for which he is giving his life. I quote, A place to stay, enough to eat, somewhere old heroes shuffle safely down the street. Where you can speak out loud about your doubts and fears. And what's more, no one ever disappears. You never hear their standard issue kicking in your door. You can relax on both sides of the tracks. And maniacs don't blow holes in bandsmen by remote control. And everyone has recourse to the law. And no one kills the children anymore. In 1982, And again in 1983, the General Assembly passed resolutions holding Israel accountable for its violations. Those resolutions called for a complete arms embargo on Israel. No such embargo has been imposed. Instead, it has fallen to global civil society to take the lead. Following a 2005 call from Palestinian civil society, social movements, activists, and increasingly church bodies and even some local government authorities around the world have created the campaign for boycott, divestment and sanctions. It aims, as many of you know, to bring nonviolent economic pressure to bear on Israel to force an end to its violations, an end to occupation and apartheid, an end to the denial of Palestinians' right to return and an end to Palestinian citizens of Israel being required to live as second-class citizens, discriminated against on racial grounds and subject to different laws than their Jewish compatriots. The BDS movement is gaining ground hand over fist. Just last week I was happy to write a letter of support to the student government of the University of California, Irvine, congratulating them on demanding that their university divest from companies that profit from the Israeli occupation. Also, last summer, I was in Pittsburgh to witness the Presbyterian Churches of the United States of America General Assembly vote on a resolution to divest from Motorola, Caterpillar, and Hewlett-Packard. This would have been unthinkable 10 years ago. To quote the great Bob Dylan, the times They are a-changing. Back to today. You, the members of the General Assembly, are about to have the opportunity to vote on changing Palestine's UN status to that of a non-member state status. Whilst not according full UK membership, it would provide UN recognition to Palestine as a state, and that, that would have the right to sign treaties.

Speaker 6: Yes.

Roger Waters: Crucially, including the Rome Treaty as a signatory to the International Criminal Court. This is a momentous occasion which was started here 13 months ago. It is one of those rare instances where you, Excellencies, can change the course and the face of history and at the same time reinforce one of the founding principles of the UN, the right to self-determination. The bid implicitly incorporates pre-'67 borders, includes the integrity of East Jerusalem, an autonomous Gaza, and the refugee diaspora. It is momentous because there are already over 132 members who have recognized Palestine as a state, and more are appearing every day. And now, just this week, Hamas has lent its support. I urge you to consider 2 points. Firstly, please resist pressure from any powerful government to coerce you into defeating or delaying this issue. Sadly, there is a history of coercion in this hallowed place. No government, however rich or powerful, should be allowed to use its financial or military muscle to set UN policy by bullying other states on this or any other issue. Secondly, do not take the statehood vote as the end of fulfilling your obligations. General Assembly responsibility goes far beyond UN technicalities. It must include real protection for Palestinians under occupation and real accountability for violations of the law. You have the power You do not use. You do not have to defer to or wait for the Security Council. In just a few months, we will commemorate the 10th anniversary of the killing of Rachel Corrie, the young peace activist killed by an Israeli soldier driving an armored Caterpillar bulldozer as she tried to protect the house of a pharmacist and his family in Rafah on Gaza's border. International activists like Rachel Corrie, Tom Herndl, and James Miller took the risks they did, and they and their families paid the ultimate price because the international community, your governments, and the United Nations itself had failed to protect the vulnerable Palestinian population living under this prolonged occupation. We are proud, though tears burn our eyes, of the work of these young activists and deeply moved by their sacrifice. But we are angry, too, that our governments and our international institutions, including the General Assembly, have failed to provide the protection that would make Rachel Corrie's sacrifice unnecessary. Also, let us not forget the thousands of courageous and anonymous Palestinians and their equally courageous Israeli brothers and sisters in arms. Boycott from within. Who protest peacefully on a weekly basis for the simple basic right to an ordinary human life.

Speaker 6: Boycott!

Roger Waters: The right to live in dignity and peace, to raise their families, to till the land, to build a just society, to travel abroad, to be free of occupation, to aspire to each and every human goal.

Speaker 6: Yes.

Roger Waters: Just like the rest of us. Speaking of the rest of us, I live here in New York City. We are a somewhat parochial group, we New Yorkers, to a large extent cut off by propaganda and privilege from the realities of the Palestinians' plight. Few of us understand that the government of the United States of America, particularly through its power of veto in the Security Council, protects Israel from the condemnation of the global civil society that I have the honor to represent here today. Even as bombs rained down on 1.6 million people in Gaza, the President of the United States of America reasserted his position that Israel has the right to defend itself. We all know the reach and power of Israel's military capability and the deadly effects of its actions. So what did President Obama mean? Did he mean that Israel has the right to indefinitely occupy the whole of the region? The Palestinians are an ancient, intelligent, cultured, hospitable, and generous people. And of course they have pride and will resist the occupation of their land and defend their women and children and their property to the best of their ability. Yes. Who would not? Would you? Would I? Would President Obama? One would hope so. It would be his duty. More than a generation ago, the General Assembly passed Resolution 2625, dealing with the principle of equal rights and self-determination. It recognized that when a people face quote, any forcible action depriving them of those rights. They have the right to, quote, actions against and resistance to such use of force. When the international community does not shoulder its responsibility to protect, Palestinians will shoulder that responsibility themselves. This is not to suggest that I support the launching of missiles. into Israel? I do not. The internationally recognized legal right of resistance means attacking any military target engaged in illegal occupation. But let us be clear, as we believe in the law as indispensable and even-handed, the launching of unguided rockets into Israel, where the most likely targets will be civilians, is not a legal form of resistance. It is wrong and it is to be condemned. Many civil society activists, including many Palestinians and Israelis, are committed to nonviolent resistance. The BDS movement, which has spread from Palestine civil society to activists around the world, is part of that nonviolent resistance and I support it wholeheartedly. But let us be clear. That the disparity of power and the reality of the occupation and the response of the occupied is in this reality— is the reality we face unless we find recourse in international law and hold all parties to it. In the meantime, let me try to dial back the rhetoric a little and address the Israel has the right to defend itself claim. From a legal and historical perspective. This won't take long. Ex injuria non oritur jus. A legal right or entitlement cannot arise from injustice. If we truly oppose all violence, whether by the occupier or violent resistance by the occupied, we must aim to end the root causes of violence. In this conflict, that means ending Israel's occupation, colonization, ethnic cleansing, and the denial of the right to self-determination and other inalienable rights that the Palestinian people is entitled to according to the UN Charter and other tenets of international law. So to the future. Hamas, having dropped its original demand for Israel to be dismantled, in the run-up to the elections, was democratically elected in January 2006 in elections deemed free and fair by every international observer present, including former US President Jimmy Carter. The leaders of Hamas have made their position clear over and over again. It is this: Hamas is open to permanent peace with Israel if there is total withdrawal To the 1967 borders, 22% of historic Palestine, and the arrangement is supported by referendum of all Palestinians living under occupation. I know you all know this, but where I live, they don't know this. They don't know that that is the position of Hamas. So I'm telling them. Mr. Chairman, Excellencies, friends, we are all here for the same reason. We are all committed to human rights, international law, the centrality of the United Nations, and equality for all, including for Palestinians. We are all attending this meeting on the 29th of November that marks the UN's International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People. But it seems to me our commemoration of this day is not enough. So what else to do? The battleground is here at the headquarters of the United Nations and simultaneously in the middle of New York City with access to the media. The battle is two-pronged. One, to continue the work of informing the people of the United States of America about the reality of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and most especially about the role of their government The host country of the United Nations using their tax dollars to fund and enable Israel's violations. 2, just as importantly, we must address finally serious reform of the UN. The UN needs to embrace a new democracy. The veto must be rethought or the UN might die. The use of the veto as a strategic political tool by one or other of the permanent members of the Security Council has become outmoded. The system is too open to abuse. The blanket protection afforded to Israel by the United States' use of the veto is but one example of such abuse. I urge you, the General Assembly, to collectively work towards wresting the power back to the people in order to facilitate progress towards a more democratic body, better able to pursue the high aspirations of this great institution, to represent the will of the peoples of these great United Nations. You, the General Assembly, represent the largest most democratic component of the United Nations. The United States and China and France and Russia and the UK have no veto here. What is needed is political will. You can make decisions and take actions that Security Council cannot or will not. The United Nations Charter begins with the words, we, Yes. The peoples of these United Nations, not we the governments. I urge you on behalf of the people of your countries, on behalf of the people of all countries, in fact on behalf of all the peoples of this, our shared Earth, to act. Seize this historic moment. And support the vote today for Palestinian enhanced observer statehood status as a step towards full membership. Where to start? Probably BDS. Let's get straight to BDS. That is the important thing at the moment. BDS. You know, every gig that I've done so far in Canada— I've done a few, done 10 or so— at the end of each gig, I say that the many things that I like about this great country And one of them is the fact that Canada does not have a nuclear weapon. And people are by and large really happy about that. And so you should be. So, yeah, BDS. It's not that long ago, 11 years ago, I— forgive me, those of you who've heard this story, because I've been asked to repeat it, so I will.

Speaker 6: Thank you.

Roger Waters: I was booked to do a gig in Tel Aviv in Israel. I knew nothing about anything. Well, that's not strictly true, but anyway, I accepted to do this gig at Hayekan Park, and I started getting emails from Palestinians and others suggesting that that might be a bad idea because of this very newly— new movement started by Palestinian civil society called BDS. And they tried to prevail upon me to cancel the gig. I talked to a number of different people, but almost immediately got put in touch with the right guy, who was Omar Barghouti, who's become a close friend of mine in the intervening years. And I did cancel that gig, and— but as an act of compromise, I moved the show that I was doing to an agricultural community halfway between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem called Wahat al-Salam, also known as Neve Shalom, where they grow chickpeas and there are Jewish people living there and Arab people living there and Christians and all sorts of people, and all their children go to school together and they—

Speaker 7: Together.

Roger Waters: So it's a beautiful experiment in how the world might look if people weren't so fixated on all the things of which we disapprove. It was an amazing success. We had 60,000 young people, nearly all young, came to the gig. Israelis, of course, because— I hadn't really figured this out at the time, but Nobody else can come to a gig because they're not allowed to travel around.

Speaker 8: No.

Roger Waters: So, and it was a huge success, and at the end there were standing ovations and blah, blah, blah, until I sort of, I said, by the way, just bear with me a minute. And I said to them, I have to say this to you guys. Thank you so much, blah, blah, blah. You are the generation of young Israelis who must make Make peace with your neighbors and put an end to all this fighting and, you know, carnage, and start figuring out how to live together. And it went— you could have heard a pin drop. They went from, rah! To, what the fuck's he talking about? You know, it became quite clear that they were— they did not understand what I was saying at all. Which was shocking to me. It was shocking beyond anything I could imagine, you know. So crestfallen, I retreated, and I went back the next year and spent, I don't know, a week or 10 days there, shown around by a lady who worked for UNRWA called Allegra Pacheo. And we went all over the West Bank and all— we were up to Jenin and talked to lots of people and stayed with people.

Speaker 9: Wow.

Roger Waters: Back down the Jordan Valley. I did not, sadly, go to Gaza, but I went everywhere else, I think. And it was shocking just to be there and see it. It was shocking. And Allegra was pointing out the outposts of the settlements and the settlements themselves and explaining to me the system of military occupation that was going on. So— And I remember thinking, as we passed through checkpoint after checkpoint after checkpoint after checkpoint— we, by the way, in UN vehicles, British passports or American or whatever— we were treated with absolute disdain, brutal disdain, by the young Israeli border guards. And I remember thinking to myself, if it's like this for me, a visiting foreigner—

Speaker 6: Yeah.

Roger Waters: You know, what must it be like for the people who are living under this occupation? It must be unbearable. So that was the beginning. So since then, I've sort of tried to open my big mouth as often as I can, and it's been a long, quite trying journey. Difficult road, not nearly as hard and trying, obviously, as living under occupation, but— so I know the opposition quite well. I know the depths to which they will stoop in order to blacken my name. But it's not really— the blackening of my name is really just one more way of obscuring the truth. That's right. The thing that they want the least of all possible things to happen is this. They want to stop public discourse where people actually tell the truth about what happened in '47 and '48, and what happened before then, and what happened since then, and what happened in '67, and what happened in '73, and what is happening now. They don't want anyone to know about that. And by and large, they've succeeded south of the border here in the United States.

Speaker 9: Yes.

Roger Waters: In the United States, people are kind of, duh, you know, they don't know. They're supremely ignorant about it. But, and here's the good thing, people like yourself, Independent Jewish Voices, Jewish Voices for Peace, have organized and rallied people, and slowly, slowly, slowly over the years, the demographics have changed. And so if you look at polls now, now of young Jewish people particularly, uh, you find that they are no longer, um, looking at this situation with— and not seeing anything. They are seeing things, and they're saying to themselves, and they're saying to other people as well, they're saying, no, this is not what Judaism is about. This is not my religion. This does not represent the way I feel about the earth and about the Almighty, if there is one, or any of that. It's completely antipathetic to that. It goes against everything that I believe in with my heart. I'm a human being. I am humane. And I do not want my people or anybody who pretends or purports to represent me and my feelings to behave like this. And that's remarkable. Well, it's not remarkable. It's what you would hope and expect out of us. Yes. But it's happening, and it lightens my heart every time I hear somebody speak out. It's great. Thank you.

Speaker 6: Yes, this is not the life we want. All right.

Speaker 9: I'll ask the next one. Your music has always been concerned with issues of power and issues of justice. What— but you still received a lot of criticism, even from long-term fans, who say that you should separate art and politics, music and politics. How would you respond to that?

Roger Waters: That's just dumb. It's quite clearly supremely dumb, and it's just another method of the lobby trying to persuade people that this is an aberration. No, this is not an aberration. Should Picasso not have painted Guernica? Or anything. I mean, you could come up with a million examples, you know. But next. Okay. All right.

Speaker 9: So my next question is sort of Sort of connected, I'd like to ask you about solidarity more broadly. So you've dedicated much of your life to speaking up against injustices, and particularly injustices that don't necessarily impact you yourself. You've used your privilege to highlight injustice around the world. So could you speak a little to the idea of solidarity with people and with movements that don't directly impact you?

Roger Waters: Well, Where to start? When I was a kid, 5 or 6 years old, my mother was a schoolteacher in Cambridge in England, and she was very left-wing. She was a card-carrying member of the Communist Party. My father had just been killed in the war fighting the fascists in Italy, and in the evenings, my mother was very political. What did she read to you? politically active. And so she was a member of something called the British China People's Friendship Association.

Speaker 6: Hmm.

Roger Waters: So she would drag me and my big brother, Jon, these 2 little kids, off with her in the evening, and we would go and watch very grainy, flickery, black and white films about the heroic march of of Mao Zedong and the Chinese Liberation Army, and blah, blah, blah, blah. And we would sit on the floor and think. And we nearly always did that at the Friends Meeting House, because they were the only people that would have us, or have my mother, and things like that. I'll never forget my mother one day saying to me, she said, you know, darling, you know I'm an atheist. You know I don't believe in God. Blah, blah, blah. I said, and I said, why is she telling me this? Yeah, I know that. But she was talking about the Friends Meeting House, and she said, you know, the Quakers, I can't subscribe to their attachment, you know, to their prophet. I just can't. But they are very, very good people. And that went straight into my heart. I was 6 years old or something. And I thought, what a brilliant idea that you can be a very, very good person, whatever your faith or lack of it. It's completely irrelevant to the way you attach your heart to— in the ways that it can empathize with other human beings in the world. So that's sort of fundamental to the way I feel about things, because it is in the attachment of our hearts to others that we derive joy in our lives, in my view. That's what we— that's what gives us joy. And in consequence, that becomes one of the things that we strive for. We certainly, as we get older, we learn that things ain't gonna do it, you know, and not empathizing with people is not gonna do it, you know, and flying thousands of miles to Kill people with drone strikes in foreign countries is not going to do it. It doesn't make us feel any. It brings us nothing but emotional ruin. So that's why. Restiamo umani, you know. There's that guy, that Italian guy who died in Gaza a few years ago. I can never remember his name, but they made a movie called Restiamo umani. And they got a few people to read patches of it. Actually, I'm— from here, I'm going somewhere to Australia and New Zealand things, then we're going to Europe. And that's gonna be part of the way of publicizing my tour, which is called Us and Them. I inevitably on my tours carry a big inflatable pig around with me. And we're gonna fly these pigs over power stations in different towns in Europe with either Restiamo Umani or the equivalent in whatever the local language is, because it's a very significant and important and broad and embracing slogan.

Speaker 6: That's wonderful. You're right about the things that do and don't bring us joy, but one of the things that does, course, is music. So it's not so far from music to politics, I think. Solidarity, communion with others, doing something together, right?

Roger Waters: Yeah. We could have a sing-song later.

Speaker 6: I was going to ask you about BDS, but you've already answered that question.

Roger Waters: About what?

Speaker 6: BDS.

Roger Waters: Oh.

Speaker 6: Do you think it's an effective way BDS. Yeah.

Roger Waters: It's the only thing that I've seen that's had any effect at all. They're so in bed with the government south of here that really there's little that anybody can do except shine a light, publicize, tell the truth, tell the truth, tell the truth, Keep telling the truth, tell the truth, because inevitably they have to keep telling the lie, tell the lie, tell the lie, tell the lie. And it's in these days that we live in where propaganda is more important, or has been seen to be more important, than what is or isn't the truth of the matter. That's— it's super important that BDS gets to Shine the light. You tell the big lie often enough and it becomes the truth. This is standard, you know, standard procedure for somebody who wants to persuade a public that something which is not true is true. Just repeat it. That's what advertising is.

Speaker 6: True that. Over to you.

Speaker 9: So I think the next question I wanted to sort of follow on with that and talk about why Despite its efficacy, and perhaps because of its efficacy as a political tool, BDS continues to be demonized. So I'm not sure if you've had a chance to meet our prime minister here in Canada during your time, but Justin Trudeau, who's generally constructed as the great hope from the north and the anti-Trump, the progressive anti-Trump, he also tweeted in 2015, a few months before he became prime minister, He tweeted that the BDS movement, like Israeli apartheid week, has no place on Canadian campuses.

Roger Waters: I think I've just figured out who you're talking about. You're talking about Justin Trudeau, right?

Speaker 6: That's right. Yes.

Roger Waters: Sorry. Okay.

Speaker 9: Yes, the great hope from the north, yes. So he went on to tweet that he was disappointed and hashtag enough is enough. So what advice would you give to What advice would you give to student activists who are working towards passing BDS resolutions on their campuses?

Roger Waters: Well, you know, that recent EKOS poll was extremely illuminating, and I think those activists should be holding up signs that say, hey, Trudeau, wake up and smell the roses. What you're saying is nonsense, and the facts are that most of your constituents know that what you're saying is nonsense. And most of your constituents would like to support the BDS movement. Most Canadians think that Canada itself should be applying sanctions to the state of Israel in order to bring it in line with international law and general basic understood notions of human rights that have existed since the Hague Convention, never mind the Geneva Conventions or the— Human Rights Charter. General Declaration of Human Rights in Paris in 1948. So, so there, so there, your government is, you know, yes, last night in Edmonton, just after I said, I'm really happy you don't have a nuclear weapon, I say that as a sort of a bit of a theatrical trick because I'm just about to sing the song Mother, which is a song of mine, the first line of which is, Mother, do you think they'll drop the bomb?

Speaker 6: Oh.

Roger Waters: And the audience responded beautifully to that, and I've entirely forgotten what point I was gonna make.

Speaker 9: Sorry.

Roger Waters: It may well come back to me.

Speaker 4: Okay.

Roger Waters: But hang on, we were talking about Trudeau. Oh, I know what it was. It's come back. The second verse goes, rather should I run for president, And then the second line in the second verse is, Mother, should I trust the government? And I was going, no, for exactly that reason. Maybe Trudeau is a liberal. Who knows? We'll never know. You never find out, you know, what the animal is wearing under its skin until it's actually in power. And then you start to find out.

Speaker 9: Mm-hmm.

Roger Waters: So, you know, if somebody wrote a letter to Trudeau and suggested that he even looked at the polls of what Canadian citizens think and thought, maybe I should look into this and find out whether I'm just repeating the million times repeated lie that the Israeli government hope people believe.

Speaker 8: Yeah.

Roger Waters: will in the end accept as the truth. You know, we're a tiny little democracy, we're the only democracy in the Middle East, we have to do this to protect ourselves, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So they should be looking at this, and it's still a mystery to me why they're not, and particularly why he's not.

Speaker 9: Right.

Roger Waters: Despite there being a lot of polls to the effect that Canadians on the whole support What is it? I mean, I don't really— I still don't really get it. I don't really get why people cannot look squarely at the truth of what is happening in the occupied territories, as we call them, in Palestine. What's happening in the occupied territories?

Speaker 7: Yes.

Roger Waters: And it's also called— the regime that is operated there is called apartheid.

Speaker 6: Apartheid, yes.

Roger Waters: That is what's being operated there.

Speaker 6: Right.

Roger Waters: You've no idea how many Musicians in the United States I've approached saying, oi, weren't you the bloke who wrote the song about we ain't gonna play in Sun City and whatever?

Speaker 6: Yeah.

Roger Waters: Well, don't you think it's time we did We Ain't Gonna Play in Tel Aviv? You know, let's get— why don't we use the old recording? Ooh, that's a much more complicated question.

Speaker 6: Really?

Roger Waters: No, it's not. It's not. It's really, really simple. But it's clouded by all kinds of other issues.

Speaker 6: Yes. Yes, it is.

Speaker 9: So the next question I think we wanted to ask you was about the documentary that you've just narrated, The Occupation of the American Mind.

Roger Waters: Yeah.

Speaker 9: So the producer of that documentary, Sajjali, has many connections to Vancouver, one of which is that Sajjali did his PhD here at Simon Fraser University, at the university here. So the question we wanted to ask you is if you could tell us a little bit about the project and about your connection with the project.

Roger Waters: I was in eastern Long Island, pottering about in me bare feet, and Satt rolled up one day. He'd sent me some emails, would you narrate this thing? I said yeah. So he boshed up with 3 or 4 people and gave me some text. And I read it. That's it. Obviously, I watched it, you know.

Speaker 6: Right.

Roger Waters: And I think it's a very coherent and important piece. And it is significant that they still haven't had a showing in the United States of America. Well, we had one in UCLA, which was great. And we had another one— these are the ones I went to. We had another one in Mexico City. About a year ago, and there was one at the Palestinian Film Festival in Chicago, and I think there was one at— did they show it at TIFF, the Palestinian TIFF in Toronto? I'm not sure. But that's it. Nobody mainstream will show it. You can't— you cannot get the movie shown. You can't find it on HBO or Netflix or anywhere. It's completely suppressed. So it's really— it's kind of Significant and also deeply depressing that a film that is about the suppression of the other narrative about Israel-Palestine is itself suppressed completely, and it's almost impossible to get it shown.

Speaker 6: Yes. Good. You seem like someone who was born with a keen sense of social justice. I mean, I love the story about your mother, but I think you probably have this innate sense. Maybe all kids do, I don't know. But do you have any ideas about how to awaken that sense in young people who don't seem born with it?

Roger Waters: Well, you know, I'm famous for having written the lines, we don't need no education. Obviously. We need nothing more. Education for our children is the most important thing that we could subscribe to, and we should be spending as much money on it. Every single child that appears in the world, we should offer them every opportunity to open their minds in every way possible and to learn everything that there is to learn, or that they're capable of learning. What we tend to do is propagandize them from when they're very, very young and teach them to be good little something or other.

Speaker 6: Another great line.

Roger Waters: I have to go back to my mother. My mother once said to me— and this is in a movie that that bloke down there and I made together years ago. And at the beginning of the movie, it's me typing on a typewriter. And the first line is, I remember my mother saying to me one day, of course, darling, if the Germans had won the war, they'd have killed me because I was a communist, but they'd have probably kept you alive and turned you into a good little Nazi. Now that is chilling, because they probably would have done. You get a kid young enough, you can get them to be almost anything that you want. So all of this spreading of light is absolutely the most precious gift that we can give our children. So that they see things, they get to question everything. They get to question what we believe. They get to look at everything. They get to be allowed to make the connections between what gives them joy and what doesn't. And that's a risk that we have to take, you know.

Speaker 6: Wonderful.

Speaker 9: Wonderful.

Roger Waters: Thank you.

Speaker 9: Okay, so maybe we'll switch a little bit and talk about music a little bit. I wanted to ask you specifically about the song Wait for Her from your latest album, your newest album. I found it deeply moving and one of the most beautiful, sensual, grown-up love songs that I've heard ever. And I know it's adapted or inspired by a Mahmoud Darwish So I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit more about the song and its connection to the Darwish.

Roger Waters: No, it's private. Well, I probably could tell you some things that are not— I know what it's about now, but my notion is this, because it's put— there are 3 bits. There's Wait for Her, And then there's another song called Oceans Apart.

Speaker 6: Mm-hmm.

Roger Waters: And then there's the final song. But basically the idea is that the Dawish poem upon which the first bit is based, which is his take on parts of the Kama Sutra, is just about falling in love. And it's just about passion, the extraordinary intensity of that thing that can happen. If you're really lucky, maybe once in a lifetime, you might experience it. And my view is that if you do, whatever happens to that bit, you can use the experience as a transcendental moment in order for you to find parts in your heart that can be be opened, not just to that man or woman or whoever it might have been, but to everybody else and to everything else, so that you can use it as a transcendental moment. And that's what I do in this, because I believe it happened to me not that long ago. So I talk about how when I laid eyes on you, when I first met you, whatever, part of me died. And then the song says, The part that is devious, mischievous, blah, blah, blah. And it lists everything negative that I could think, not just about me, but about aspects of society and others and things. And says that that part died. That part. That's the bit that wants to engage in drone warfare. That's the bit that wants to cut the heads off little girls in Saudi Arabia because they were having a dance in somebody's apartment. That's the bit that wants to You know, that's the bit that is symptomatic of everything that is evil in the hearts of men. And that— if that part is allowed to die, then what you have left is all the rest, which is by and large is kind of good. And then at the end of the song, I say, bring me a bowl to bathe her feet in. Bring me my final cigarette. It would be better by far to die in her arms than to linger in a lifetime of regret. So what I'm saying, well, it's pretty— it's quite easy to understand, you know. You either embrace love in your life or you don't, and if you don't, you're a beggar for the rest of your life.

Speaker 6: My question has to do with another song. I have a question for you from that record, and it's The Last Refugee. I framed it as the way your politics is expressed in your work, because I think that love, music, and politics are closely allied. They're 3 sources of passion. that nourish us forever if we do them right. In The Last Refugee, the bitterly ironic lyric juxtaposes a New Year's Eve broadcast— this is— I'm talking about the video now— with a destitute woman and her memories of her child. Can you talk about how you came to write that?

Roger Waters: I don't think I can, but I could sit here quietly for a few minutes and see if I could remember what the seeds were. We're bombarded with images of people being driven from their homes.

Speaker 9: Yes.

Roger Waters: Constantly. If we're active in this work with BDS, We never move far from the key, the right of return, the idea that we've been driven from our homes, from our ancestral land, by an evil force. And so we— so you never get far from the idea of how appalling that must feel. And then when we see, you know, the kid on the beach in Turkey or the people drowning in the Mediterranean, All the Syrian who are fleeing Africa, or all the refugees leaving Syria and other places because we have made them impossible to live in.

Speaker 7: No.

Roger Waters: You know, put me up against the wall and fucking shoot me, but it's not Bashar al-Assad who's done it. We have done it. If they'd been left alone to figure it out for themselves, they would have had problems.

Speaker 8: Thank you.

Roger Waters: So we do that. So we do that. So, and it tears your heart out just to see it. It makes me very emotional even to talk about it because I live the cushiest life that you could possibly imagine, you know. So to imagine being cold and hungry and destitute and hopeless and not knowing where you're going to get your next meal or where you're going the next or where you— how you're gonna look after your children or whatever. It's incomprehensible for me. I try to understand it, but I know that I will never actually know their anguish. Well, maybe I will. You never know. Anything can happen.

Speaker 6: Inshallah.

Roger Waters: But so you can only think politically when you see the forces of the corporate organizing themselves. With supremely damaged and demented right-wing elements of political parties, which is, you know, the places that— that's where the Hitlers come from, is they come from that extreme fringe of people who feel so badly about themselves that they can't think of anything to do really except gather others of like Like-minded pain and agony around themselves and lash out at somebody else in order to make them feel less. I could be wrong. Thank you. So, you know, the plight of the refugees is huge, and yet it's a problem that is going to increase, if it is a problem. And we have— we in the rich countries, before we start sharing our wealth with the poor countries in a more general way, have an absolute responsibility to welcome these people into our communities and to assimilate them and to understand that in any future that's going to be worth living, we're going to have to accept the idea Cosmopolitan societies where people of different ethnicities and, and faiths and colors and all the rest live cheek by jowl and enjoy the richness of each other's cultures. And so—

Speaker 9: And All right. So I think the next question we wanted to ask was about your experience of living in the US, which you have done for a long time now. So in the last couple years, you've had a front row seat to the rise of the normalization of bigotry, the rise of fascism, the rise of what we might call Trumpism. So we were gonna ask you what your perspective is As an insider and an outsider to this ongoing nightmare south of the border, south of our border, how do you think they got there?

Roger Waters: Well, my view is— and my view is that the rise of Donald Trump specifically is actually a I think it's a symptom of something that's been going on in the United States and across much of the rest of the world for the last 150 years, at least. Yeah. You know, it's called consumerism, and it has become— it's the altar that we all— well, I don't, but that society bows down to. And capitalism as an idea has been completely accepted. And so, once that happens, you— the 2 things happen. Well, more than that, but 2 big things happen. One is that you— it is absolutely essential that you don't educate people. You have to keep people really dumb or they would not stand for it. They would reject the idea that—

Speaker 4: That's right.

Roger Waters: Actually, what they really need is the i7. And go, I don't need an i7, you know, what I need is to talk to my neighbor. And there, there's a lot of research and a lot of books written about all of this stuff and so on and so forth. Um, what am I trying to say? They've accepted a system that divides us one from another, that encourages us to to stay alone and encourages us to compete with one another, and encourages us to compete with one another in a way that produces winners and losers. What Trump loves, loves, loves, loves the idea, I won, I won. He thinks people give a shit.

Speaker 9: I won.

Roger Waters: You know, he thinks that people admire him because he won. Donald, you know, wake up, brother. People do not admire you. They think you're a complete schmuck, and they're right.

Speaker 9: Mm-hmm.

Roger Waters: You know, except for this— you know, if he has a base, which I'm perfectly happy to believe that he does, You know, it's people with kind of— I nearly said guns and tattoos. I've got nothing against tattoos, by the way. But he encourages the rise of this crypto-fascism that isn't anymore. It's out front. In Louisville, they were marching in the street with torches, unconfronted by any law enforcement. Right. Or by our society, by what we might want people to do if they saw that. They were encouraged. And then obviously he went on to encourage them. He sees it as a way forward in his political career, I believe.

Speaker 6: Mm-hmm.

Roger Waters: Which just shows how crippled he is. But, you know, you could say, what can you do about this? What can anybody do about this on a broader political level? I think if you live in the United States, it's a long, hard, slow road up a rocky path to the understanding that your political system is completely broken, that Congress is sold to the highest bidder, and that you no longer have a democracy, and you haven't had one for 100 years, and you're never going to get one unless you stand up and do something about it. Sorry, I went a bit radical there for a minute.

Speaker 9: It's all good. What would you say has been the role of the corporate mainstream media in facilitating or enabling or creating the monster that exists now?

Roger Waters: Well, if you think— when was the Eisenhower speech? '61, his military-industrial complex speech. He was— I think he was sincere, and he was clearly right, and nobody took any notice. And it's happened. And now, whatever that is, and whoever controls it, however much it has to do with the Project for the New American Century, and with Wolfowitz and Cheney, and— And the CIA. Cheney and Rumsfeld and all their awful spawn and Blair and blah, blah, blah. We will never know. We will never know how deep it goes. This stuff is, you know, is the depths of it, I believe to be unplumbable. But nevertheless, as a general experience of living, you can see that it is inviolate because there is no political method for getting at it.

Speaker 6: Right.

Roger Waters: It will go on trundling on and on until— I've no idea when, how, why, what. Maybe things just have to get much, much worse. Maybe the divide between rich and poor has to get even greater. Maybe nothing will happen until all the corporations are existing in offshore entities where they don't pay any tax. That's right. They have no responsibility to society of any kind, and they can just go on, and the people who own them getting richer and richer and richer. And they can do a lot of their getting richer by making Lockheed and Boeing and Raytheon and the other weapons manufacturers bigger and bigger and bigger. And so they can go on going around the world blowing up brown people just to make money, simply to make money for no other reason.

Speaker 6: Right.

Roger Waters: Yeah. I don't know. And maybe at some point there will be a huge conflagration. The problem is that if you get rid of Trump, you get Mike Pence, and that's what he wants. He is waiting for the rapture. I mean, these people are crazy. They are crazy. They're super crazy. I don't know. I can't— I'm much better talking about love. Thank you.

Speaker 9: So this would be a good way to segue to my last question, which is about hope. So this is obviously a very— it's been a devastating couple years. There's a lot of, I think, fatigue among activists, among people who care about justice, with the rise of nativism, not just in the US but across Europe. Europe and around the world. How do you find hope? What would you say to inspire us to continue?

Roger Waters: You know, I am— 12 years ago, maybe more. No, a lot more. Hang on. '89, '99, 2000. 28 years ago. Isn't that scary?

Speaker 6: Yes, yes.

Roger Waters: 28 years ago, I wrote an opera. About the French Revolution based on the libretto of a very good friend of mine, a Frenchman called Étienne Rodégil. And after I'd written the music, and I wrote a translation in English and blah blah blah, and the project goes on, I'm happy to say. We're hoping to take it back to France next year or the year after. Anyway, it's called Ça ira. Future tense of sava, that will be. But I subtitled it There Is Hope, which is why I bring it up now. And one morning when we were working on the recordings and adding some new lyrics that Etienne had written, we were walking down 54th Street towards Sony Studios one morning, and Etienne was an alcoholic, and so we had to stop so he could have his first And he could have his first quadruple shot of famous grouse, and I could have a cup of coffee. And we did, and we were sitting there, and he was sitting in the sunshine smoking the first of about 500 Benson Hedges that he would smoke that day. He was one of those beautiful, massive grey hair, incredibly brilliant intellectual French Catalans, who, if we get to meet one of them in our life, we're very lucky. Anyway, he was there, and I— we were sitting there, and I said something to him, and he said this to me, and I wrote it down on a piece of paper. I still have it in my hotel room. I carry it everywhere. I used to carry it in my back pocket, but it became wrinkled, and I thought I was going to lose it. He said— he looked at me, and he went, I was here, yeah. I felt something, and perhaps I was not alone. I mean, I know it takes a while to sink in, but I— when he said that to me, I thought, yeah, well, if that's what you talk about when you're singing On 54th Street in the weak winter sunshine at 10 o'clock in the morning, drinking yourself— drinking and smoking yourself to death. If you're attached to that idea of, was I alone or not, there is hope for the rest of us if even one person is doing that, sitting in the street. That's my view anyway. That's where hope resides, in the fact that human beings are beautiful and interesting And capable of philosophizing and capable of empathy and capable of love and capable of thought and capable of connection and capable of community. That gives me hope. You are going to entertain the people who shot the feet off Palestinian footballers.

Speaker 6: Yeah.

Roger Waters: Yeah, there's 2 kids, 18-year-olds, that had been to the local football stadium pitch to train, dreamed of playing at some point for Palestine, and some IDF soldiers decided to shoot. They shot one kid 7 times in one foot and 4 times in the other. So obviously they'll never play soccer, but they'll— and they'll never walk again. Oh, you know, I'm a musician, I just wanna play I don't want Roger Waters bullying me.

Speaker 7: What?

Roger Waters: They're shooting the fucking feet off 18-year-olds who want to play soccer! Don't talk to me about your freedom of speech. I mean, I do care about it passionately, but I don't have to live there. I'm not a Palestinian. I don't get my door kicked in every night by whoever wants to. In Palestine, this happens to people constantly, and even to children. Do we believe in law or not? Do we consider that human beings, individual human beings, have rights? Israelis have been time-wasting since 1948. They pretended that they were going to go along with the U.N. mandate that there should be 2 states, if they were having a state, that there should be a Palestinian state as well. But they never had any intention of doing that. of not taking over the whole thing. From 1948 on, they have been systematically making life on the earth that is Palestine intolerable for the indigenous people in an attempt to drive them into neighbouring countries, into refugee camps, so that they can take over the whole thing. And I mean, At least now they're sort of admitting it, because, you know, it's like it was so obvious for so many years. But it's almost impossible for Netanyahu now to go and say the same thing again and again without kind of tittering up his sleeve. All you people in this room, your efforts are not in vain. And I'm seeing it in the United States. It's kind of— Barely perceptible on the surface because the mainstream media will not report it. But I speak to lots of people and I hear it, and certainly in the Jewish community in the United States of America, support for Israel and its appalling colonialist policies and its racism and apartheid, the support for them is diminishing at a great rate, particularly amongst the young. Because this is a global effort, and it is really beginning to gain some purchase. And that makes me really happy. Ordinary people standing shoulder to shoulder with other ordinary people, who may live 10,000 miles away, but who nevertheless we support and have sympathy with their predicament. And that is what makes us human.

Speaker 8: Not backing down. Israel, Free Speech and the Battle for Palestinian Human Rights. That's the title of the panel set to take place Saturday at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. 3 anonymous UMass students filed a lawsuit to stop the event, claiming they'll, quote, suffer irreparable harm if it takes place. But Judge Robert Ullman ruled on Thursday the event can proceed, saying, quote, there's nothing that comes even close to a threat of harm or incitement to violence or lawlessness. Free speech is a right. Meanwhile, the university has backed the event, despite the protests, saying it's committed to the principles of free speech and academic freedom. So, we're joined right now by Pink Floyd founder Roger Waters, who was one of the participants in that event. Welcome to Democracy Now!

Speaker 4: Thank you.

Speaker 8: And talk about why you're doing this on Saturday and the significance of the court ruling.

Roger Waters: Well, Sa' asked me to come to his university to be on this panel. And I'm delighted to be able to do it. Thank you, Judge. He was very explicit and brief and to the point, and his ruling is obviously sound. My view is that it's a good thing that these— that the organizations who are attacking the event, because what it does is it serves to shine light on the predicament of the Palestinian people, who we support.

Speaker 6: Thank you.

Roger Waters: And the more light that is shone in any question of human rights, the better, in my view. So, I'm very glad that they failed, though, in a way, if they had succeeded in their legal maneuvers, that might have gone even further to shine light on the predicament of the Palestinians, which is what this is about. You know, something that I say at every show I do now, because I find— Yeah. The way I cut my speeches down, so they're very short, is, at some point in everybody's life, they have to decide whether or not they believe in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Paris.

Speaker 7: If you do—

Roger Waters: either you believe in it or you don't. You can't have it both ways. And so, if you do believe it, then you have to stand up for people's human rights all over the world, irrespective of their ethnicity or their religion or their nationality, which is what we are doing in this panel. Right. At the University of Massachusetts on Saturday.

Speaker 8: Can you talk about the backlash against pro-Palestinian voices, including the backlash that you, Roger Waters, have experienced, as a musician, as a human rights activist, as you travel the world?

Roger Waters: Well, this particular issue is far more divisive than any other. So, I've just been on tour for a couple of years all over the world. And in many countries, certainly in Europe, in France and in Germany, I came up against an absolute wall of silence, really, particularly in Germany, where nobody in the press, until I spoke to one journalist with a newspaper from Munich, nobody would speak to me. Nobody would speak to me. On the grounds that they'd been told that I was anti-Semitic and that I could not be spoken to. And the Germans are very sensitive about Jewish affairs. And, in consequence, they are not open to even speaking— even speaking— about human rights within the context of Palestine.

Speaker 8: Can you talk about the equation of being critical of the Israeli government with anti-Semitism?

Roger Waters: Well, I could talk about it, yeah, but what's the point? So much— Respond to it. OK. Well, it's quite clearly— criticism of any government is nothing to do with anti-Semitism. And certainly, criticism of the Israeli government's flouting of international law and abuses of human rights has nothing to do with the Jewish faith or Jewish people. I've had lots of meetings all over the world with— JVP-sponsored events.

Speaker 8: Jewish Voice for Peace.

Roger Waters: Actually, we did one in— the first one we did after I left the States was in Vancouver. And it wasn't JVP, but it was another Jewish organization, Jewish— I can't remember, something other voices. And, of course, they are just as humane and care just as much about human rights as everybody else does who cares about human rights. Unfortunately, the Israeli government does not care. Care about human rights, and neither does this government in this country, which is why this administration is supporting the annexing of the Golan Heights and the moving of the embassy to Jerusalem and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and all the rest of it. So, it is very important that those of us who do care organize, meet, have meetings and continue to protest.

Speaker 8: Roger Waters, do you feel that kind of optimism, that— I mean, here Noam Chomsky has been so critical of the Israeli state for so long, and yet he says he feels there is a different climate right now?

Roger Waters: Absolutely. I mean, I've been involved in this struggle only for the last 12 years, but over those 12 years, it has changed dramatically. And Noam Chomsky is exactly right, and so is Sut. They are desperate now. That's why they pulled this silly legal stunt about this meeting in UMass. And I'm so happy to see it. And working with people from Jewish Voice for Peace and other Jewish organizations, as well, has developed dramatically over the years, as the demographic within the Jewish community in the United States has changed, and they're becoming more and more More round to saying, not in my name, which is hugely encouraging. Yeah. I feel overcome almost with joy even to be able to speak about it in these terms now. And I'm really looking forward to Saturday in Massachusetts and having— you know, speaking to young people and meeting also the other panelists, all of whom I'm in awe. Yeah.

Speaker 8: Why risk this criticism? I mean, you are a world-renowned musician, and yet you take this on everywhere you go. Why?

Roger Waters: My mom. You know, my mother, when I was young, at one point, she said to me, you know, at some point in your life, you're going to be faced with difficult decisions. Find out as much as you can about anything that you're confronted with. Then make up your own mind what it is that you're going to do. There's nearly always the right thing to do. Just do it. This is the right thing to do, and I'm just doing it. So, there's never any sort of question about that.

Speaker 8: And what message do you have to other musicians and artists?

Roger Waters: Get on board. I mean, a lot of people, a lot of my colleagues in my industry, are still very frightened of the industry and of the power in the industry, of the Israeli lobby, just the same as members of Congress are still terrified of AIPAC and the people who fund their elections. And so—

Speaker 4: Although—

Roger Waters: That is still there, but it's diminishing, which is—

Speaker 8: Although— it's been quite remarkable to see the number of Democratic presidential candidates Who did not address AIPAC this year.

Roger Waters: It was a huge change, yeah, and hugely encouraging to us all.

Speaker 7: Well, thank you so much, Roger, for being here with us today.

Speaker 6: Very well.

Speaker 7: Just wanted to talk to you about your music and your activism involving Palestine, and perhaps a little bit about your tour. And I thought maybe first that we'd start off by maybe Taking a look at, you know, myself being a Canadian, and perhaps yourself as someone from the UK, it'd be safe to say that we were exposed to a lot of mainstream media that wrongly frames Palestine as, quote unquote, the problem. And I'm just curious to know when you first began to see that.

Roger Waters: Yeah.

Speaker 7: In your own life?

Roger Waters: All right, that old story. Okay, well, that old story is 2005, I think. Um, I was on tour in Europe. Maybe it was the Dockside. I can't remember what the tour was for. And suddenly, in the middle of the tour of Europe, uh, my agent, um, calls me and he says, Look, there's a space of four days here. We could stick a gig in. Okay, whatever. Yeah, Haikun Park, Tel Aviv. Okay, whatever. So they put Haikun Park into my itinerary, and I immediately started getting emails. The first ones, interestingly, were from North Africa, from Moroccans and Algerians. And I'm going, and then I started getting some from. The occupied territories because the BDS movement had just started. Literally, that was the year. So, and I got an email from Omar Barghouti, who I've since got to know very well over the years. And I said, please don't, and explained everything. So in fact, the show was sold out, but, and I canceled that show having heard that, you know, Highcombe Park is built on a Palestinian Graves and blah and blah. But I came to some kind of internal compromise because I knew very little about what was going on in Palestine, and and I moved the gig to a agricultural community where they grow chickpeas. It's a sort of peace village. It has two names. It's called I think it's Wahat al-Salam in Arabic. I may be wrong. And in Hebrew, it's Neve Shalom. And it's sort of halfway between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. And what's good about it is that they— it's Jews and Muslims and Arabs and Druze and Christians and agnostics. And they all live together in this community growing chickpeas mainly. And but all their children go to school together. And so they— and they teach kind of Love and peace. So we did a gig there. We had 60,000 people came. I think at the time it was the biggest gig that ever been in Israel, and it was a huge success. And they were all being polite, blah blah blah blah blah, until the very end when I got up on my hind legs and I said, "Now then, you are the generation of young Israelis who must make peace with your neighbors," and blah blah blah. And they went from, yeah, to Roger, to it was uncanny. They went from that to what the fuck are you talking about? We're not going to make peace with anybody. Are you crazy? They're animals. And that, I mean, they didn't say all of that, but they weren't very, very quiet anyway. We left and I went back the next year and went on an extended tour with a lovely lady called Allegra Pacheco, I think is her name. And we went all over the West Bank and it was chilling beyond anything that I could ever have imagined to see back then in 2006. Yeah. What was going on and the absolute disdain and disgust with which we, me with the British passport in an UNRWA vehicle, was treated by all the young Israeli border guards and people. I remember thinking at the time, if they're like that to me, what must they be like to the Palestinians? And of course we know. And now to bring it entirely up to date, we know exactly what they're like to the Palestinians because they are, as we speak, committing genocide in Gaza.

Speaker 7: I mean, you've seen so much in the time that you've been involved in Palestinian solidarity work, from the time that you became more proactive in the BDS movement.

Roger Waters: Yeah.

Speaker 7: But I'm wondering how specifically the events that have transpired since October 7th have affected you and how maybe that's Like anybody with a heart.

Roger Waters: Right. I spend my life teaching on the verge of tears. Yes. Because you can't possibly put yourself in that position, in their position, those mothers and fathers, those children, those 2.3 million— well, a bit less now. People living in Gaza being bombarded by F-16s day and night, week after week after week. You can't— one cannot even begin to imagine what it must be like. And that it's being cheered on by the most powerful empire in the world is disgusting beyond all belief. And not to mention B'nai B'rith in your country. And Trudeau, he's cheering it all on as well. What is wrong with these people? How can they possibly be doing that? How can they still be trying to cast the Israelis as victims? I'm sorry, my voice was beginning to rise then because it's so insane what they're doing. And what the Israelis are doing is just— it's beyond all imagination. It's beyond our capacity to imagine such evil.

Speaker 7: It's a good, perfect segue because I wanted to ask you, I mean, more generally, do you think that this says something about the dark side of humanity, the evil that people are still capable of?

Roger Waters: Yeah, well, now we're getting philosophical. And now we have to bring Yahweh into it. God has to enter the conversation at some point, because if you look at it very specifically in terms of what's going on there, God is evoked constantly. My father, I have to say, was a deeply avowed Christian. That's why my father was a pacifist and why he was a conscientious objector. When he was called up in 1939, he said, no, no, I can't. I'm a Christian. I can't kill anyone. Okay. So they said, well, actually, they said to him, will you drive an ambulance? And he says, yes, I will. And he went and drove an ambulance from the beginning of the war until 1941, when, having become politicized to some considerable extent, he had joined the Communist Party. He decided that the need to fight the Nazis trumped his Christianity. So he went back to the conscription board and said, excuse me, I've changed my mind. Who are you, Waters? Look, this chap's got a degree, officer material. And that was the end of it. So, you know, he did his basic training and then officer training, and then he went to North Africa or to Italy, Vernon. And he was killed.

Speaker 7: Yes. You know, I wanted to actually ask about your beloved father because I know that he's— Eric Waters was commemorated in Italy decades later after World War II. And I know that you have a memory of him from the time you were around 5 months, if I'm correct. So I'm wondering if that figures in somehow into your activism today. Yeah.

Roger Waters: I mean, interestingly enough, I do a song every night that talks about my elder brother, Jon, who was 2 years older than me, and how he used to sit on my father's knee when my father was home on leave, when he was doing his training, basic training and officer training and stuff like that. That's in the show every night. So you get a picture of my family and with my big brother, me, my mother and my father. And we see that. And I say in this, I say at the end of the song, I was mercifully spared the memories that they shared. That's my father and my big brother because I was only 5 months old when Daddy died. So I have no Actual memory of my father, but I can't tell. I can't tell you the story about the death of my father on February the 18th, 1944, without my heart and soul going to back to Gaza. Now, I mean, that's how much it affects my life now, and and everybody almost that I speak to. It's so unspeakable what the Israelis are doing in Gaza that I feel my whole body revolting against it with every breath that I take. But I'm happy to, you know, talk about the past as well.

Speaker 7: To your credit, you're so tenacious despite all the pushback. from some of these groups, as the one you mentioned in Canada.

Roger Waters: Beneath breath, my friends.

Speaker 7: And so I'm wondering, really, like, where do you think that stems from? Where do you draw your strength from despite this constant pushback that seems to be coming from all directions?

Roger Waters: My mother. My father was dead. My mother wasn't. And there's this story I tell, which is true. I'll tell it very quickly. When I was about 13, I was struggling with something. I've no idea what it was. Some question. And my mother could see I was. And she's looking over and she goes, what is it? Oh, Mum, nothing. I'm just— She says, listen, come here. I'm going to give you some advice. All through your life, Roger, you're going to come up against knotty problems, things that you have to think through and work out and decide what to do about, make decisions. Here's my advice. When that happens to you, read, read, read, and then read some more. Find out everything that there is to know about whatever it is that is troubling you. Study the history and don't just read the opinions of people who agree with you on it. Read everything. Find out from all sides of it. When you've done that, the hard work is over. What do you mean? Well, you've done all the heavy lifting. Well, what do I do then, Mum? And she said, you do the right thing. You know, Mum, thanks. What an incredible lesson to give an adolescent. If only that's what we were teaching our children instead of teaching our children, as they do in Israel, That Palestinians are animals, that they're subhuman. Listening to Ayelet Shekar, we must kill all the little snakes. And if there's a pregnant woman with a little snake in her belly, kill her.

Speaker 8: What?

Roger Waters: This is what you're teaching your children? No. Ayelet Shekar, take a leaf out of my mother's book. Teach your children to do the right You know, that's—

Speaker 7: it's such an important point, Roger, because I do wonder whether people are losing that sensibility sometimes. There's so many distractions. We're constantly being pushed to buy, to self-present in new ways. And I wonder whether people are losing sight of just that, of doing the right thing despite—

Roger Waters: Yeah, many, many people. They are subject to propaganda. And as you mentioned, the mainstream media earlier, the propaganda of the mainstream media, whose job it has become to echo what's bouncing around the echo chamber of the powers that be, the ruling class. And that's what they do. And people, it's very difficult not to be affected by that and not to take some of it in. But it is extremely dangerous because it is propaganda. And we all know how this all got developed in the last 150 years or so with people realizing that if you hold the key to the dissemination of information, i.e., the media, well, then you have all the power. You know, goes back to Voltaire or, you know, to the Enlightenment and to We wise men have been writing about this now for like several hundred years, but it's hard for the wise things to get through to us ordinary mortals. And it's— why is it hard? Because we live in a world where— well, the United States where I live, that is a world where there's only one thing. There's only one real god that we bow down to, and that is profit. So neoliberal capitalism with profit on the altar is the thing that we all have to— Well, when you do that, you're screwed. There's no possible way that you can find your way out of the maze of that Friedman economic policy nonsense to enlightenment or to finding the love that you might have in your heart and empathy for your brothers and sisters all over the world. Irrespective of their ethnicity or religion or nationality, to find your way onto that path is almost impossible.

Speaker 7: I feel that we're hardwired to do the right thing, but under these conditions of neoliberal capitalism, that it's almost conditioned out of us.

Roger Waters: Yeah, we have a— there is still hidden within most of us an absolute instinct when you see the old lady fall down in the street to go and help her. But in terms of the way our governments work and empire works, it's wiped out. It's erased. How is it erased? By propaganda to teach us that the old lady in the street is actually vermin and needs to be eradicated. Ooh, ooh, I thought it was like somebody's grandmother. Oh, It's vermin. Okay, well, in that case, just— I don't want to see it, but just— or I do want to see it. I want to sit in a deck chair and applaud while they go on dropping bombs on Gaza.

Speaker 7: You know, I'm wondering if part of the reason in your shows you have these large visual signs— it's just a curiosity I have. Is because it's telling the audience, you need to think about this. It's the important thing right now that we should be all considering as human beings.

Roger Waters: Yeah.

Speaker 7: Whether we like it or not. And it flies in the face of, I think, Western culture's celebration of the individual. I'll do me. Don't bully me. I'll do what I want. But if, you know, you push that to the extreme, then you have people just ignoring things all the time that they should be concerned about because it's comfortable.

Roger Waters: Yeah, well, interestingly enough, that's sort of why I made the new redux version of Dark Side of the Moon, was because this is a piece that I wrote 50 years ago, and I could see that the business end of my music business were going to celebrate the fact that That piece of work is 50 years old. And I realized that people didn't really understand what I was writing about when I wrote it. And so that's why I've made a new version that's more reflective and that's more— as my daughter pointed out to me, she said, this is great, Dad, because this is the 29-year-old you who wrote all this and the 80-year-old, 79 as I was then, you're old. Looking backwards and forwards across 50 years at this piece of work and reflecting upon it from the age of 79, at the work of the 29-year-old who was like wide-eyed and, this can't be right, you know. All that you touch and all that you see is all your life will ever be. This is it. You only get— And that That is a central point of Dark Side of the Moon, is that you only get one go, as far as we know.

Speaker 7: So, no, I'm just being cynical, but I'm just wondering if there's any final observations or thoughts you'd like to share before we wrap up.

Roger Waters: My heart and my brain are so full of all the political as well as the humanitarian machinations of the Gaza question and the Palestine question right now that I find it difficult to escape from it and all the bullshit that I've been experiencing in South America with them trying to— they just tried to cancel my show tomorrow here in Santiago, in Chile, where I know I'm enormously popular, not just because the shows are sold out. They were in Buenos Aires as well. And yet the Israeli lobby still tried to get my shows in Buenos Aires canceled. On the grounds that I'm an anti-Semite, which I'm not, obviously.

Speaker 7: Right.

Roger Waters: It's such arrant nonsense. And yet they tell— they make up stories and then amplify them and then print them again and again and again and again and again and again. And I know we're not allowed to say it, but it's right out of Goebbels' playbook and Göring. This is exactly what they said and what they Absolutely did. They said we have to lie and lie and lie, and the bigger the lie, the more likely people are to believe. That's what these stupid assholes have been doing against me. Your friends—I know they're not—and mine in Nybridge. These are very, very dim people, and they are completely attached to the idea. of the illegal settler colonialism of the Zionist movement in Palestine. And the other crazy people who've attached themselves to this are Christian evangelicals in the United States who support Israel like Biden. And why? Because they want to see the Jews all burn in hell when Jesus comes down in the Second Coming and they all go to heaven holding hands with Jesus. And they believe this bullshit. And they're prepared to sacrifice this entire beautiful planet that we live on. And that is our— they're sacrificing the whole thing. I mean, I don't— they should believe what they want, but they should not hold positions of political power because this is crazy.

Speaker 7: I would love to keep going and going, but I think—

Roger Waters: I have you to do so.

Speaker 7: Oh, yeah. No, no, no, no. And I would I had thought I'd keep going myself, but thank you so much.

Roger Waters: Not at all. Thank you very much for talking.

Speaker 7: And the privilege, and all the very best.