Crazy that West still ‘trying to cast Israelis as victims’ - Roger Waters

Roger Waters’ deep voice and lyrics are known to evoke a sense of introspection among his listeners. His solidarity with Palestinians has equally inspired thousands of people around the world.

TRT World’s senior producer Paul Salvatori sat down with Waters in Chile for an in-depth interview in which he talked about his childhood, Israel’s war on Palestine, Goebbelsian propaganda, and today’s sensibilities and distractions.

PAUL SALVATORI: 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 start off by maybe taking a look at myself being a Canadian and perhaps yourself someone from the U.K. It is 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 in your own life?

ROGER WATERS: All right, that old story. Well, that old story is 2005, I think. I was on tour in Europe and maybe it was on “the dark side of the moon”. I can't remember what the tour was and suddenly in the middle of the tour of Europe, my agent calls me and he says - now there's a space of four days here, we could stick a gig in here. Hayarkon Park, Tel Aviv. Okay, whatever. So they put Hayarkon 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. And then I started getting some from the occupied territories because the BDS movement had just started, literally, that was the year. So 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 I cancelled that show, having heard that Hayarkon Park was built on Palestinian graves and blah, blah, but I came to some kind of internal compromise because I knew very little about what was going on in Palestine. I moved the gig to an agricultural community where they grow chickpeas. It is a sort of East Village that has two names – it's called, I think it is, Wahd 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. What's good about it is that there are Jews and Muslims and Arabs and Jews and Christians, Druze and agnostics. And they all live together in this community, growing chickpeas mainly. All their children go to school together and they teach kind of love and peace. So we did a gig there. We had 60,000 people who 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 Pink Floyd. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, until the very end when I got up on my hind legs. I said there then: “you are the generation of young Israelis who must make peace with your neighbours and blah, blah, blah.”

And they went from, yayy Roger, Roger, Roger, to……[faces falling in disappointment]. It was uncanny. They went from that to what the F**k is he talking about? We are not gonna make peace with anybody. Are you crazy? They (Palestinians) are animals. I mean they didn't say all of that, but they went very very quiet.

Anyway, we left and I went back the next year and went on an extended tour with a lovely lady called Electra Patrio, I think is her name, and we went all over the West Bank. It was chilling beyond anything that I could ever have imagined to see back then in 2006 what was going on. And the absolute disdain and disgust with which we, me with the British Passport, in a 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 might they be like to the Palestinians?

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.

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. But I'm wondering how specifically the events that have transpired since October 7th have affected you?

RW: Well, like anybody with a heart. I spend my life teetering on the verge of tears…….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. 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 [Zionist organisation] B'nai Brith in your country [Canada], and Trudeau – he's cheering it all on as well. What is wrong with these people? How could 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.. because it's so insane in what they do and what the Israelis are doing. It's beyond all imagination. It's beyond our capacity to imagine such evil.

I wanted to ask you more generally, do you think that this says something about the dark side of humanity - the evil that people are still capable of?

RW: 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 invoked 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.

So they said to him: Will you drive an ambulance? And he says, yes, I will. And then he went and drove an ambulance from the beginning of the war until 1941, when having become politicised 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. They were, “who are you?”. Waters here. [The board said], 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. And he was killed.

I wanted to ask about your beloved father. Eric Waters was commemorated in Italy decades later after World War Two. And I know that you have a memory of him from the time you were around five months, if I'm correct. So I'm wondering if that figures somehow into your activism today?

RW: I mean, interestingly enough, I do a song every night that talks about my elder brother John, who was two 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 and my mother and my father. And we see that. And 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 five 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 back to Gaza now.I mean that's how much he affects my life now. And everybody almost I speak to. It's so unspeakable what the Israelis are doing in Gaza that, that I feel my whole body revolting against it with every breath I take.

But I'm happy to, you know, talk about the past as well.

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

Bnai Brith, my friends!

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?

RW: My mother. My father was dead, my mother wasn’t. And there's this story or two, which is true, I'll tell it very quickly. When I was about 13, I was struggling with something. I have no idea what it was – some question why? And my mother could see how I was. And she's looking over and she said: What is it?

Oh, mum, nothing. I'm just….

She said, listen, come here, I'm going to give you some advice. All through your life Roger, you are going to come up against naughty problems, things that you have to think through and work out and decide what to do about and 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, read everything, find out from all sides of it. When you've done that, the hard work is over.

[Roger responded]: What do you mean?

[His mother]: 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 Shaked, [who says] “we must kill all the little snakes. And if there's a pregnant woman with a little snake in her belly, kill her.”

What? This is what you're teaching your children? No, I let Ayelet Shaked take a leaf out of my mother's book. Teach your children to do the right thing.

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 by, to self present in new ways. And I wonder whether people are losing sight of just that – of doing the right thing?

RW: 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 how this all got developed in the last 150 years or so with people realising that if you hold the key to the dissemination of information, i.e., the media, well, then you have all the power. You know, it goes back to Voltaire, to the Enlightenment. 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 why is it hard? Because we live in a world where, well, in the United States, where I live, that is a world where it'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 bow to. 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, an empathy for your brothers and sisters all over the world, irrespective of their ethnicity or religion or nationality. To find your way onto that is almost impossible.

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

RW: There is still hidden within most of us, an absolute instinct when you see the old lady fall down in the street, you go on to help her. But in terms of the way our governments work, an 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. Ew. Ew. I thought it was like somebody's grandmother. Oh, it's vermin. Well, in that case, I don't want to see it. Or, oh, I do want to see it. I want to sit in a deck chair and applaud while they go on dropping bombs on Gaza.

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 whether we like it or not. And it flies in the face of, I think, Western culture of celebration of the individual. I'll do me. Don't believe 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.

Yeah, well, interesting enough that sort of why I made the new Redux version of the Dark Side of the Moon was because this is a piece that I wrote 50 years ago, and I could see that the business and my music business were going to celebrate the fact that that piece of work is 50 years old.

And I realised 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 79-year-old looking backwards and forwards across 50 years in 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 be like all that you touch and all that you see is all your life will ever be. This is it. And that is a central point of the Dark Side of the Moon. It is that you only get one go, as far as we know.

Any final observations or thoughts you’d like to share before we wrap up?

My heart and my brain are so full of all the political as well as humanitarian machinations of the Gaza question, on the Palestine question right now that I find it difficult to escape from it and all the bullshit that I'm experiencing in South America with them trying to cancel my show. 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 have tried to get my shows in Buenos Aires cancelled on the grounds that I'm an anti-Semite, which I'm not, obviously! It's such outright nonsense. And yet they still make up stories and then amplify 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 – the bigger the lie, the more likely people are to believe that's what these stupid a**holes have been doing against me.

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 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 and they believe this bullshit. And I know they're prepared to sacrifice this entire beautiful planet that we live on. They should believe what they want, but they should not hold positions of political power because this is crazy.