Many musicians fear speaking against Israeli aggression, says Roger Waters

They're in favour of Palestinians but terrified that their career will be destroyed, says Pink Floyd star

The acclaimed rock band Pink Floyd star Roger Waters has said various musicians who are in favour of Palestinians and want to speak up against Israel are terrified to do so out of fear that their career will be destroyed.

The veteran musician – who is an adamant supporter of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel – said that people who saw him being constantly labelled as a Nazi and anti-Semite have been silenced because of fear of going through the same.

“The only response to BDS is that it is anti-Semitic,” Waters told in an interview in his first major English interview about his commitment to Israeli activism. “I know this because I have been accused of being a Nazi and an anti-Semite for the past 10 years."

My industry, he said, has been particularly recalcitrant in even raising a voice [against Israel], adding that there’s me and Elvis Costello, Brian Eno, Manic Street Preachers, one or two others, but there’s nobody in the United States where I live. I’ve talked to a lot of them, and they are scared.

Waters added: “If they say something in public they will no longer have a career. They will be destroyed. I’m hoping to encourage some of them to stop being frightened and to stand up and be counted, because we need them. We need them desperately in this conversation in the same way we needed musicians to join protesters over Vietnam.”

It was in 2006 that Waters’ views about the Middle East had changed as he went to play a gig in Tel Aviv.

The Palestinian artists urged him to use the gig as a tool to speak up against Israel’s policies after which Waters agreed to change the location of the concert so that it could accommodate more people.

However, the tickets had already been sold and the audience turned out be entirely Jewish Israeli.

“It was very strange performing to a completely segregated audience because there were no Palestinians there. There were just 60,000 Jewish Israelis, who could not have been more welcoming, nice and loyal to Pink Floyd. Nevertheless, it left an uncomfortable feeling,” he said.

Subsequently, Pink Floyd's star would travel around the West Bank towns of Jenin, Ramallah and Nablus and saw how Jewish and Palestinians communities were segregated.

He witnessed the security barrier separating Israel from the Occupied Territories where he also sprayed a signed message from his prominent work ‘Another Brick in the Wall’ reading “We don’t need no thought control’.

The musician then joined BDS movement and started condemning the Israel’s aggression.

“I’m glad I did it,” he says, as people in Israeli are “treated very unequally depending on their ethnicity. So Palestinian Israeli citizens and the Bedouin are treated completely different from Jewish citizens. There are 40 to 50 different laws depending on whether you are or are not Jewish”.

Waters has borne many accusations but it’s whenever he is called a Nazi, it hurts him the most because his father Lt Eric Waters of the 8th Royal Fusilliers, died aged 31 fighting the Nazis at Anzio, Italy in early 1944.

“I have veterans coming to all my shows and I meet them at half time. At a gig in 2013, one veteran came up to me, took my hand, wouldn’t let go and looked me in the eye… I can hardly tell you this now without welling up. He said: ‘Your father would have been proud of you'."

Waters went on to say, "My father died fighting the Nazis, my mother [a strong CND and Labour supporter] devoted her life to doing everything she could to create a more humane world."

We are asking questions that have never been asked until the last couple of years, which are bringing the wrath of the Israeli lobby down on people like me and all the others who dare to question and criticise, he added.

The singer said, “[The Israeli lobby] is determined not to let that conversation develop into one that people can listen to and that is why they accuse us of being Nazis. This idea that BDS is the thin end of some kind of genocidal Nazi wedge that ends up in another Holocaust – well it isn’t.”

Despite too many things to regret and lament for, Waters said he is hopeful that status quo might change in his lifetime since now growing activism in US universities often by Jewish students are taking place.

The musician would often write letters to those students who are going to play an important role in the future of Israel the way they went against Vietnam War, influencing US foreign policy in the 1960s and 70s.

The article originally appeared on The Independent.