British Musician Legend, Roger Water: Boycotting "Israel" Way to Go

Local Editor

Former bass player Roger Waters has asked fellow musicians to boycott "Israel" and asserted that the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaign against "Israel" was "the most effective way to go."

In an interview with The Electronic Intifada, Waters accused the Zionist entity of being an "apartheid regime.
He further stated that sanctions like those imposed in the past on South Africa are the only way to handle the situation in the Palestinian territories.

Waters also revealed that he is planning on publishing an open letter addressed to his musician colleagues worldwide, asking them to join the BDS movement and refuse to perform in "Israel" and at "Israeli" events worldwide.
"What caused me to write this public letter was an affair where Stevie Wonder was hired to play a gala dinner for the "Israeli" Military Forces on 6 December last year. I wrote a letter to him saying that this would be like playing a police ball in Johannesburg the day after the Sharpeville massacre in 1960," Waters said.

Wonder cancelled his appearance at the so-called Friends of the "Israel" Forces after several organizations asked him not to perform.
Waters has been an outspoken advocate of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions campaign against "Israel" for several years.
"Where governments refuse to act, people must, with whatever peaceful means are at their disposal," Waters wrote in 2011. "For some that meant joining the Gaza Freedom March, for others it meant joining the humanitarian flotilla that tried to bring much needed humanitarian aid to Gaza. For me it means declaring my intention to stand in solidarity, with the people of Palestine."
Waters said his position was not anti-Semitic, but rather a "plea to my colleagues in the music industry, and also to artists in other disciplines, to join this cultural boycott."
The musician's decision to support a boycott goes back to a 2006 visit to al-Quds and Bethlehem during which he saw the West Bank security barrier.
"Nothing could have prepared me for what I saw that day. The Wall is an appalling edifice to behold. It is policed by "Israeli" soldiers who treated me, a casual observer from another world, with disdainful aggression. If it could be like that for me, a foreigner, a visitor, imagine what it must be like for the Palestinians, for the underclass, for the passbook carriers. I knew then that my conscience would not allow me to walk away from that Wall, from the fate of the Palestinians I met, people whose lives are crushed daily in a multitude of ways by "Israel's" occupation," Waters wrote in the Alternative Information Center statement.

More recently, Waters has served as a juror on the Russell Tribunal on Palestine, an initiative aimed at drawing attention to how Western governments and companies aid "Israel's" violations of international law. In that capacity, he addressed the United Nations during November last year.

Source: Electronic Intifada, Edited by moqawama.org