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Monday, Mar 17, 2014 07:43 AM EDT
Roger Waters: Why I must speak out on Israel, Palestine and BDS
Salon exclusive: The Pink Floyd star details why he supports the boycott
Roger Waters
Seventy years ago, my father – 2nd Lt. Eric Fletcher Waters – died
in Italy fighting the Nazis. He was a committed pacifist, and a
conscientious objector at the start of the war, but as Hitler’s crimes
spread across Europe, he swapped the ambulance he had driven through the
London blitz for a tin hat and a commission in the Royal Fusiliers and
he joined the fight against fascism. He was killed near Aprilia in the
battle for the Anzio Bridgehead on Feb. 18, 1944. My mother – Mary
Duncan Waters – spent the rest of her life politically active, striving
always to ensure that her children, and everyone else’s children, had no
Sword of Damocles in the form of the despised Nazi Creed or any other
despicable creed hanging over their heads.
Last month, thanks to
the good people of Aprilia and Anzio, I was able to pay tribute to the
father I never knew by unveiling a memorial in the town where he died
and laying a wreath to honor him, and all the other fallen. Losing my
father before I ever knew him and being brought up by a single, working
mother who fought tirelessly for equality and justice colored my life in
far-reaching ways and has driven all my work. And, at this point in my
journey, I like to think that I pay tribute to both my parents each time
I speak out in support of any beleaguered people denied the freedom and
justice that I believe all of us deserve.
After visiting Israel
in 2005 and the West Bank the following year, I was deeply moved and
concerned by what I saw, and determined to add my voice to those
searching for an equitable and lawful solution to the problem – for both
Palestinians and Jews.
Given my upbringing, I really had no choice.
In
2005, Palestinian civil society appealed to people of conscience all
over the world to act where governments had failed. They asked us to
join their nonviolent movement – for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions
(BDS) – which aims to end Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian
territories, to secure equal rights for Palestinian citizens of Israel,
and to uphold the right of Palestinian refugees to return to the cities
and villages they were violently forced out of in 1948 and 1967.
After
more than two decades of negotiations, the vulnerable Palestinian
population still lives under occupation, while more land is taken, more
illegal settlements built, and more Palestinians are imprisoned, injured
or killed struggling for the right to live in dignity and peace, to
raise their families, to till their land, to aspire to each and every
human goal, just like the rest of us. The Palestinians’ prolonged
statelessness has made them among the most vulnerable of all peoples,
particularly in their diaspora where, as now in Syria, they are subject,
as stateless, powerless refugees, to targeted violence, from all sides
in that bloody conflict, subject to unimaginable hardship and
deprivation and, in many cases, particularly for the vulnerable young,
to starvation.
What can we all do to advance the rights of Palestinians in the occupied territories, Israel and the diaspora? Well, BDS
is a nonviolent, citizen-led movement that is grounded in universal
principles of human rights for all people. All people! In consequence, I
have determined that the BDS approach is one I can fully support.
I
feel honored to stand in solidarity alongside my father and my mother,
and alongside my Palestinian brothers and sisters, and so many others of
all colors, faiths and circumstances from all over the world –
including an ever-increasing number of courageous Jewish Americans and
Israelis – who have also answered the call.
In the furor that
exists in the U.S. today about BDS and the right and wrong of a cultural
boycott of Israel, a quote from one of my heroes, Mahatma Gandhi, has
been on my mind. He prophetically said, “First they ignore you, then
they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” The BDS movement
is fulfilling its promise and fits Gandhi’s description. Once
dismissed by many as a futile strategy that would “never work,” BDS has
gained much ground in recent weeks, bringing with it the expected
backlash.
Divestment votes at major U.S. universities, European
pension funds divesting from Israeli banks that do business with illegal
Israeli settlements, and the recent high-profile parting of the ways
between actor Scarlett Johansson and the global anti-poverty group Oxfam
are symptoms of a growing resistance to the Israeli subjugation of the
indigenous people of Palestine, and also, to the decades of occupation
of land designated by the U.N. as a future state for the Palestinian
people.
And with each new BDS headline, the ferocious reaction
from the movement’s critics, with Netanyahu and his AIPAC fulminations
in the vanguard, has risen exponentially. I think it’s safe to say BDS
is in the “then they fight you” stage.
Some wrongly portray the
boycott movement, which is modeled on the boycotts employed against
Apartheid South Africa and used in the U.S. civil rights movement, to be
an attack on the Israeli people or even on the Jewish people, as a
whole. Nothing could be further from the truth. The movement recognizes
universal human rights under the law for all people, regardless of their
ethnicity, religion or color.
I do not claim to speak on behalf
of the BDS movement, yet, as a vocal supporter, and because of my
visibility in the music industry, I have become a natural target for
those who wish to attack BDS, not by addressing the merits of its claims
but, instead, by assigning hateful and racist motivations to BDS
supporters like me. It has even been said, cruelly and wrongly, that I
am a Nazi and an anti-Semite.
When I remarked in a recent
interview on historical parallels, stating that I would not have played
Vichy France or Berlin in World War II, it was not my intention to
compare the Israelis to Nazis or the Holocaust to the decades-long
oppression of the Palestinians. There is no comparison to the
Holocaust. Nor did I intend or ever wish to compare the suffering of
Jews then with the suffering of Palestinians now. Comparing suffering
is a painful, grotesque and diminishing exercise that dishonors the
specific memory of all our fallen loved ones.
I believe that the
root of all injustice and oppression has always been the same – the
dehumanization of the other. It is the obsession with Us and Them that
can lead us, regardless of racial or religious identity, into the abyss.
Let
us never forget that oppression begets more oppression, and the tree of
fear and bigotry bears only bitter fruit. The end of the occupation of
Palestine, should we all manage to secure it, will mean freedom for the
occupied and the occupiers and freedom from the bitter taste of all
those wasted years and lives. And that will be a great gift to the
world.
“Ashes and diamonds
Foe and friend
We were all equal
In the end.”
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