 For more videos on people's struggles, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. Hello and welcome to People's Dispatch and Globetrotter. Today, on the 14th of May, Israel continues to bomb the Palestinian people. We're going to talk to Roger Waters. Roger, welcome to People's Dispatch and Globetrotter. B.J. Thank you. I'm so happy to be talking to you again. Roger, you have been involved in trying to lift the voices of Palestinians to try to raise awareness about the atrocity that Israel commits on a regular basis, on an everyday basis. Then again, we're in the middle of something hideous. What's your immediate reaction to what's happening? Well, obviously, deep concern for the people who are there being killed again, you know, particularly after 2008, 2009, 2012, summer of 2014 and now. But beyond that, I've actually been moving around this little bit of the United States a fair bit. I've been having to go to court in support of a friend of mine who's in court at the moment and blah, blah, blah, blah. So I've been, it's a bit, I've been a bit peripatetic. Something that excites me is that I feel my team fighting back. Those of us who have a voice, I feel our voice getting stronger because the fucking Israelis are playing into our hands by saying, I know what to do now. They're saying, let's lurch further to the right. Let's become even more evil and fascist and inhuman and disgusting in our behavior. And I think they're making a fundamental strategic and tactical error. I really do. It remains to be seen whether I'm right about this or not. But in the wake of the HRW declaration that Israel is now in apartheid state and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I have noticed that, well, two days ago, I had RT Moscow call me up and say, will you be on the news, please? And I went, yeah. And I called them out. I had 17 minutes of nonstop me talking about Gaza and about, you know, the West Bank and about potentials for what might happen in the future on what is the only alternative to mainstream media that you can find on the television in the United States of America. And in consequence, it's the only thing that you can watch if you want to find anything. RT is the most balanced look at international politics that I can find, which is interesting. But why are they speaking to me for 17, 10 years ago, they didn't even know who I was unless they looked up Pink Floyd. But now they know that I'm one of the talking heads that you can go to if you want to talk to somebody who is passionately pro human rights, which is all this is about. It's a small platform. I've said it before and I'll say it again. It's my, it's my platform. It's lots of other people's platform as well. But as far as it pertains to the Israel Palestine question, it's the platform. All our brothers and sisters all over the world, irrespective of their race, color, creed, this religion, blah, blah, blah, but nationality deserve and should have under international law equal human rights. That's the end of the story. Get that into your thick heads, Israeli government. And if you won't come around to subscribing to that basic fundamental idea, Israel will be history. This is a, this is a very important thing you're saying because you mentioned the Human Rights Watch report, which after so many years finally has said that Israel is in a apartheid state in 2014, 2017, the UN Economic and Social Commission on West Asia already said that. But well, it's never too late, right? Ten years ago, Roger, you recorded a version of We Shall Overcome as part of your stand against the medieval siege placed around Gaza. Last year at Nakba Day, you did another version of We Shall Overcome. It's a powerful version in it. You're saying we choose human rights instead. We choose human rights instead. Reflect a little bit on why you chose We Shall Overcome to record then and again, and I suppose again, in the service of the Palestinian cause. Well, because it's a recognizable anthem. All right. It's, it's, the music is, is gospel. Where, where, where are the words gospel? I do not know. Maybe there is some attachment with one or other forms of Christianity. I've no idea. That doesn't form part of my attachment to it. I'm attached to the idea that right and wrong, good and evil are identifiable. And that those of us who choose to subscribe to the notion that we should just support good and oppose evil. And in consequence of that, that we believe that there is a fight that's been going on certainly in the Western world for the last 500 years, mainly the fight against slavery. But it, it, when we look at it from our perspective now, it actually spreads all around the world. It's actually the fight against imperialism. The idea that one person, the emperor, can sit on his throne and say, go and plunder those countries over there. Plunder the fucking Indians, you know, and, and, and the South Americans. Or that would, of course, be a Spanish emperor or a Portuguese emperor who would, but there were European emperors who said, just go and steal everything, everything. And they're still fucking doing it right now. I live in the United States of America, which is the great imperial plunderer of everything. And the Acolytes are still the Europeans. They follow the American lead, which is, let's continue this tradition of plundering the third world and plundering Asia and plundering the southern hemisphere. Well, it's wrong. We, you know, in the days to cut them a little bit of slack, the emperors back in the 16th century or whenever it was had no idea that the divine right of kings was a load of bollocks. Now we know a lot more about everything. So we know, we know about the genomes. So we know that we're all brothers and sisters and uncles and aunts and cousins, every single one of us, every boat, every homo sapiens in the world is a distant cousin. There weren't many of us, but we were all in North Africa 200,000 years ago, and we spread out. And so we look a bit different and we intermarried them. But we're all from the same stock. We know, we know it. You, all you have to do is give a drop of blood and they can tell you where you're from, what your lineage is. We're all African. So it's taking us a while to get used to that. I live in America. There's a phrase that I like to use now. I learned, I saw it somewhere, primal disdain. And it is so entrenched in these fucking white assholes who still believe themselves to be superior to anybody with a dash of brown in the pigment of their skin. You can shake them until their teeth fall out, but it's ingrained and it's deeply ingrained in them. So the process of explaining to them or encouraging them in the belief that they're not special, even though one I told them they were as a way of keeping them subservient, i.e. keeping poor white people enslaved as well as the slaves, you know, and all the brown people in all the colonies all over the world, all working themselves to an early grave, you know, in the service of their white masters. It's hard to explain to people that that is the reality of their life. But, and that's why you see fucking pickups full of people going Trump 2020 driving around with Confederate flags because they suffer from the burden of primal disdain. It's a powerful concept. You know, I wanted to also come a little bit to resistance because, look, the families in Sheikh Jarrah in Jerusalem just don't want to be evicted. The people of the West Bank just don't want to be humiliated. And the people of Gaza are just resisting. They are not interested in surrendering to, you know, whatever Israel said, the primal disdain from Israel toward the Palestinians. If we can use that concept, the resistance is quite powerful. How have you been impacted by this resistance? Well, they have an absolute moral obligation and also political and legal obligation to resist the occupier. In this case, the imperial settler colonist, I don't know actually where the, where does the head of the Israeli empire start somewhere in Eastern Europe? I think somewhere in the, what they would claim was the diaspora of of adherence to the Jewish religion who maybe had some vague collection of thousand years before with somebody who might once have lived in the Middle East, somewhere near what was called the Holy Land. I've no idea. But certainly the ones who started Bengorian, you know, and the rest of them, they were all Northeastern Europeans and they, and they, they picked up on the whole idea of Zionism, which was we're going to go and carve out a land for ourselves and we're going to do it in a warlike way. We are followers of the Old Testament. The Old Testament is full of mass murder. Every time they came up against the Assyrians or the Titoids or the this or that, they murdered the fucking lot according to the book and God loved it. Apparently, wahey or whatever they called God in those days went, yeah, go for it. My son, murder is really good. You know, this is a rough and tumble world. You have to assert yourself by force and force of arms and net, if necessary, by extra judicial executions or whatever it take. A lot of this seems to have run, I'm not criticizing the Jewish religion. Please don't get me wrong. And I believe it when my Jewish friends tell me that the Talmud is actually, you know, prescribes the notion of sharing and forgiveness and brotherhood and all of the things that I, as a radical atheist, subscribe to. It's no different. And I know why they do. I know why they do because if you subscribe to that ethos, which none of the Israeli government do, if you do, if you're a Jewish person, like me, you do so maybe for the selfish reason that it brings joy to your life. It brings you joy. I saw on something I lucked into on the internet the other day, it was actually from a, it's called the Bridgehampton Child Care Day Center or something. And it's a sort of day school and whatever. And it was set up, I think originally for the children of sort of itinerant, but then domestic or whatever workers, but Brown mainly, let me say. And it's a wonderful thing. I try and support it a bit myself. But I saw a thing about every Thursday, ladies appear there, and they, they've set up a whole organization and they collect food and particularly through COVID, they collected food and then they deliver food to people who are either disabled or very old or this and that. And they deliver food to, I feel quite emotionally about presenting this. There were three old black ladies all between the ages of 80 and 100 and one old white lady. So she was outnumbered, but they were all the same woman, obviously clearly. And they all made basically the same speech. And the speech was, I really look forward to Thursday because on Thursdays, I go and do this work with these other lovely old ladies and whatever. And we get this stuff and then we get to go and say here to somebody and we give somebody something and they take it. And the joy that we derive from being in that relationship, let's look after one another, is beyond all description. And they're right. So that's how my Jewish friends who believe in the bit of the Talmud that says, you should cross over to the other side of the street. We all need to be the good Samaritan. Why? Because it gives us joy. And the joy comes from the fact that the person we cross the street for to help needs help. So it brings joy to them as well. So it's a completely joy. Now then, does flying an F-16 over fucking Gaza and killing a family of eight with one bomb bring you joy? I suggest no. No, it doesn't. It brings you a lifetime of mental ruin. I assume. I mean, I've never done it, but I can only assume that if you're an Israeli pilot doing that today, today you're doing it. You did it yesterday and the day before that until there's a ceasefire, you will go on doing it. Does that bring you anything in your life? Anything at all of any value to you or your family or any? No, it doesn't. You just are a murdering swine and that's the end of it. Faster. You become that part of history. All right. So do you want to be this part? Do you want to be the old black lady and all white lady in Bridgehampton giving food or do you want to be the arsehole in the F-16? I know it's hard for you because you have been propagandised since you were a tiny Israeli kid in a school where you were taught 24 seven that these people are animals and terrorists and they have to be destroyed and you've had alit fucking shaka telling you that they're snakes and that you should kill the mothers of these snakes. Excuse me for getting upset, but what a load of crap. What a disgusting woman that is, whatever her name is. Disgusting. She should be in a lunatic asylum with people trying to be kind to her to encourage her into the light because she lives in the pitch black of a putty racist hell. Pitch black and she encourages you Israelis to go and live in that pitch black hell with her and I'm sorry for you. I really am. I'm not being nasty about it. I really feel deep sorrow when I see your disgusting young settler people going around beating up the local farmers whose land it is that they're beating them up on by the way. I think what a terrible waste of human life. Your human life. What a pooling waste of the flitter. We get a heartbeat to live in all of us. Human lives are very short. If you get to live to be 60 or 70 or something, you know, or 80, it's a long time. Well, it's think of it as that's all you get. So you get a very short period of time to decide, am I going to be a complete fucking asshole all my life or am I going to search for that inner capacity to empathize with the other? How would I feel? I said this to Joe Biden the other day. How would you feel Joe Biden? You're sitting in your house watching the TV after a hard day's work being president and some fucking foreign asshole who's not even from Washington DC and he's not even a recent immigrant. He's just somebody who comes in and goes, Oi! Ow! I beg your pardon. Ow! I'm taking your house. Well, hold on a minute. I live here with my wife and my father lived here before me and we this is where we live. This is our neighborhood. This is, this is, this is, what are you talking about? No, we have the power here. The Israeli Supreme Court has told us so. Get out on the street now or I'm going to beat you to death. I mean, Joe, hey Joe, how do you like them apples? Oh, you don't like it? Well, why don't you stand up for the victims of it then? You old person. So Roger, what you've said to our viewers, they have a choice. They can either be one of the four women who go on Thursday and deliver food to other people and it touches a part of our hearts, yours, mine and theirs or you can be a pilot in an Israeli jet killing a family of eight people. That's quite a choice and I hope people will listen and consider how we should live in the world. We will overcome. Thanks a lot for joining us on People's Dispatch and Globetrotter.