Roger Waters talking:
I know Kirsten Gillibrand a bit. I’ve met her a couple of times. And I was absolutely flabbergasted when I saw her name as a co-sponsor. She was a co-sponsor of this bill. So, but it—so, that points to something. And that is that when a piece of paper comes across your desk, and you’re a politician, and you go, “Oh, AIPAC. It’s from AIPAC. It’s been drafted by AIPAC,” you just sign it and hand it back. You don’t even read it. They don’t even read it. They just go, “Oh, that’s it. That’s a done deal. Whatever AIPAC wants, AIPAC gets. And that’s all there is”—which is bizarre, and wrong, obviously.
And I’m really glad that Kirsten Gillibrand has taken her name off it. She’s still against BDS, but almost certainly, she—almost certainly, she doesn’t know. She hasn’t traveled enough, though she did say—to her credit, she did say that she had a meeting with Netanyahu when on a visit to Israel. And she asked him a question of what was his plan for what should happen in the future. And he went, “Next.” You know?
Sut Jhally talking:
we actually have some footage of him at a meeting with his right-wing settler base, where he thinks no one is listening, essentially saying that. He said, “We’re never going to give it back. And don’t worry about America. I know how to manipulate America. It’s very, very easy.” It’s very, very telling. And so, from their perspective, the occupation is never going to end.
And one of the major ways in which you can put pressure on is, I think, precisely through things like BDS, is precisely through what’s happening within the U.S. I think BDS—you know, no matter what you think of BDS, as a rhetorical device, it is superb. It has been branded in a way that even if you’re against BDS, you’re talking about it. And so, I would really urge everyone to talk as much as possible about BDS, because it is such a weapon to use to be able to raise these issues, especially with young people. Especially with young people.
Roger Waters talking:
I would say, in answer to Thom Yorke saying that we’re not supporting the Israeli government, “Willy-nilly, Thom.” And I’ve said this to him—well, not face to face, because he won’t talk to me. But I’ve said to him, “Willy-nilly, you are. Like, after you did your gig in Tel Aviv, it was all over the front pages of Israeli newspapers.” And they actually quote—there were quotes saying, “This is the best moment for hasbara that we’ve had in decades. Radiohead playing has given us so much better position and so much more power than we had before they played.” Doesn’t matter what they say in—not that they’re speaking much about it. They’re being pretty quiet about it, I think. If you’ve listened to what Thom Yorke has said since the gig,
Before they played, I contacted him. I wrote him a number of emails, and I said, “Can we talk about this?” And so—and then there was a little bit of to and fro, when he said that people like me and—oh, well, people like me—it’s enough, me—have been kind of throwing mud at them from afar and not coming for dialogue, which is nonsense. You know, I entreated him. I implored him to have a conversation about it and to talk about the picket line and to talk about BDS and to talk about the situation on the ground, as well, because I’m sure Thom doesn’t know. I bet he hasn’t been around the West Bank. I bet he hasn’t been to Gaza. I bet he hasn’t actually looked. Because when you do and you see the way the Palestinian people are treated by the occupying army, it breaks your heart, and you have really no alternative but to say, “I am going to be part of this.”
It’s like Michael Bennett, that Seattle Seahawk. A number of NFL players were invited to go to Israel on a PR—all expenses paid. And Michael Bennett, to his eternal credit, and half a dozen of the others went, “No, I do not want to be”—I mean, he’s a sporting icon. “I do not want to be used as part of the hasbara, part of the whitewashing of that.” And see, sorry, just to finish—and he quotes John Carlos, you know, who was the athlete in ’68 who stood up and gave the Black Power salute at the thing.
In Mexico City at the Olympic Games, very, very bravely and very controversially. And he says, as John Carlos says, you know, “As far as justice is concerned, you’re either in or you’re out.” And he says, “Well, I’m in.” That’s Michael Bennett. And I thought, “Yeah!” You know, that kind of commitment to the idea that everybody should have justice is laudable.
We’ve been asked by Palestinian civil society to join them in their struggle against the occupation of their land, let’s be clear, OK, land that was laid out in the U.N. resolutions in 1947 as land that should be for a Palestinian state. Whatever your feelings may be about the creation of the state of Israel or whatever, the U.N. decided that partition was a good idea, and whatever, OK? So—and it’s not happened. And as Sut just said, it’s been whittled away, piece by piece by piece, by illegal settlements. The land is slowly being stolen. The indigenous population, the Palestinian people, are being forced out, or the attempt is. Their resolve to protest their situation nonviolently, using something like BDS, is one of the most admirable pieces of resistance that we’ve ever seen anywhere in the world. You know, it’s quite extraordinary.
Could I boycott Egypt? If anybody ever asked me to go and play in Egypt, I might see if there was an organization in Egypt that I could ally myself to, like there is BDS in Palestinian civil society. Could I go and play in Syria? No, there’s nothing left. It’s rubble, you know. Well, there is, there’s something there, but it’s clinging to its statehood by its fingernails.
What gives me hope? Well, we just saw a little clip there of a Black Lives Matter activist talking about how he feels that his struggle is in concert with the struggle of the Palestinian people. And it’s also what Sut was saying in the film, that there are blogs, there are other places to get news now via the internet, so that you can get at more of the truth of what’s going on. And the fact that people are communicating through that now gives me some hope. In our show, it’s expressed very, very clearly. I don’t mention Palestine once in our show. There’s one—there’s one shot, I think, of the separation wall going through it or something. It’s something I steered away with. But there’s a general sense in everything in my show that we’re all human, that we have an absolute responsibility to look after one another.
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Roger Waters
legendary musician who co-founded Pink Floyd, one of the most popular rock bands of all time.
Sut Jhally
professor of communication at the University of Massachusetts and founder and executive director of the Media Education Foundation, which produced the film The Occupation of the American Mind: Israel’s Public Relations War in the United States.
— source democracynow.org 2017-09-17