Contact
Full Interview and Transcript
This video and transcript are brought to you free of charge by Multimind inc Please help cover our costs. |
Full Transcript
Roger Waters on Walls, Gaza and The Freedom March
You bring up the subject of walls, I've seen extensively the wall around all the settlements on the West Bank and the wall that runs through Bethlehem the wall that runs through the middle of Jerusalem, and I have not been to southern Gaza so I haven't seen the walls there though I know they exist.
I gather that the Egyptians, Im not quite sure why but sinking pilings into the ground to prevent tunneling from Egypt into Gaza, presumably to prevent what they might consider to be illicit supplies of going into Gaza.
I know very little about Egyptian politics, I wrote letters to them yesterday and today, as did many hundreds of thousands of other people, requesting the Egyptian government, to allow this march of these committed and decent people from all over the world, who are trying to get into Gaza, and they need permission from the Egyptian government because the only way in is through Egypt, thats the only possible way in.
None of these people are Palestinian, because Palestinians are not allowed in or out of Gaza, they all have relatively neutral passports, they're either from North America or Canada, or France or Germany or Italy or from Australia or New Zealand, Forty two countries in all represented, I think there's about Fifteen Hundred people trying to cross the border.
So, we implore the Egyptian government to allow this peaceful non violent protest at the siege of this country to proceed.
I have a feeling they will.
This again points to the potential power of this demonstration, I think the Egyptian government may find that if they deny this due process of the rights of human beings to peacefully protest when they see a crime being committed, then they will find themselves on very dangerous shifting sands and put into a difficult position themselves.
This again speaks to the fact that the organizing committee of the freedom march on Gaza have already achieved, even before they start, have achieved to some extent their aim, because this is becoming big news around the world and it will become bigger and bigger news, and if as we all hope they actually make it across the border and they meet with Palestinians, I think its hard to imagine what an amazing surge of hope that could engender in the hearts of the Palestinian people who actually meet with them and get to talk to people from the outside, and for them to understand that we have not forgotten them.
We saw a year ago when the Israeli's invaded and razed Gaza practically to the ground, although I know what happened there as well as is possible because I pay attention, most of the media in the US and in the UK really played it down, if they hadn't played it down, it seems impossible that the uprising of shock and horror of what was done to the Palestinians in Gaza a year ago, would have entirely demanded that the US government and the UK government take action, and impose some kind of sanctions on the Israeli's or something, or at least deplore the action or do something.
What actually happened of course when the Goldstone report came out, they sort of went "maybe this guy is a bit strange" you know.
There is a huge and unfathomable tendency, to want this problem to go away...this is too difficult for us to deal with, and it would mean us actually confronting our Israeli allies.
Message to the Freedom March
And I keep coming back to the Freedom march on Gaza, If anybody that is on that march is seeing this footage, or if anybody in Palestine sees this footage, or if any of my friends or anybody that I don't know...sitting here in the comfort of my home, all I can say to you is, I applaud your actions, I support you wholeheartedly, I feel very emotional in this moment of telling you my intense feelings of solidarity with the Palestinian people of Gaza, but not only with them but also with all the brave and committed people from forty two different countries all over the world, who have taken the time out of their busy lives, to go to Egypt, to talk to and plead with the Egyptian government, and eventually, hopefully to cross that border in a symbolic act that not only will fly across the news media al over the world because its so important to all of us, but might provide a spark for us to attend again to our attachment to the law and to our responsibility that we have to each other, being as we are all brothers and sisters on this small planet with its diminishing resources, and you are a beacon to us all, and we thank you for it.
The Media
Our media, certainly here in the US where I live, but also to a lesser but still significant extent in England, particularly where I spend some time, skate over conditions in Gaza, it's very rarely reported.
Generally the media seem to be trying to establish the view that these people brought this on themselves, not so.
This is a largely innocent population, who've been occupied by a foreign power since 1967.
I was thinking this morning about this and I was thinking, how strange to be a Palestinian living in Gaza or the West Bank, and to be forty two years old, never having known any life where you weren't occupied by a foreign power.
42 years old! 42 years of occupation!
Should the wall come down?
In 2006 the ICJ, International Court of Justice, heard for many days on this subject and they came down with this now famous ruling that, the wall is illegal under international law, as is the siege, so yes of course it should come down, its illegal!
Civilization, The Law and Being Human
You know, we human beings, we either stand together and we can all have our opinions or we can all stand up and shout at each other, bit civilization, if it means anything at all, means that when we've had our say, we pull all the ideas that we had and we enshrine, the end of those debates is enshrined in what we call "Law",
and if we didn't have law we would have anarchy, and it would just be who had the biggest assault rifle or who had the biggest gang, I know this may sound like foreign policy, which it kind of is, in fact, I make a point that I wasn't trying to make which is that, without investing all our power and belief in law, the maintenance of law, and of international law, not just national or state law, once we allow that to go by the board we're on a very slippery slope to where anything goes, just depends how powerful you are and you get to do what you want.The law is the only recourse that the poor and the weak, and the middle class and the intelligentsia have.
Its the only recourse that we have against the onrushing tide of the power of globalization and the multinationals and anybody with an assault rifle who wants to come into our country and destroy our chicken farms and our hospitals, all our infrastructure our water service etc.
These laws date back before the first world war and the Geneva convention and they are being whittled away.
So thats something else that's important about a demonstration like this that stands on such solid rock of rightness, and that is all about asking that the law should be obeyed, and that the people that break the law should be brought to book, and not necessarily punished, but told in no uncertain terms by the rest of us, you cant do that.
Does the Wall Protect from Attack
It always reminds me of a Robert Hinlin short story about a soldier on an outlying planet, its a science fiction story, and he spends his whole time patrolling a perimeter fence, a wall in fact, and he is under constant bombardment by stingers and whizzers and all kinds of nasty alien deadly things, and the point of the story is that all these are a projection of his own aggression.
So you have to say about the wall that the Israeli's have built in the West Bank, it would have been different if they had built a wall on the green line.
Now if the Israeli's had built a wall on the green line from 1967, they at least could make the argument that they're protecting their citizens from attack.
But they haven't, it meanders through the west bank, annexing property that belongs to the Palestinians, and they make up laws as they go along, "oh you haven't been farming your land for a year, so we're going to take it"
Hang on a minute, I cant get at the land, you built a FUCKING great wall so I cant get there.
So they're using as legalized, in their view, way of stealing land that 's in the west bank
Anyway these questions have nothing to do with this peaceful demonstration in Gaza but it's an interesting point that you make.
In the short term if you did build a wall on the green line, you might reduce the risk to Israeli citizens of suicide bomb attacks, but that in general terms, Israeli foreign policy absolutely guarantees that suicide attacks will go on beyond anywhere that we can possibly imagine, because when you occupy another land, it is the duty of the occupied people to resist the occupation.If the Germans had occupied England in the second world war, some of us would have become collaborators, but most of us I truly believe would have resisted.Like the French did, like the Poles did, like the Belgians did.There is a natural desire in people living under the occupation of a foreign power, to resist.
The longer it goes on the deeper the need for them to resist grows, and the more impotent they are, the more likely it is that they will be reduced to things like suicide bombing, because suicide bombing is an absolute last extreme of a powerless people, in my view.
So, no I don't think the wall makes the Israeli's safer, at all.
The rule of law
We Brits have a very murky imperial past and I believe happily that most of it is the past now because we don't have the muscle to treat people as badly as we used to in the 19th century.
However having said that, we do have something in Great Britain most are proud of and that is we have jurisprudence.We have a set of laws that we've developed over the last 1000 years or so, based on Magna Carta which gave rights of property to ordinary people over and above the church and kings, and also Habeas Corpus which allows people that abide by law, the right of anyone accused, the right to a lawyer.
Now these laws are taken very lightly, obviously in the US, you look at Guantanemo Bay and what happened to all the people imprisoned there.Im not saying they're all good guys, far from it, but we believe very strongly that everybody should have recourse to the law.
Certainly if you're a Palestinian, you don't get it.
This is one of the things I care most passionately about, which is that the adherence to the law is slowly but surely being diluted and the power is being taken away from the people from us and given more to the multinationals and corporations.
So laws tend to be described now in terms of their convenience to the way business is run globally.It seems to me that we shy away from an acceptance from the basic human rights that are enshrined in what was British jurisprudence and is now accepted around the world, and in consequence when there is an illegal act that is inconvenient for us, like for instance this siege of Gaza we tend to look away and go, well it might be illegal but there are some grey areas and anyway we don't recognize the international courts of justice.
It may be that through the next hundred years we may persuade each other, that we wish our governments to sign an accord whereby they will agree to be bound by international judicial processes.
At the moment the US doesn't agree to that, they say, no we we're strong, if you think we've done something wrong screw you, we're not interested or care what your opinion is.
Barack Obama
Barack Obama, Im certain of a number of things, one thing Im absolutely sure of, and I so hope Im right, I believe that Barack Obama's heart is in the right place.
This isn't Bush two, this guy thinks about things, he cares about people, I think he's finding the job he's trying to do, which is almost wage war on the multinationals
in the interests of the people is a far harder task than he could ever have imagined, so I personally am prepared to believe that he is trying to do the right thing all the time, but he has to tip toe round to the extent that he actually appears to be playing the game in the way politicians have done since the second world war and way before. Im not party to his conferences and conversations with his inner circle and with the problems he has to deal with, the speech he made in Cairo six months ago was a breath of fresh air, and he was rounded on by the Jewish lobby in North America and by the Israeli govt.Since then its gone a little quiet, I would actually be interested to hear what the President of the United States has to say about this non violent democratic demonstration of ordinary people from 42 countries all over the World, marching into a very uncomfortable place because they feel solidarity with their brothers and sisters, other human beings who are living in conditions that non of us would stand for for a single second in any of our countries.
So I hope Barack Obama will respond to this and I hope he makes a statement about it, I hope he will come out and support this march and I hope he will come out and say "Listen, this siege of this country is illegal, and we must support the law.We must support the rights that human beings have under the law"
Trip to Jenin
Jenin which I visited this year, I was lucky enough to be invited to the Berlin Festival
to Cinema for Peace, where one person honored was Mikael Gorbachov as was I and Leonardo di Caprio.
One of the movies shown called Heart of Jenin, the story of Ismael and his son Ahmed who is killed by Israeli forces.
Ismael decided to donate Ahmed's organs and they all go to Israeli children.Its one of the most touching documentaries that I've ever seen, so when I went to Jenin I visited the refugee camp there where there were terrible Israeli incursions in 2002, and I spoke with the leaders, because of course the refugee camp is still there, there's no where for the refugees to go.Hopefully that will be part of the final settlement of what happens between Isarel and Palestine, we shall see.
So, Marcus Veter who made this documentary decided to reopen a cinema in Jenin that had been closed for 25 years, so Im helping with that project and we hope to open in August of 2010 and Im looking forward to going back and seeing my good friends Ismael and Fahrid Hamri and sharing some movies and getting some young people involved in movie making because, it is pretty bleak.
One of the leaders told me that some of the young children during when the Israeli's came in to the camp are now teenagers.One chilling fact is that they commit suicide routinely in a new way, they get a knife and run at checkpoints so they will be shot.
a lot of people in the west don't know this, something like that if it happened here, we would say this is entirely unacceptable that we have children in our community with these kinds of mental stresses that they are committing suicide in this way.
Israeli support of the Palestinian cause?
I don't know what the numbers are that are sympathetic, I know that there are a lot of them.There is a real groundswell of resistance by ordinary Israeli people with good hearts to their governments foreign policy.I know this because some are my friends
and I speak to them.There are people that are trying to work out ways of solving the problems with the west bank and the settlements, develop the Negev and Galilee and get people to settle there rather than take Palestinian land.We've all seen documentaries about refusinks, Israeli airmen who say, Im not doing this anymore. People rebel, people of good hearts, unfortunately they live in a country where internal systems of propaganda are very powerful and so a lot of them who may be nice people believe, we've got to kill them before they kill us, and believe all this BULLSHIT, in the same way that the Germans believed Hitler's BULLSHIT in the 30's and through the 2nd World War.Its sometimes very convenient to believe the rantings of a hierarchy because it makes you feel better or because you're afraid or not doing well, its always nice to identify an external enemy, but there are huge numbers of Israeli citizens that resist and that not only fight for the rule of law, but try convince their fellow citizens that this is not in their countries best interest.
The analogy of Apartheid?
I've spent some time not a lot in Israel and the analogy is very direct the right if you're a Jew or an Arab are completely different, in fact the passbook system that they had in South Africa which eventually the world said this is wrong, still happens in Israel, its a two tiered society.We drove to Jenin and all the way down the Jordan valley and you're constantly passing road blocks, and if you're Palestinian, you cant go through the road blocks, the road to Jenin is only for Jewish settlers .None of the people who's country is are allowed to use the roads.
It would be like driving from NY to Philadelphia if we had been invaded by Russians or something and being told this is only for Russians, we have Russian settlements, go around.Where? Don't care...
Thats how it is, and I cant begin to imagine what its like.
I narrated a short documentary for the UN called "Walled Horizons" you can find it on the net, which is specifically about the wall and how its destroyed many Palestinian communities in the West Bank.
Im sick and want to go to hospital....NO! Let me see your passbook... No, you cant go.
and the argument that they are all suicide bombers doesn't work.
Its all part of fulfilling the prophecy that God intends that the Israelites should return to the promised land, its all theirs, it's not the Palestinians it's all theirs, which you know, don't get me started on God.
|