#1878 - Roger Waters

Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day.

Thank you very much for doing this. I really appreciate it. I'm a gigantic fan, so it's a real honor. And it's very nice to know that you could actually play pool.

Well, we've only played two reichs. Yeah.

But I could see, I could see how you move the ball around. You got to get a little warmed up. We just started.

Yeah. Well, it is true that if you start playing pool against somebody you don't know and you discover that they do understand that control of the cue ball is everything.

Yeah.

Then that's something you think, oh, well, maybe we could have a game.

Well, as soon as you looked at the table and said, these are very unforgiving pockets, I was like, oh, you.

Know, a little bit. Yeah.

Well, first of all, it's an honor to have you in here. I'm very excited. But second of all, you're in the middle of a lot of things. You've got your tour, you've got a lot of controversy going on. I really enjoyed that conversation that you had with CNN because that kind of conversation is rare to see on the air and see someone as informed as you are to have these opinions and express them so honestly and bravely. And it was very interesting conversation.

Well, I'd known Michael a bit for a year or two, and actually my last kind of engagement with him, with Michael SMcConish, I'm talking about. Right. The interview was when I was playing in Miami a few years ago, and the local jewish community decided that I shouldn't be allowed to use local school children to sing another brick in the wall part two. Because all during the wall tours that I did, I always used local children, preferably from undernourished communities, to come and sing with me between eight and twelve of them every night. And they would come in, having listened to the song a bit, and I would rehearse them at 05:00 in the afternoon and then, boom, at Hopostate, they're on stage singing, and they get very excited, obviously, but it's a wonderful thing for them, but also for me and also for the band. Have these children come and perform with us on stage. And the mayor of North Miami beach, or wherever it was, came under some pressure from the local community and they weren't allowed to play. So I got some other kids.

But what was the objection?

That I'm an antisemite. Obviously, I'm not an anti semite. Let's get that clear straight away, if you don't mind, because I'm obviously not. You can study my record going back as far as you want, but that's always the objection, because I support BDS and because I have, for the last 16 years or so, BDS. You know what BDS is? Boycott, divestment and sanctions. Okay? It's a movement that was started in 2005 in palestinian civil society, and it stands for boycott, divestment and sanctions. And so it's a movement to try and shine a light on the predicament of the palestinian people, particularly in the occupied territories, but also, I guess, in Israel itself, using those, using boycott and divestment from companies like Caterpillar or Hewlett Packard, people like that who deal in the illegal settlements in the occupied territory. And sanctions, well, there's not many people out there who are powerful enough to impose sanctions on other people, and most of those with that much power are allies of the israeli government and so wouldn't do so. But anyway, that's what it is, by and large. And since then, we have made great strides in that movement, and it's much bigger movement than it was in consequence. The sort of battle lines have been drawn, but it's got more intense and it's slightly less gentlemanly sport than it was 16 years ago, in my experience, anyway.

So 16 years ago you were allowed to have different opinions about conflicts.

Well, no, but nobody knew about the conflict. It was largely unknown that there was a problem at all in the holy land, certainly by most of the public in this country and where I'm from in the UK as well. And in me, I mean, I had accepted back in 2005 or six, one of those years, to do a gig in Tel Aviv. I was asked in the middle of a european tour, hey, Raj, they want you to go and do a gig in Tel Aviv. And I went, yeah, right. I didn't think twice about it. So that's where I was then. So I'm not blaming people for not having known about the zionist project since 1948 and everything that had happened, although I was vaguely aware of the Yom Kippur war, the 67 war and the 75 war and so on and so forth. I knew a little bit about the history, but I wasn't really ofay. And that's how I learned, because as soon as I said I would do that gig, I started to receive emails from supporters of BDS, although it was only five or six months old at the time, mainly from North Africa to start with. But then I got an email from Omaba Guti, who was one of the sort of founding forces behind the beginnings of BDS, and he tried to persuade me to cancel the gig in high combat, which had sold out, of course, in a few minutes. And eventually I was persuaded to cancel that gig. But as an act of compromise, as I thought, I feel as if I'm repeating a speech that I've all, that's okay. Made already, which I am. I've said this often before. Anyway, so I moved the gig to an ecumenical agricultural community called Wahat asalam. In Arabic and translated into Hebrew, it's nevish shalom. So something about peace, where Muslims and Christians and Druze and atheists and all live together in a community, and all their children all go to the same school, and they all mix together and they live peacefully and grow chickpeas, mainly as an example to the rest of us, if you like. So we did a gig there in the open air, and it was huge. 60,000 Israelis came. What I didn't realize at the time, of course, was, of course, they were all Israelis because Palestinians aren't allowed to travel, so there couldn't be any Palestinians there. They would need special permission to cross through checkpoints and things, which they wouldn't get. So we did this gig, and at the end of it, and it was lovely, they were extremely enthusiastic. They knew the work very well, and there was very pinfly and all of that and lovely food backstage, and it was a warm summer evening. At the end of it, I thought, I'm going to say something. It was euphoric at the end of the gig, and I said, so I made a little speech and I went, you are the generation of young Israelis who need to make peace with your neighbors. Start talking to the palestinian authority and the blah, blah, blah and whatever, and da da da. And they went from Pink Floyd, nothing. It was like steel shutters had come down behind the eyeballs of every one of those 60,000 young array. They were gone. And I was staggered by that, and I was really shocked. Really, really shocked. I couldn't believe it, and I saw it. I went back the next year and traveled extensively in the occupied territories. Until you go there and you see it, you cannot believe what a shock. It know things that you wouldn't believe possible anywhere on the world, like different roads for people with different religion. Can you imagine?

Really?

Yeah, really. Can you imagine? You're going from Austin to Dallas and you can only go on the road if you're Christian. If you're not a Christian, you can't go on the road. So if you're atheist or some other thing, you're not allowed to drive on the road. You have to go on back roads, and they're all filled up with boulders, and there are checkpoints everywhere, so the local indigenous people are not allowed to use the roads. And you see that, and when you see it, you think, I don't believe this. But you get to believe it as you drive around and all the checkpoints. And they have to go this way. Only people with yellow license plates can go through here, which means that they're jewish Israelis. And it mind numbingly fills you with despair