<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?><oembed><version><![CDATA[1.0]]></version><provider_name><![CDATA[Occupied Palestine | فلسطين]]></provider_name><provider_url><![CDATA[https://occupiedpalestine.wordpress.com]]></provider_url><author_name><![CDATA[occupiedpalestine]]></author_name><author_url><![CDATA[https://occupiedpalestine.wordpress.com/author/hajarhajar/]]></author_url><title><![CDATA[ROGER WATERS; WHY I SUPPORT THE CULTURAL&nbsp;BOYCOTT]]></title><type><![CDATA[link]]></type><html><![CDATA[<p class="byline"> Posted  			by desertpeace			at PS.HADNEWS.COM on Monday, 			March 7, 			2011 			at 8:24 am. </p>
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<div><span style="font-family:Verdana;"><strong>My conviction is born  in the idea that all  people deserve basic human rights. My position is  not anti Semitic. This is not  an attack on the people of Israel. This  is, however, a plea to my colleagues in  the music industry, and also to  artists in other disciplines, to join this  cultural boycott.</strong></span></div>
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<h2><span style="font-family:Verdana;font-size:medium;"><span style="color:#808000;font-size:large;">Roger Waters: My Journey to BDS</span> </span></h2>
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<p><strong><span style="font-family:Verdana;">In 1980, a  song I wrote,  “Another Brick in the Wall Part 2,” was banned by the government  of  South Africa because it was being used by Black South African children  to  advocate their right to equal education. That apartheid government  imposed a  cultural blockade, so-to-speak, on certain songs, including   mine.</span></strong></p>
<p><span style="font-family:Verdana;"><img src="https://i2.wp.com/www.alternativenews.org/english/images/stories/news/2011/March_2011/roger_waters.jpg" alt="roger_waters" width="600" height="366" /></span></p>
<p><strong><span style="font-family:Verdana;">Twenty-five  years later,  in 2005, Palestinian children participating in a West Bank festival   used the song to protest Israel’s apartheid wall.  They sang “We don’t  need no  occupation! We don’t need no racist wall!”  At the time, I  hadn’t seen  first-hand what they were singing about.</span></strong></p>
<p><strong><span style="font-family:Verdana;">A year later  in 2006, I contracted to perform in Tel Aviv.</span></strong></p>
<p><strong><span style="font-family:Verdana;">Palestinians  from the  movement advocating an academic and cultural boycott of Israel urged me   to reconsider.  I had already spoken out against the wall, but I was  unsure  whether a cultural boycott was the right way to go. The  Palestinian advocates of  a boycott asked that I visit the occupied  Palestinian territory, to see the Wall  for myself before I made up my  mind.  I agreed.</span></strong></p>
<p><strong><span style="font-family:Verdana;">Under the  protection of  the UN I visited Jerusalem and Bethlehem. Nothing could have  prepared  me for what I saw that day. The Wall is an appalling edifice to behold.   It is policed by young Israeli Soldiers who treated me, a casual  observer from  another world with disdainful aggression. If it could be  like that for me, a  foreigner, a visitor, imagine what it must be like  for the Palestinians, for the  underclass, for the passbook carriers. I  knew then that my conscience would not  allow me to walk away from that  Wall, from the fate of the Palestinians I met,  people whose lives are  crushed daily in a multitude of ways by Israel’s  occupation.  In  solidarity, and somewhat impotently, I wrote on their wall that  day:  “We don’t need no thought control.”</span></strong></p>
<p><strong><span style="font-family:Verdana;">Realizing at  that point  that my presence on a Tel Aviv stage would inadvertently legitimize  the  oppression I was witnessing, I canceled my gig at the football stadium  in  Tel Aviv and moved it to Neve Shalom an agricultural community  devoted to  growing chick peas and also, admirably, to cooperation  between people of  different faiths, where Muslim, Christian and Jew  live and work side by side in  harmony.</span></strong></p>
<p><strong><span style="font-family:Verdana;">Against all   expectations, it was to become the biggest music event in the short  history of  Israel. 60,000 fans battled traffic jams to attend. It was  extraordinarily  moving for me and my band, and at the end of the gig I  was moved to exhort the  young people gathered there to demand of their  government that they attempt to  make peace with their neighbors and  respect the civil rights of Palestinians  living in Israel.</span></strong></p>
<p><strong><span style="font-family:Verdana;">Sadly in the  intervening  years, the Israeli government has made no attempt to implement   legislation that would grant civil rights to Israeli Arabs equal to  those  enjoyed by Israeli Jews, and The Wall has grown, inexorably,  illegally annexing  more and more of The West Bank.</span></strong></p>
<p><strong><span style="font-family:Verdana;">I had learned  that day  in Bethlehem in 2006 something of what it means to live under   occupation, imprisoned behind a Wall.  It means that a Palestinian  farmer must  watch olive groves centuries old, uprooted.  It means that a  Palestinian student  cannot get to school because the checkpoint is  closed.  It means a woman may  give birth in a car, because the soldier  won’t let her pass to the hospital  that’s a ten minute drive away.  It  means a Palestinian artist cannot travel  abroad to exhibit work, or to  show a film in an international film  festival.</span></strong></p>
<p><strong><span style="font-family:Verdana;">For the  people of Gaza,  locked in a virtual prison behind the wall of Israel’s illegal   blockade, it means another set of injustices.  It means that children go  to  sleep hungry, many chronically malnourished.  It means that fathers  and mothers,  unable to work in a decimated economy, have no means to  support their families.   It means that university students with  scholarships to study abroad must watch  the opportunity of a lifetime  slip away because they are not allowed  travel.</span></strong></p>
<p><strong><span style="font-family:Verdana;">In my view,  the  abhorrent and draconian control that Israel wields over the besieged   Palestinians in Gaza, and the Palestinians in the occupied West Bank  (including  East Jerusalem), coupled with its denial of the rights of  refugees to return to  their homes in Israel, demands that fair minded  people around the world support  the Palestinians in their civil,  nonviolent resistance.</span></strong></p>
<p><strong><span style="font-family:Verdana;">Where  governments refuse  to act, people must, with whatever peaceful means are at  their  disposal. For some that meant joining the Gaza Freedom March, for others   it meant joining the humanitarian flotilla that tried to bring much  needed  humanitarian aid to Gaza.</span></strong></p>
<p><strong><span style="font-family:Verdana;">For me it  means  declaring my intention to stand in solidarity, not only with the people  of  Palestine, but also with the many thousands of Israelis who disagree  with their  governments racist and colonial policies, by joining a  campaign of Boycott,  Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel,  until it satisfies three basic  human rights demanded in international  law.</span></strong></p>
<p><strong><span style="font-family:Verdana;">1.         Ending its occupation and colonization of all Arab lands  [occupied since 1967] and dismantling the Wall;</span></strong></p>
<p><strong><span style="font-family:Verdana;">2.         Recognizing the fundamental rights of the  Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel to full equality;  and</span></strong></p>
<p><strong><span style="font-family:Verdana;">3.         Respecting,  protecting and promoting the rights of  Palestinian refugees to return  to their homes and properties as stipulated in UN  resolution 194.</span></strong></p>
<p><strong><span style="font-family:Verdana;">My conviction  is born in  the idea that all people deserve basic human rights. My position is   not anti Semitic. This is not an attack on the people of Israel. This  is,  however, a plea to my colleagues in the music industry, and also to  artists in  other disciplines, to join this cultural boycott.</span></strong></p>
<p><strong><span style="font-family:Verdana;">Artists were  right to  refuse to play in South Africa’s Sun City resort until apartheid fell   and whites and blacks enjoyed equal rights.  And we are right to refuse  to play  in Israel until the day comes — and it surely will come — when  The Wall of  occupation falls and Palestinians live alongside Israelis  in the peace, freedom,  justice and dignity that they all deserve.</span></strong></p>
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<div><a href="http://www.alternativenews.org/english/index.php/topics/economy-of-the-occupation/3374-roger-waters-my-journey-to-bds"><span style="font-family:Verdana;font-size:medium;">Source</span></a></div>
<p>Filed under: <a href="http://desertpeace.wordpress.com/category/boycott-israel/">Boycott Israel</a>, <a href="http://desertpeace.wordpress.com/category/entertainment/">Entertainment</a>, <a href="http://desertpeace.wordpress.com/category/international-solidarity/">International Solidarity</a>, <a href="http://desertpeace.wordpress.com/category/israel/">Israel</a>, <a href="http://desertpeace.wordpress.com/category/palestine/">Palestine</a></div>
<p><a href="http://ps.hadnews.com/roger-waters-why-i-support-the-cultural-boycott.htm">ROGER WATERS; WHY I SUPPORT THE CULTURAL BOYCOTT at PS.HADNEWS.COM</a>.</p>
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