Roger Waters: Join Israel boycott

In al-Jazeera interview, Pink Floyd frontman slams Jewish state for 'paying lip service to the idea that they want to make peace while throwing people out of their homes and quietly annexing the land'

English musician Roger Waters of Pink Floyd, who performed in the Jewish-Arab cooperative village of Neveh Shalom five years ago, is calling on fellow artists to boycott Israel.

Speaking in an interview to al-Jazeera's Riz Kahn, Waters revealed that he had written an op-ed piece on the situation in the Middle East, which would be published "in either the New York Times or the Guardian, and it’s actually me calling upon my fellow musicians and artists to join the BDS campaign against Israel because I've finally just decided to put my head above the parapet and say enough is enough."

He said the Israelis "pay lip service to the idea that they want to make peace with the Palestinians, and they sort of talk around the possibility of a two-state solution, but in the meantime they're throwing people out of their homes in the Negev, in east Jerusalem. They're annexing huge parts of the West Bank.

So all this talk is they're quietly getting on with taking over the whole of the land, and what happens then to the Palestinians?

"And I'm really concerned about that, as was my father, interestingly enough. My father taught at St. George's School in Jerusalem from 1936 to 1938 and was very concerned even then, before the war, before the Holocaust, before all of that, about what was going on in Palestine. He died fighting the Germans in 1944."