By Travis Gettys
Former Pink Floyd front man Roger Waters said the comparisons between present-day Israel and Nazi Germany in the 1930s were “crushingly obvious.”
Waters, a longtime critic of Israeli treatment of Palestinians, told CounterPunch magazine on Saturday that the powerful “Israeli propaganda machine” had influenced U.S. policy in the region and shaped the mainstream media narrative.
“The Jewish lobby is extraordinary powerful here and particularly in the industry that I work in, the music industry and in rock ‘n’ roll, as they say,” Waters said.
He has called on musicians to boycott Israel for its treatment of Palestinians, which he also compared to ethnic cleansing and South African apartheid.
“So for an artist to go and play in a country that occupies other people’s land and oppresses them the way Israel does, is plain wrong,” Waters said. “They should say no. I would not have played for the Vichy government in occupied France in the Second World War, I would not have played in Berlin, either, during this time. Many people did, back in the day. There were many people that pretended that the oppression of the Jews was not going on from 1933 until 1946, so this is not a new scenario — except that this time it’s the Palestinian people being murdered.”
Waters expressed his longtime support of the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions movement, which hopes to pressure Israel into give Palestinian refugees the right to return to lands they believe was unlawfully taken from them and occupied by Israeli forces and to give Arab-Palestinians full equality under the law.