ORGANIZED RAGE: Pink Floyd's Roger Walters: Tear The Wall Down .

Pink Floyd's Roger Walters: Tear The Wall Down, Boycott Israeli Goods!

How could people whose families suffered behind this wall, make others suffer behind this wall?

In 1980, a song I wrote, Another Brick in the Wall Part 2,was prohibited by the administration of South Africa because it was beingusedby black South Africanchildren to recommend their right to equaleducation.

That apartheid government imposed a cultural blockade, so tospeak, on certain songs, including mine.

Twenty-five days later,in 2005, Palestinian children participating in a West Bank festival usedthe song to resist against Israel's wall round the West Bank.They sang: "We don't need no occupation! We don't ask no racist wall!"At the time, I hadn't seen firsthand what they were telling about.
Ayear later I was contracted to do in Tel Aviv. Palestinians from amovement advocating an academic and cultural boycott of Israelurged meto reconsider. I had already spoken out against the wall, butI wasunsure whether a cultural boycott was the rightway to go.

ThePalestinian advocates of a boycott asked that I visit theoccupiedPalestinian territory to see the bulwark for myself before I madeup my mind. I agreed.

Under the security of the United Nations Ivisited Jerusalem and Bethlehem. Nothing could have inclined me forwhat I saw that day. The fence is an appalling edifice to behold. It ispoliced by young Israeli soldiers who treated me, a casual observer fromanother world, with disdainful aggression.
If it could be likethat for me, a foreigner, a visitor, imagine what it must be like forthe Palestinians, for the underclass, for the passbook carriers. I knewthen that my conscience would not let me to pass away from that wall,from the lot of the Palestinians I met: people whose lives are crusheddaily by Israel's occupation. In solidarity, and somewhat impotently, Iwrote on their wall that day: "We don't want no thought control."

Realisingat that degree that my presence on a Tel Aviv stage would inadvertentlylegitimise the oppression I had seen, I cancelled my gig at the stadiumin Tel Aviv and touched it to Neve Shalom,an agrarian community devoted to growing chick peas and also,admirably, to co-operation between different faiths, where Muslim,Christian and Jew work english by side in harmony.

Against allexpectations it was to get the biggest music event in the shorthistory of Israel. Some 60,000 fans battled traffic jams to attend. Itwas extraordinarily moving for us, and at the end of the gig I was movedto exhort the new people gathered there to take of their governmentthat they seek to have peace with their neighbours and respect thecivil rights of Palestinians living in Israel.
Sadly, in theintervening years theIsraeli government has made noattempt toimplement legislation that would grant rights to Israeli Arabs equal tothose enjoyed by Israeli Jews, and the wall has grown, inexorably,illegally annexing more and more oftheWest Bank.

For the mass of Gaza,locked in a virtual prison behind the palisade of Israel's illegalblockade, it means another set of injustices. It means that children goto sleep hungry, many chronically malnourished. It means that fathersand mothers, unable to act in a decimated economy, have no means tosupport their families. It means that university students withscholarships to study abroad must learn the chance of alifetimeslip away because they are notallowed to travel.

In my view, theabhorrent and draconian control that Israel wields over the besiegedPalestinians in Gaza and the Palestinians in the occupied West Bank(including East Jerusalem), coupled with its defence of the rights of refugees to pass to their homes in Israel, demands that fair-minded people about the public supporting the Palestinians in their civil, nonviolent resistance.

Wheregovernments refuse to act people must, with whatever peaceful means areat their disposal. For me this means declaring an aim to stand insolidarity, not merely with the people of Palestine but also with themany thousands of Israelis who differ with their government'spolicies, by joining the movement of Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions against Israel.

Myconviction is innate in the thought that all people deserve basic humanrights. This is not an onslaught on the multitude of Israel. This is, however,a supplication to my colleagues in the music industry, and likewise to artists inother disciplines, to connect this cultural boycott.

Artists wereright to decline to work in South Africa's Sun City resort untilapartheid fell and bloodless people and black people enjoyed equal rights.And we are good to resist to work in Israel until the day comes - andit surely will come - when the bulwark of occupation falls and Palestinianslive alongside Israelis in thepeace, freedom, justice and dignity thatthey all deserve.