Roger Waters Wants Wall To Fall In Israel

Former Pink Floyd singer/bassist Roger Waters says he'd be willing to play a show in Israel — so long as it takes its security fence, which runs through parts of the West Bank, down.

Rogers visited the Ayda refugee camp in the West Bank, which is part of the Occupied Palestinian Territories. He says he'd be willing to play a show that would echo his 1990 Wall concert in Berlin that he played to celebrate the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

"[The security fence] is a bad thing," Waters told BBC 6music on Tuesday. "This is wrong. This is not helping anybody, this thing.

"If they take this thing down, I would be delighted to come and do a concert here. In fact, I would insist on it."

Israel began building the fence, which it calls the "security fence" or "separation barrier," after the end of the second Palestinian intifada (or uprising) in 2002. Israel says it is intended to protect Israeli citizens from would-be suicide bombers and largely sticks to the 1949 armistice lines that separate the West Bank and Israel.

But some portions of the fence, which many Palestinians call the "apartheid wall," encroach into Palestinian land and cut off Palestinians from their welfare, mostly because the wall has been built around and to protect Israeli settlements like Ma'ale Adumim that are themselves located in the West Bank and had been the targets of suicide bombings.

Although Israel's Supreme Court approved the fence, the International Court Of Justice ruled in 2004 that the separation barrier, which is 670 kilometres long and up to eight metres high in some places, is illegal under international law.

"When you stand in front of an edifice like this, whether it's here or outside a township in South Africa, or the Warsaw ghetto during the Second World War, or Berlin in the '60s and '70s, there's something you know instinctively, this is wrong," Waters said on Tuesday.

While the security barrier has decreased suicide attacks in Israel, it has not stopped militants from attacking Israel in other ways. It's probably worth noting militants in the Gaza Strip (on the other side of the country and part of the Occupied Palestinian Territories) now launch rocket attacks into western Israeli towns like Sderot on an almost daily basis.

Waters, who has spoken against the separation barrier in the past, last played a show in Israel in 2006 and says unfortunately not much has changed since he was last there.

"It's actually very, pretty depressing, coming back here three years later and seeing that the political situation has changed very little — there are more settlements, there has been more grabbing of land."