Roger Waters, the legend, joins the Russell Tribunal on Palestine as a juror.
Roger Waters, founding member of the British rock band Pink Floyd, has announced that he will join Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alice Walker, civil rights icon Angela Davis, and others, on the jury of the Russell Tribunal on Palestine, taking place in New York City, October 6–7, 2012.
Decades of rock fans know Waters for his progressive ideas and groundbreaking albums such as Dark Side of the Moon and The Wall, which have sold in the hundreds of millions of copies. Waters, whose current tour, “The Wall Live,” has topped international concert ticket sales in 2012, has chosen to participate as a juror in the fourth and final international hearings, saying, “The Russell Tribunal on Palestine is about shedding light about what’s going on in the occupied territories in order that we can lend weight to the argument that the Palestinian people should be treated with respect.”
In a brief video clip Waters made for the Russell Tribunal on Palestine, Waters explains, “I will be required as a juror to sit, to listen to testimony which will maybe give me a little bit more of a feeling about where a solution might lie. There is a nonviolent solution to their problem that might stop us all killing each others’ children for the next 100 years.”
The Russell Tribunal on Palestine was launched in 2009 following Israel’s bloody assault on Gaza, which killed approximately 1,400 Palestinians, and has since worked to bring together legal experts, scholars, activists and other people of note to expose the reality of Israel’s 45-year-old military occupation and colonization of Palestinian land. Previous sessions have been held in Barcelona, London and Cape Town. These hearings have addressed, respectively, European Union support for Israel, the complicity of corporations in the occupation of Palestine and the question of whether Israel is guilty of the crime of apartheid.
The fourth and final session will be held on October 6–7, 2012, at New York City’s historic Great Hall at Cooper Union (7 East 7th Street, Manhattan).
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