Roger Waters has urged followers on social media not to vote for Kamala Harris or Donald Trump in the upcoming US election, due to their respective stances on the ongoing Israel-Palestine conflict.
Waters has frequently spoken on the issue since last October when over a thousand Israelis were killed by Hamas forces at a music festival.
Following the attack, the Israeli cabinet formally declared war against Hamas, leading to the most significant escalation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in several decades and triggering unprecedented and seemingly unrelenting violence.
According to a report by Reuters, Palestinian health authorities have said Israel’s ground and air campaign in Gaza has killed more than 41,500 people. The attacks by Hamas on October 7, 2023 killed over 1,200 people.
Waters took to Twitter/X today, ahead of the election next Tuesday (November 5), to tell his followers not to vote for either party as “they both support murdering children”. Waters added: “They are both evil beyond all imagination, there is no lesser evil.”
DO NOT VOTE FOR @KamalaHarris OR @realDonaldTrump
THEY BOTH SUPPORT MURDERING CHILDREN
THEY ARE BOTH EVIL BEYOND ALL IMAGINATION
THERE IS NO LESSER EVIL pic.twitter.com/Vr6i5Gor9b— Roger Waters ✊ (@rogerwaters) October 28, 2024
The former Pink Floyd bassist then urged followers to vote for independent candidates Dr. Jill Stein, Butch Ware, Cornel West, Melina Abdullah, or Socialist Equality candidate Joseph Kishore and his running mate Jerry White, instead.
Harris, who is running as the Democratic party candidate, has repeatedly said Israel has the right to defend itself but has also acknowledged the suffering of Palestinians. She has also said there must be a two-state solution that provides “security for the Israeli people and Israel and in equal measure for the Palestinians,” however she has not laid out any plans for this.
Earlier this year she called on the Israeli government to do more to increase the flow of humanitarian aid to Palestinians, though in August her national security adviser said that she does not support an arms embargo on Israel. In September, she said that she supported current president Joe Biden‘s decision earlier in the year to withhold a shipment of 2,000-pound bombs from Israel amid concerns that they’d be used in Rafah, where more than a million Palestinians were seeking refuge after fleeing their homes.
Meanwhile, Trump has claimed that the terrorist attack by Hamas on October 7 2023 would have never happened if he were president. He has previously portrayed himself as a defender of Israel but has criticised the Israeli government’s handling of the war. Last year, he said, “Israel has to do a better job of public relations, frankly, because the other side is beating them at the public relations front.”
During his presidency, Trump moved the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and ended decades of U.S. opposition to Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, which was later reversed by the Biden administration.
Trump was asked during the June presidential debate whether he would support an independent Palestinian state, to which he responded, “I’d have to see.”
Earlier this year, Waters hit back at Nick Cave, who called Waters’ support of the BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) movement “embarrassing” and “deeply damaging.”
Waters, who has been a supporter of the movement since 2011, responded to the comments, saying that crossing picket lines “serves to whitewash the 75-year-old Zionist Israeli occupation, land theft, apartheid, and genocide” of the Palestinian people.
In 2018, Waters and Brian Eno were among the prominent figures advocating for a boycott of the Eurovision Song Contest, which was held in Tel Aviv that year, as they reiterated their support for the movement. Cave also criticised Eno in the Reason podcast episode.
Waters’ stance on the conflict has also led to criticism from his former bandmate David Gilmour, who earlier this month vowed that he will “absolutely not” ever perform with Waters again.
It follows Gilmour attacking Waters with claims of anti-Semitism earlier this year, and Gilmour’s wife Polly Samson sharing a tweet in which she accused Waters of being “anti-Semitic to [his] rotten core”.
She continued: “Also a Putin apologist and a lying, thieving, hypocritical, tax-avoiding, lip-synching, misogynistic, sick-with-envy, megalomaniac. Enough of your nonsense.” Gilmour re-shared Samson’s tweet, adding that “every word [is] demonstrably true”.
Waters himself issued a statement in response, which saw him describe Samson’s comments as “incendiary and wildly inaccurate” and continued that he “refutes [them] entirely”. He added that he was “taking advice as to his position” regarding the claims.
Samson’s comments came after Waters took part in an interview with German newspaper Berliner Zeitung, and shared his views on Israel and the Russian-Ukraine war.
Per a translated version of the interview on Waters’ site, the musician was at one point asked if he still believed – as he had said in the past – that the state of Israel was comparable to Nazi Germany. “Yes, of course,” he replied. “The Israelis are committing genocide. Just like Great Britain did during our colonial period.”
