The Pink Floyd cofounder’s collaboration with Palestinian singer Mona Miari has transformed one of rock’s best known songs into an appeal for Gaza. In Waters’ own words, and in the words of the Palestinian and solidarity artists beside him, it is the latest chapter in a twenty year journey that began with a concert in Israel, a visit to the West Bank wall and a public appeal for peace.
“All Palestinians should have exactly the same human legal rights as all Israeli Jews.”
Roger Waters gave that answer when Piers Morgan asked him to define what he wanted for Palestine. Two years later, he put the same argument into music. Nearly half a century after “Comfortably Numb” first appeared on Pink Floyd’s The Wall, Waters returned to the song with Palestinian singer and songwriter Mona Miari, turning a composition about disconnection and sedation into a refusal to look away from Gaza.
“Comfortably Numb Re-Imagined,” released in June 2026, is not simply a cover with a political dedication attached. It is a nine minute reconstruction with new English and Arabic passages, Palestinian musical elements and a film combining scenes recorded in New York with images made inside Gaza. Proceeds are being directed to the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund, which provides medical care for injured and ill Palestinian children. Miari also created a section in memory of Hind Rajab, the six year old Palestinian girl killed in Gaza in January 2024 after pleading for rescue from a car containing the bodies of members of her family. The project describes the recording as an attempt to resist alienation and apathy while directing material support to Gaza.
The two artists described their purpose in unusually direct terms. “Basic human rights is the only thing that is important to us,” Waters told WIRED Middle East on July 27, 2026. Miari answered from a different position: “I’m not participating in the cause. I am the cause.” Palestine, she explained, is not an issue she adopted but the history and identity she carries.
That difference in experience is part of the song rather than something the production tries to conceal. “That’s why it’s good—the fact that it’s a conversation,” Waters said in a June 13, 2026 interview conducted by the Palestinian poet Mohammed El-Kurd. Miari called the recording “a wake-up call,” conceived for listeners who had become comfortably numb. Waters, who does not speak Arabic, said he first responded to the emotional force of her performance and then worked from her explanations as the two exchanged words and music between them.
The accompanying film, directed by David Barron with Gaza cinematography by Suhail Nassar, places the old Pink Floyd composition against destroyed homes, displacement and the continuing struggle to survive. The project’s organisers said members of the Gaza crew worked while bombing was taking place and repeatedly lost contact with the production team. Its central musical idea is simple: where the 1979 song ended in emotional paralysis, the new work rejects numbness.
Miari is not the first artist to place a Palestinian voice beside Waters’. When Le Trio Joubran wanted an English speaking collaborator for “Supremacy” after the United States recognised Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, Adnan Joubran said the choice had to be Waters. At the 2024 Stand Up for Palestine concert where Waters appeared with Yusuf and Lowkey, Yusuf asked the audience, “Who is more innocent than babies and children?” Their words locate Waters inside a longer collective effort, not as a solitary celebrity speaking for Palestinians but as one musician lending his platform to a cause shaped by Palestinian artists, poets and families.
That collective record also describes the public role Waters has tried to occupy for two decades, sometimes with unusual moral clarity, sometimes with claims that have brought legitimate challenge, and always with a willingness to accept professional and reputational consequences.
A life marked by war
Waters’ politics cannot be separated from the loss that runs through his music. His father, Second Lieutenant Eric Fletcher Waters, was killed near Aprilia during the Battle of Anzio on February 18, 1944, when Roger was five months old. That absence later shaped songs including “When the Tigers Broke Free” and much of The Final Cut, while the machinery of war, authoritarianism and manipulated crowds became recurring subjects across his Pink Floyd and solo work.
The Wall was not written as a manifesto about Palestine. It began as a story about bereavement, isolation, celebrity and a performer who imagines a barrier between himself and his audience, before sliding into the fantasy of a fascist demagogue. Yet its language proved readily transferable to actual systems of separation. By 2005, Palestinian children in the West Bank were adapting “Another Brick in the Wall” as a protest against occupation and Israel’s separation barrier. Waters later said he had not then seen the structure for himself.
That changed in 2006, when he accepted an invitation to perform in Israel.
The concert that changed his course
Waters was originally scheduled to play at Hayarkon Park in Tel Aviv on June 22, 2006. Palestinian artists and boycott campaigners urged him to cancel, arguing that a major international concert would help normalise an occupation he already claimed to oppose. He did not cancel the performance, but in April he asked that it be moved to the grounds near Neve Shalom, also known as Wahat al Salam, a community founded on cooperation between Jewish and Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel.
In the statement announcing the relocation, Waters called it “a show of solidarity with the voices of reason among Israelis and Palestinians.” He also made his position on occupation explicit: “I support the struggle for freedom.” A contemporary Ynet report dated April 16, 2006 recorded that roughly 35,000 tickets had already been sold and that the organisers agreed to honour them at the new site.
The day before the concert, Waters travelled to the occupied West Bank and saw the concrete barrier around Bethlehem. He wrote Pink Floyd phrases on it, including the demand to tear down the wall. The symbolism could hardly have been more direct: the author of rock music’s most famous wall confronting a structure that cut Palestinian communities from land, work, schools, hospitals and one another. Israel defended the barrier as protection against attacks; Palestinians and human rights campaigners argued that its route through occupied territory facilitated annexation and collective control.
On June 22, Waters performed before an estimated 50,000 people in a field near Neve Shalom. At the close of the concert he appealed directly to the audience, saying that their generation should “tear down the walls and make peace with their neighbours.” AFP’s report, published by Al Jazeera on June 23, 2006, also recorded hostile reactions posted online after the show.
One element of this story requires care. In later speeches, Waters sometimes recalled the crowd turning cold when he called for peace. A surviving concert recording tells a more hopeful story: the appeal appears to have been met by loud cheering, which grows as he speaks. A 2019 critique by Rabbi David Seidenberg links to the recording and compares it with Waters’ later account. The discrepancy does not erase the hostility Waters later encountered over Palestine, nor the political effect of what he witnessed in the West Bank, but it does matter. The most reliable evidence suggests that many Israelis in that field welcomed his call for peace, even as angry responses appeared elsewhere.
What changed Waters most profoundly was therefore not the audience’s reaction but the occupation he saw beyond the concert site. When he later explained his decision to support a cultural boycott, he wrote that nothing had prepared him for the West Bank wall or the treatment of Palestinians living around it.
From one concert to a cultural boycott
Waters returned to the West Bank in 2009, visited refugee communities and said he would perform at the site if the wall were one day removed. In 2010 he narrated Walled Horizons, a United Nations film about the barrier’s impact. That June, he recorded the civil rights anthem “We Shall Overcome” as an appeal to end the blockade of Gaza.
The following month produced one of the most remarkable musical moments in the long and often bitter history of Pink Floyd. Waters and David Gilmour reunited for a small private performance in Oxfordshire benefiting the Hoping Foundation, which supports Palestinian refugee children. They performed “To Know Him Is to Love Him,” “Wish You Were Here,” “Comfortably Numb” and “Another Brick in the Wall, Part Two.” Reports at the time said the event raised about £350,000. It was a rare meeting of former bandmates whose personal and professional relationship had fractured, brought together by a Palestinian charity.
In March 2011, Waters formally endorsed the Palestinian call for boycott, divestment and sanctions. Writing in The Guardian on March 11, 2011, he compared the campaign with the cultural boycott of apartheid South Africa and asked other musicians to refuse performances in Israel until Palestinians and Israelis could live with freedom, justice and equal rights. “This is not an attack on the people of Israel,” he wrote.
The distinction is central to Waters’ defence of BDS. He says the target is not Israeli identity, Jewish religion or individual musicians, but institutions and cultural events that help present normality while occupation continues. Opponents answer that a cultural boycott closes channels between people who might otherwise challenge their governments, and some Israeli peace activists have argued that outside artists should engage rather than withdraw. The dispute has followed Waters ever since.
In 2013 he addressed an open letter to what he called the family of rock and roll, urging fellow musicians to join the boycott. He subsequently challenged artists including Alicia Keys, Bon Jovi, Radiohead and Nick Cave over performances in Israel. Some cancelled proposed appearances; others rejected his appeals and accused him of trying to police artistic freedom.
Making Palestinian memory audible
Waters’ Palestine work has not been limited to speeches and boycott letters. In 2018 he collaborated with Le Trio Joubran, the Palestinian oud ensemble formed by the brothers Samir, Wissam and Adnan Joubran.
On “Supremacy,” Waters recited an extract from a poem by Mahmoud Darwish over the trio’s music. The recording was released after the Trump administration recognised Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. Adnan Joubran said the brothers wanted to respond immediately, to make the feeling of that moment accessible in English and to bring other listeners into it. Their choice of collaborator was decisive: “It was clear to us that it had to be Roger,” he told Middle East Monitor on October 15, 2018. Waters and the Joubran brothers presented the piece as a meditation on indigenous people, homeland and settler colonialism, connecting Palestine with other histories of dispossession.
Their second collaboration, “Carry the Earth,” was even more directly connected to Gaza. Le Trio Joubran says the composition was dedicated to four young cousins from the Bakr family who were killed by Israeli shelling while playing football on Gaza beach in July 2014. The track opens with the sea and evokes a landscape in which childhood, surveillance and sudden violence coexist. Long before the present destruction, Waters was helping place Palestinian names and stories inside an international musical culture that often treated Gaza only as a recurring security crisis.
Gaza after October 7
After the Hamas led attacks of October 7, 2023, Waters became a principal signatory to the Artists Against Apartheid statement supporting Palestinian liberation. He rapidly focused on Israel’s bombardment and siege of Gaza, Western arms supplies and the refusal of the United States and Britain to impose a ceasefire.
Some of his early comments damaged the force of that case. In a November 2023 interview with Glenn Greenwald, Waters speculated that the Hamas assault might have been a false flag operation and questioned whether Palestinian fighters had deliberately killed civilians. There was no sound basis for describing the Hamas led attack as a false flag. Armed Palestinians filmed and broadcast parts of the assault, during which civilians were deliberately killed and people of many ages were taken hostage.
Waters later acknowledged that Hamas fighters killed civilians and probably committed war crimes, while insisting that October 7 had to be understood in the history of dispossession, blockade and occupation. Historical context is essential, but it does not remove the protections owed to civilians. The same principle that condemns the mass killing and destruction in Gaza also applies to Israeli civilians attacked on October 7.
His use of the word genocide was public within the first two months of the assault. In a TRT World interview reported by Anadolu Agency on December 6, 2023, Waters said Israel was “as we speak, committing genocide in Gaza.” He described weeks of bombing as beyond ordinary imagination.
By early 2024, Waters was issuing repeated video statements demanding an immediate ceasefire and accusing Israel of genocide. The term was fiercely contested at the time. It has since been adopted in formal findings by Amnesty International in December 2024, the International Association of Genocide Scholars in August 2025 and the United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry in September 2025. Israel rejects the allegation and says its military campaign has been directed against Hamas. The International Court of Justice has issued binding provisional measures in the case brought by South Africa, but the case remains on the Court’s docket without a final merits judgment.
“Tonight is for Palestine”
On June 21, 2024, Waters joined Yusuf, also known as Cat Stevens, and the rapper Lowkey for the Stand Up for Palestine concert at St Pancras New Church in London. The event was announced only days beforehand and sold out quickly.
Waters performed an acoustic “Wish You Were Here” with guitarist Dave Kilminster. He noted that the song is often associated with Syd Barrett, his former Pink Floyd bandmate, before making the dedication unmistakable: “Tonight is for Palestine.” He followed it with “The Bar,” his long form meditation on war, indigenous dispossession, shared pain and the possibility of human fellowship. Waters told the room that many people were living “on the brink of tears.” Yusuf, whose own set drew on a lifetime of spiritual and antiwar songwriting, centred the innocence of Gaza’s babies and children. Anadolu Agency reported their words on June 22, 2024.
The performance demonstrated what Waters often communicates more successfully through music than in confrontation. Instead of arguing over labels, he used two songs about absence and human connection to ask an audience to recognise Palestinian suffering as intimate and immediate.
The battle with Piers Morgan
Eleven days later, on July 2, 2024, Waters appeared on Piers Morgan Uncensored for an hour long interview that was abrasive, revealing and at times chaotic. Morgan had previously called him the world’s dumbest rock star; Waters had accused Morgan and much of the media of participating in efforts to discredit him. Their meeting was never likely to be gentle.
Waters began with the moral lesson he said he learned from his mother: read widely, decide what is right and then act. He grounded his Palestine position in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. His clearest sentence, quoted at the beginning of this feature, was that Palestinians should have exactly the same legal and human rights as Israeli Jews. He advocated a single democratic state with equality for everyone, although his insistence that the country should be called Palestine and an earlier video telling Israelis to return to Europe or the United States gave Morgan an obvious line of challenge.
Waters said the clip had been truncated and that he had explicitly allowed that Israelis who wished to remain should live as equal citizens. Even with that qualification, language telling millions of people to go back to somewhere else carries the sound of collective expulsion and deserved the scrutiny Morgan gave it. Waters’ strongest formulation was not about departure, but about a common state in which Muslims, Christians, Jews, Druze and nonbelievers would share equal rights.
The most emotional moment came when Waters said he was “in tears over Gaza every morning.” He described the destruction as a test of whether universal human rights retained any meaning and criticised British political leaders who continued to arm Israel.
The interview became most contentious when Morgan asked about October 7. Waters condemned the killing of civilians and said armed resistance could not lawfully include war crimes. He nevertheless disputed reports of sexual violence and repeatedly claimed there was no evidence. That categorical claim was not supported by the information available at the time. A United Nations mission reported in March 2024 that there were reasonable grounds to believe rape and gang rape occurred in several locations and clear and convincing information that some hostages experienced sexual violence in captivity, while also calling for a full investigation.
Morgan also confronted Waters with accusations of antisemitism, including the public allegation made by David Gilmour’s wife, the writer Polly Samson, and endorsed by Gilmour. Waters refused to discuss the personal rupture but denied holding any animus towards Jewish people. He explained that the authoritarian costume used in The Wall concerts represents a fictional rock star becoming a fascist and is intended as antifascist satire. Morgan agreed that this part of the show had frequently been presented without its narrative context.
The wider allegations do not rest on the costume alone. Waters’ critics, including the Anti Defamation League and the Campaign Against Antisemitism, cite his language about the power of Israeli or Jewish lobbying, his historical analogies and the use of Jewish symbols within concert imagery. Waters answers that his target is Zionism, occupation and state policy, not Jews, and that symbols in The Wall are placed among a wider attack on religion, militarism, capitalism and authoritarian power.
The dispute has brought concrete consequences. German broadcasters withdrew support for his concerts in 2017. Hotels in Argentina and Uruguay reportedly refused him rooms during his 2023 tour, and BMG ended its relationship with him in 2024. At the same time, a Frankfurt court overturned an attempt to cancel his 2023 concert, finding that the show could be understood as a work of art and that its fascist imagery did not amount to glorification of Nazi crimes.
The Piers Morgan interview did not settle these arguments, but it stripped away several caricatures. Waters was not an uncritical defender of killing civilians, because he expressly condemned it. Nor was every claim he made reliable, particularly his denial of evidence concerning sexual violence. He was most coherent when he returned to equal rights and opposition to collective punishment, and least persuasive when speculation outran established facts.
Refusing silence
Waters continued speaking after the Morgan confrontation. In an extended TRT World interview published on October 8, 2024, he traced his Palestine advocacy back to the 2006 visit and again accused Western governments and large media organisations of shielding Israel from accountability.
On July 5, 2025, only hours after Palestine Action was proscribed in Britain under terrorism legislation, he published a video declaring support for the direct action group and insisting it was not a terrorist organisation. The statement was reported to counterterrorism police and exposed him to calls for prosecution. The ban itself has remained the subject of major litigation: the High Court ruled it unlawful in February 2026, but the Court of Appeal reversed that decision in June, meaning the proscription remained in force as of August 2026. No public report reviewed for this feature establishes that Waters was prosecuted over his video.
In September 2025, Waters addressed a large Gaza demonstration at Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate by video, appealing for international action and an end to arms supplies. On November 28 he released “Sumud”, named after the Arabic concept of steadfastness that has become central to Palestinian political and cultural life. The song carried his familiar themes of endurance, return and equal freedom.
He returned to Piers Morgan Uncensored on January 16, 2026, this time for a broader argument about war, Iran, Venezuela and United States power. The second invitation was significant in itself. Whatever Morgan thought of Waters’ politics, the first encounter had not made him disappear, and the appetite for hearing him had not been extinguished.
The June 2026 recording with Mona Miari then brought his public campaigning back to the place where he remains most effective: the song. It joined a line running through the Gaza version of “We Shall Overcome,” the Hoping Foundation reunion, “Supremacy,” “Carry the Earth,” the 2024 Palestine benefit and “Sumud.” Together, those works form a musical record of solidarity that is longer and more substantial than any single television argument.
The meaning of the wall
Roger Waters remains a polarising messenger. His refusal to soften his language has kept attention on Palestinians when much of the entertainment industry preferred silence, but it has also led him into overstatement and speculation that allow opponents to dismiss everything he says. A fair assessment requires holding both realities at once. His factual claims are not beyond challenge, and his warnings about Gaza cannot honestly be brushed aside because some of those claims were wrong.
The political language around Gaza has changed markedly since Waters told Piers Morgan in July 2024 that he was witnessing genocide. Major human rights organisations, genocide scholars and a United Nations commission have since reached that conclusion, although Israel continues to deny it and the world court has not delivered a final judgment. Waters was not alone in sounding the alarm, but he was among the most internationally recognisable musicians willing to do so early, repeatedly and at personal cost.
His journey also complicates the claim that cultural engagement by itself produces political understanding. Waters did play in Israel. He moved the concert to a community dedicated to coexistence, stood before tens of thousands of Israelis and appealed for peace. The surviving audio suggests many in the audience cheered him. Yet the experience did not persuade him that concerts could overcome occupation. Seeing the West Bank wall led him in the opposite direction, towards a boycott intended to make normal cultural relations conditional on Palestinian freedom.
Twenty years later, the core of his appeal is still recognisable beneath the controversy: tear down systems that separate one people from another, reject the idea that some lives matter less, and insist that peace without equal rights is merely the quiet continuation of injustice.
With “Comfortably Numb Re-Imagined,” Waters and Miari have turned that appeal into music for Gaza. The song does not ask listeners to agree with every claim Waters has made. It asks something more immediate and more difficult: after years of watching Palestinian death and displacement through a screen, will the world continue to feel, or will it accept the comfort of numbness?
Principal source record
The feature draws on the following dated records, alongside the links embedded above:
- Ynet, April 16, 2006: announcement that the Tel Aviv concert would move to Neve Shalom at Waters’ request.
- AFP via Al Jazeera, June 23, 2006: report on the Neve Shalom concert, Waters’ peace appeal and his visit to the West Bank barrier.
- Rolling Stone and contemporary event reports, July 2010: Waters and David Gilmour’s Hoping Foundation benefit for Palestinian refugee children.
- The Guardian, March 11, 2011: Waters’ first person explanation of his support for the cultural boycott.
- Middle East Monitor, October 15, 2018, and Le Trio Joubran: the making of “Supremacy” and “Carry the Earth,” including the dedication to the four Bakr cousins killed on Gaza beach in 2014.
- TRT World interview reported by Anadolu Agency, December 6, 2023: Waters’ early public use of the term genocide and his description of the bombing of Gaza.
- Anadolu Agency, June 22, 2024: Waters’ and Yusuf’s words at the Stand Up for Palestine concert, where Waters performed “Wish You Were Here” and “The Bar.”
- Piers Morgan Uncensored, July 2, 2024: full interview with Waters on Gaza, October 7, equal rights and accusations of antisemitism.
- Amnesty International, December 5, 2024: conclusion that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza.
- United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry, September 16, 2025: finding that Israel had committed genocide in Gaza.
- Roger Waters, November 28, 2025: release of “Sumud.”
- Piers Morgan Uncensored, January 16, 2026: Waters’ second appearance.
- “Comfortably Numb Re-Imagined” project materials, June 2026; Dazed MENA, June 13, 2026; and WIRED Middle East, July 27, 2026: Waters’ and Miari’s account of the collaboration, Gaza filming and charitable purpose.
