Responding to Saif’s request for advice as a Palestinian in Germany who “wants to fight for the rights of her people without facing such allegations,” Waters answered, “you have to ignore the allegations, Palestinian or not.”

Waters claimed that he knew “Israelis in Germany who stand up for Palestinian rights,” going on to charge that they had been “attacked” by the German police as a result.

“You’re not allowed to gather together in public if you’re in the BDS [the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement targeting Israel],” Waters asserted. He alleged that German law gave the police “a free hand to throw tear gas at you and beat you over the head with a baton if you gather in the street with a Palestinian flag to complain about the apartheid state of the occupation in Palestine.”

Waters did not cite any examples of where such police brutality against BDS supporters occurred. While the Bundestag, Germany’s parliament, passed a resolution with cross-party support in May 2019 branding the BDS movement as “antisemitic,” elements of the judiciary have declined to prevent pro-BDS events from being staged on the grounds of freedom of speech. Indeed, Waters’ own concert tour this year benefited from this approach when an attempt to cancel his appearance in Frankfurt was overturned on appeal.

More broadly, antisemitic offenses have risen markedly in Germany over the last decade, with at least five incidents reported on a daily basis. Many experts believe the true number is five times higher.

Waters urged Saif to “just keep doing what you’re doing.”

He continued: “That’s all you can do, don’t give in.”

The documentary released on Thursday — titled “The Dark Side of Roger Waters” — features extensive interviews with legendary producer Bob Ezrin and saxophonist Norbert Statchel, both of whom are Jewish, in which they recalled several occasions when Waters uttered antisemitic remarks. Waters has always taken offense at the suggestion that his stridently anti-Zionist views are rooted in a personal antipathy towards Jews.

Among the several incidents related by Ezrin was one concerning an impromptu song that Waters wrote about Bryan Morrison, Pink Floyd’s Jewish agent. “I can’t remember the exact circumstance, but something like, you know … the last line of the couplet was ‘cos Morrie is a f–king Jew,’” Ezrin said. “It was my first inclination that there may be some antisemitism under the surface.”

Statchel said that when he told Waters that his family were Ashkenazi Jews and that most of his father’s relatives had been murdered during the Holocaust, the singer offered to introduce him to “your dead grandmother,” launching into a hackneyed imitation of how he imagined a Polish Jewish woman might speak. On another occasion, Statchel said, Waters objected to a procession of vegetarian dishes served during a dinner at a Lebanese restaurant by denouncing the meal as “Jew food” and demanding that the servers remove it from the table.

The UK-based Campaign Against Antisemitism (CAA), which produced the documentary, has launched a petition calling on London’s Palladium venue — owned by the famous British composer Andrew Lloyd Webber — to refrain from hosting two concerts by Waters on Oct. 8 and 9.