When Roger Waters sings, "I feel your pain from New York City" to Mona Miari, he is doing more than revisiting a Pink Floyd classic; he is sending a letter into the ruins of Gaza. It is a conversation across continents between a renowned rock musician, "an old bloke in New York City," and a Palestinian artist who grew up under occupation, whose family carries the memory of the Nakba, and who refuses, as she puts it, "to let the world become comfortably numb" to genocide.
Forty-seven years after its first release, Comfortably Numb: Reimagined is more than a nostalgic cover.
It transforms one of Pink Floyd's most iconic songs into a meditation on Gaza, bearing witness to people being bombed, starved and displaced in real time by Israel, while asking what responsibility artists have when confronted with such suffering.
When I speak to them, Mona is very clear that this project didn't start from fandom or from some abstract admiration for a rock canon.
"I'm personally not a fan of doing covers. I'm all about writing new stuff," Mona tells The New Arab .
She only turned to Comfortably Numb when she found herself walking, in her imagination, "through the rubble" of Gaza, hearing Roger Waters' original questions in her head and deciding to answer them.
"I took the questions that Roger asked in the original Comfortably Numb in reference to what's happening in Gaza… So I came up with the idea of responding to that — okay, we have the questions, why don't I just lay out a stark, devastating truth and refuse to let the world become 'Comfortably Numb' to unsee it?" she continues. By the time the two of them finally sat down to shape Comfortably Numb: Reimagined , they had already arrived at a shared political and artistic ground.
"We were both on the same page — politically, artistically, and in our general approach to life," Mona explains. That, she says, set the standards on how to approach the project "rooted in urgency, responsibility, and truth." A conversation across continents With a shared ground, the collaboration didn't revolve around explaining Palestine to a Western audience or to Roger Waters himself.
"There was a shared language, and it became less about explaining the intention and more about carrying it forward with precision and care as a testament and a reflection of this devastating truth, and the complete refusal of the world to ignore it," Mona shares. Roger, who has been outspoken on Palestinian liberation for more than two decades, describes his writing on the track as something that "just organically and very naturally turned into a correspondence."
Once he read the translation of Mona's Arabic lyrics, he asked himself, "What am I going to write? What am I going to do?"
The answer came in the form of a direct address. "The first words that I wrote were ' I feel your pain from New York City', and I just went on from there," Roger tells The New Arab. "So, it's the doddle, it's just me writing to this woman across the sea, and we're having a conversation. That's why this piece is so powerful, because that's what it is — a conversation."
The conversation is multilingual but deliberately accessible, transcending the language barrier through subtitles.
"It doesn't matter whether you speak Arabic or English, you get it, and that's why it's very moving and cool," Roger adds. Gaza's images, Gaza's eyes If the song is a correspondence, the film becomes its visual reply: a black-and-white split screen between Roger and Mona in the studio and Gaza as seen through the lenses of Palestinians under bombardment.
This is not archival symbolism or stock imagery — Gaza-based photographers and filmmakers shot it while Israeli bombs fell around them, making the project not just a reflection on war, but a record of people living through it.
Led by Palestinian photographer Suhail Nassar and his Emmy-recognised crew, their work serves as a reminder that the visual language of this project belongs to those living and documenting the genocide, not to outsiders parachuting into the aesthetics of war.
As you sit listening to Roger Waters' haunting guitar and vocals accompanied by Mona Miari's powerful, emotive performance, you find yourself looking at personal relics of Suhail himself — from shots of his grandmother's key from her home stolen during the Nakba, to video portraits of Gaza's families and their daily lives under occupation.
For Mona, this is where the question of "aestheticising suffering" gets turned inside out. She rejects the idea that she is looking at Gaza from afar.
"Bringing in the sensitivity and the reality that has been happening for almost 100 years now, it's basically who I am. It's my home. I cannot be 'in solidarity' with my people. I am my people. I am telling my story," she says.
For her, putting Gaza's images into music is not a stylistic choice but a native language.
"Singing about Palestine is what I know. It's my life, it's the language that I learned, and I developed over the past 30 years." Hind Rajab and refusing numbness One of the most powerful passages in the song is Mona's imagined conversation with the mother of Hind Rajab , the six-year-old girl from Gaza killed by Israeli forces as she sat pleading for help from her family car, where her relatives had already been shot to death.
In Comfortably Numb: Reimagined , Hind is not a detached symbol; she is addressed intimately, woven into a lullaby that refuses to let her name be buried under the statistics of mass killing.
This is part of why Mona insists that the song cannot be reduced to a "beautiful" protest track. When I ask her how she measures success for a project like this, she pushes back against the usual criteria: "This is a call to action," she says.
"At the end, we're not looking for praise or for people to tell us, oh, beautiful — we don't want that. I personally don't want that," Mona says.
"We know it's beautiful… but that's not our goal, you know, it's a call to action, it's an invitation — not even invitation, it's actually… basically forcing everyone to confront and to understand, to even sit with their discomfort about this truth." That discomfort is both temporal and ethical, about tracing not only Palestinian history but the ignorance that has surrounded it in the West.
"It's not about a positive response, it's more about engagement and having the listener… trigger something in them to take action. That's why it's also linked with a fundraiser," she notes, referencing the link in the YouTube video to the Palestine Children's Relief Fund — an NGO that provides and supports long-term recovery in Gaza.
"Whoever listened to the song has the opportunity to take action and donate to Gaza."
The ending, she insists, is not a lament. "That's why the song ends, not in mourning. No, no, it's… there's a climax. We end on a peak, on a musical and ethical climax. Palestine must be free. We remain free."
Roger situates the song in a broader arc of his own political work.
For him, Comfortably Numb: Reimagined is not a side project. "This is not just some song we've done — this is part of 'Sumud'," he says, using the Arabic word for steadfastness.
"This is the perseverance to resist the occupation of Palestine completely, all of Palestine, not just talking about Gaza and the West Bank, we're talking about the whole thing from the river to the sea."
That phrase — "from the river to the sea" — appears in the song, and has already provoked the backlash they fully expected.
Mona notes "a lot of Zionist backlash freaking out about very specific phrases that we're using, such as 'from the river to the sea', or 'go back to 48 before the settlers stole the land'… Some of them even are longtime Pink Floyd fans that are freaking out that Roger Waters is dedicating Comfortably Numb , such an iconic song, to Palestine."
For her, the outrage mainly reveals that "they didn't actually understand what Pink Floyd was about all these years."
Roger is even more blunt. "Mona and I are part of an existential battle for the whole human race, for the soul of the human race," he tells The New Arab. "What we've done together is part of the resistance to the subjugation and the stealing of the homeland of Palestine from the Palestinian people, so we're inviting people to join the resistance to the occupation." 'From the river to the sea' – imagining a future Towards the end of our conversation, I asked them about the final chant on the track: 'Equal human rights for all / from the river to the sea'. What political reality in Palestine does that actually describe?
Roger doesn't hesitate. "A single democratic state with equal human rights for everyone, irrespective of their religion or ethnicity or nationality," he answers.
Mona agrees with the principle, but insists on the order of things. "Not just a single democratic state. Before any of that, freedom and justice for my people and all the oppressed people all over the world — and then we'll think about a single democratic state," she tells The New Arab. When Roger interjects, "Well, you need some system," she nods, but doesn't retreat. "Absolutely, for sure, but the fight is for freedom and justice."
That, ultimately, is where Comfortably Numb: Reimagined lives: not in legal blueprints, but in that fight.
In the names of children like Hind Rajab. In the eyes of Gaza's filmmakers, shooting under bombing. In Mona Miari's refusal to separate her art from a century of dispossession and massacre. And in Roger Waters' belief that the quiet "voice of reason" is still there, insisting that Palestine must, and will, be free. Agnese Boffano is a journalist at The New Arab, with previous experience in breaking news and OSINT investigations across the Middle East. She graduated with a master's degree in International Journalism from City University in 2021 Follow her on X: @AgneseBoffano