Milan Rai
In the next few months, we will be organising some readers’/activists’ chats as part of our ‘rethinking PN’ process. These conversations will be about what’s facing the peace movement in the UK, and how PN might be able to help.
Folk have already organised two events: 2pm, Wednesday 8 May in Manchester; and 7pm, Thursday 9 May in Edinburgh. There are limited places and they’re going fast. If you’d like to get on the waiting list, please phone or text us (see below…
Back in the 1970s, Peace News used to advertise itself in the pages of Freedom, the anarchist paper with these words: ‘“Peace News” – the other anarchist weekly.... “Peace News” for the theory and practice of nonviolent anarchism.’
Freedom no longer exists as a printed paper, sadly – that disappeared 10 years ago – but its online version continues to carry reports of anarchist action around the world.
Peace News has long been committed to…
As PN goes to press, Israel’s war of destruction in Gaza continues, with 32,000 reported deaths, half the people of Gaza on the edge of famine, and a third of the buildings in Gaza destroyed or damaged by the Israeli war machine, according to a UN expert analysis of satellite images.
While the Israeli government continues to threaten an all-out assault on Rafah in the south of Gaza, where 1.5 million Palestinians have been driven by the Israeli attack, there are signs that…
Ukraine should negotiate an end to its war with Russia, and be prepared to trade ‘peace for land’.
That’s the view of one of Britain’s most senior retired military leaders, a former chief of the defence staff, general David Julian Richards (lord Richards), expressed in a surprising interview with the BBC on 20 February.
Richards follows in the footsteps of US general Mark Milley, who publicly and repeatedly argued along similar lines while still the head of the US armed…
Over the past few months, Electronic Intifada (EI) and other independent outlets have gathered together the growing evidence that the Israel defence forces (IDF) deliberately attacked vehicles and buildings on 7 October 2023 when they either knew that Israeli civilians were inside or when there was a significant risk that Israeli civilians might be harmed.
A new Al-Jazeera documentary about 7 October interviews a former British artillery officer, Chris Cobb-Smith,…
The US and Britain are, at the time of writing, at war with the Ansar Allah movement that controls over two-thirds of the population of Yemen and a third of its territory. This war is not an act of ‘self-defence’, it is doomed to failure, it is wrecking the fragile and desperately-needed Yemeni peace process, and it is actually strengthening Ansar Allah, known as ‘the Houthis’ after their first leader.
British forces took part in US-led airstrikes and missile attacks on Ansar Allah on…
Three Palestinian human rights groups issued a joint statement on 26 January welcoming the World Court’s decision to consider whether Israel’s war in Gaza is genocidal, and to order Israel to stop killing Palestinians in Gaza, among other measures.
Al-Haq (based in Ramallah, in the West Bank) and Al Mezan and the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (both based in Gaza City, Gaza) described the decision of the International Court of Justice (ICJ, also known as ‘the World Court’) as ‘a…
As we head towards the second anniversary of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, the question of peace negotiations is becoming more pressing, especially with the possibility that Donald Trump may be re-elected president in November. Trump opposes US aid to Ukraine.
If it looks likely that Trump is going to win, Ukraine may be tempted to go for a high-risk, high-speed military push while it still has US backing – or it may finally open the door for a negotiated solution before…
Noam Chomsky once wrote that activists had two options in relation to changing government policies (in the US): ‘One way is to try to influence the choice that will be offered by the two major political parties and to exercise this choice on Election Day. Another, very different approach is to try to modify the objective conditions that any elected official must consider when he [or she] selects a course of action.’
You can either work within the system, trying to persuade a party to…
On 10 November, former Guardian journalist Hadley Freeman expressed her concerns about the ‘Ceasefire Now’ marchers due to demonstrate in London the following day. Freeman told BBC Radio 4’s PM programme: ‘First of all, I would ask them, you know, what they think is going to happen if there’s a ceasefire?
‘Hamas has said that they will not stop until Israel is annihilated. And the fact is there are still 200…
On 31 October, Keir Starmer explained why he opposed calls for a ceasefire in Israel’s war on Gaza, in the same terms as the US and British governments. The Labour leader said: ‘that would leave Hamas with the infrastructure and the capability to carry out the sort of attack we saw on October the 7th.... Hamas would be emboldened and start preparing for future violence immediately.’
Therefore, Starmer argued, the right position was to ‘stand by the right to self-defence of any nation…
Our long-serving and long-suffering news editor, David Polden, has decided to hang up his PN keyboard. He’s been writing news items for PN regularly since 2007!
David, thank you so much for your dedication and your hard work over the years. You have contributed so much to the paper, with your keen sense of what was happening around the peace movement.
David will continue to produce the CND Non-Violent Resistance Network (NRVN) newsletter.
Radicals excluding radicals because they have the ‘wrong’ ideas on trans rights is nothing new.
I was surprised, however – surprised, saddened and shocked – when I learned at the Anarchist Bookfair in London that the organisers of the bookfair had excluded a group not because it had the wrong ideas about trans rights, but because it had not expelled members who had expressed the ‘wrong’ ideas about trans rights in an internal discussion. (See p5 for the story.)
I don’t see how…
The world’s attention is fastened on Gaza at the moment. This issue of PN is almost completely taken up with Palestine.
At the same time, there is an important opportunity right now for British peace activists to help bring an end to another devastating war, and another horrifying humanitarian catastrophe.
As I write, the internationally-recognised Yemeni government has just called on the US, Britain and other Western governments to designate the Yemeni rebel movement…
Rishi Sunak’s government has actively supported Israel’s war on Gaza, Declassified UK has revealed, flying over 30 military transport flights to Tel Aviv from Akrotiri, an RAF base on Cyprus.
According to Declassified UK, the government has also allowed Akrotiri to be used for US military flights, many of which have been carrying weapons to Israel. (It is not currently known what the British aircraft were carrying.)
The Israeli air assault and ground invasion…
