Hanukkah Candlelit Vigil
The Jewish Fast for Gaza is an ad hoc group of rabbis, Jews and people of conscience world-wide who have committed to undertake a monthly daytime fast to call for the lifting of the blockade on Gaza.
We also call for humanitarian and developmental aid for the people of Gaza and for Israel, the US and the international community to engage in negotiations without pre-conditions with all relevant Palestinian parties, including Hamas, for an end to…
Approximately one year ago, Israel unleashed its attack on the Gaza Strip – amidst its ongoing siege and occupation – killing more than 1,400 Palestinians, the majority of them civilians.
From Alaska to Adelaide, on 27 December, people worldwide demonstrated in their towns to remember the assault, including Glasgow and Edinburgh. At the Edinburgh gathering, fifty people held banners and placards at the foot of the Mound, appealing to passing bargain hunters to remember the…
On the second morning (the third day) of the Triennial, we had our first “reflectors” session. The reflectors were five people who had been chosen to give their reaction to the conference so far. There were four women (all English-speaking, one African, one Australasian, one European, one North American) and one man (Spanish-speaking, Latin American).
Incidentally, this reminds me of something Jai Sen said about the book he co-edited: World Social Forum: Challenging Empires. They set…
What was the “breaking news” I promised at the beginning of the last posting? Well, yesterday I sat in on a discussion group that decided to put forward a major proposal to the council of War Resisters International, suggesting an investigation of the feasibility and desirability of WRI addressing the extent to which climate change, and in particular the threat of runaway climate change, affects the anti-militarist and social justice struggles it is currently involved in, or supporting.…
Can international conferences like this be justified? Lots of my friends think not. I have breaking news from Peace News on this score – the survey they dared not print. Well, no one has not dared to print it, actually, but it dramatises the story.
Earlier today, in the morning plenary session, we had a searing moment which really made the whole thing worthwhile. We had two plenary speakers. One was Samarendra Das, who has been working for 16 years with poor communities facing…
On 31 December, hundreds of peace activists from around the world plan to enter through the Egyptian border to join a Palestinian-led “Mile-long March for Freedom” in Gaza, in protest against the Israeli siege.
At the end of October, Peace News facilitated a weekend training session for people considering taking part in the Gaza Freedom March.
After watching a film about Rachel Corrie on the Friday night, participants were led through some training on Saturday by…
To mark the first anniversary of Israel’s bloody 22-day assault on Gaza, hundreds of international activists will march nonviolently alongside the people of Gaza on 1 January 2010, breaching the illegal Israeli blockade.
The marchers (following a code of nonviolence) will leave Cairo on 27 December, cross into Gaza from Egypt and continue to the Israeli border. Amnesty International has called the blockade a “form of collective punishment of the entire population of Gaza [and] a…
Palestinians, Israelis and international activists continue to resist the illegal Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory. On 21 June, Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem, including clerics, held a nonviolent demonstration in a neighbourhood in Silwan scheduled for takeover by the Israeli municipal authority, which plans to destroy 88 Palestinian homes and blocks of flats, which currently house around 1,500 Palestinians.
The Israeli media reported on 23 June that the…
10 June: In Jayne Anne Phillips’ Lark and Termite, the skies over Korea, in 1950, are described in this way:
“The planes always come… like planets on rotation. A timed bloodletting, with different excuses.” The most recent plane to attack the Pakistani village of Khaisor (according to a Waziristan resident who asked me to withhold his name) came 20 days ago, on 20 May. A US drone airplane fired a missile at the village at 4.30am, killing 14 women and children and two elders, wounding…
2 June 2009: Shortly after arriving in Pakistan, one week ago, we met a weaver and his extended family, numbering 76 in all, who had been forcibly displaced from their homes in Fathepur, a small village in the Swat Valley.
Fighting between the Pakistani military and the Taliban had intensified. Terrified by aerial bombing and anxious to leave before a curfew would make flight impossible, the family packed all the belongings they could carry and fled on foot.
It was a harrowing…
Russian social movements are struggling with Putin's repression and economic “liberalisation”, the war in Chechnya, neonazis and the mafia. (Organised crime apparently now controls over 20% of Russia's gross domestic product.)
On 14 and 15 April, unauthorised “Dissenters' Marches” in Moscow and St Petersburg by the new liberal-led coalition “The Other Russia”, were met with arrests and police beatings.
Veteran radical Boris Kagarlitsky observes that, “As things stand today, the…
As death and destruction continue in Gaza under the ongoing Israeli siege of the Strip (see p6), the Free Gaza Movement (FGM) continues to plan siege-breaking journeys, despite splintering into two, as announced on 22 May. The FGM was established in 2006 to break the siege of Gaza by means of humanitarian and awareness-raising boat missions from Cyprus.
The following year, Greta Berlin and Mary Hughes, two of the FGM founders, were involved in the establishment of a Californian non…
Four months on from Israel’s brutal 22-day onslaught, Gazan farmers and fishermen are enduring daily assaults from the Israeli military despite a unilateral Israeli “ceasefire” since 18 January. Human rights observers from the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) are accompanying farmers in border areas to the east of Khan Younis in southern Gaza, notably Abassan and Khoza’a.
The farmers are determined to access their land and harvest crops, in the face of routine fire from…
The second People’s Peace Convoy to Gaza looks set to leave London on Sunday 4 October. The Convoy is organised by Viva Palestina, a network of volunteers. (The documentary Lifeline to Gaza about the first Viva Palestina convoy will be shown in two parts on Press TV on 13 and 14 May.)
In Wales, the Local Economic Action Forum (LEAF) is campaigning for support for the convoy. Help is needed with many things, from the financial to the musical. LEAF was founded in 1990 and is…
Hamas features in the European list of terrorist organisations. Is this fair? Hamas, like many other movements in the Middle East, is essentially a political party with a military wing. It is not homogeneous.
I know one Hamas mayor with posters of Gandhi and Martin Luther King in his office. I know others understandably consumed with bitterness. Their supporters are an even more diverse bunch.
Many Palestinian Christians cast their votes for Hamas, an avowedly Islamist…
