Israel-Palestine

3 November 2013Blog

As a Christian, I had often thought of going to Israel-Palestine but had never quite been able to overcome the uneasy feeling of visiting a place regarded as ‘holy’ which is also a place of such injustice and violence.

In 1999, that changed when Pax Christi held its international council in Jordan and Jerusalem to offer support and encouragement to its partners in the whole region. To be invited by organisations working on the ground for peace and justice to ‘come and see’ made it…

1 September 2013News in Brief

On 2 August, 12 Palestinian and Jordanian detainees were reported to be on hunger strike in Israeli prisons – down from at least 23 in early July.

Administrative detainee Ayman Hamdan has refused food for over three months in protest at his detention without trial or charge. The duration of the strikes by the other 11 ranged between 30 and 90 days.

The five Jordanians launched their hunger strike in early May demanding that they be allowed serve their sentences in Jordanian…

8 June 2013Comment

Nonviolent resistence in Palestine

The courageous Israeli Jewish journalist Amira Hass recently condemned the phrase ‘nonviolent resistance’ in relation to the Palestinian struggle against Israeli occupation. This caused some jubilation among activists concerned with Palestine who are hostile to nonviolence.

Their jubilation may have been premature.

Amira Hass said, in her interview with US radical news programme, Democracy Now!, ‘I don’t like the term “nonviolent resistance”…. because it puts the onus of being…

5 April 2013News

While Palestinian prisoners continue hunger strikes against their detention without trial, Israeli and Egyptian forces are using sewage against Palestinians.

Ayman Sharawna (PN 2552-53), hospitalised after a seven-month hunger strike, has agreed to confinement in Gaza for 10 years in return for his release. However, Samer Issawi, 240 days into his hunger strike, announced on 18 March that he had refused a similar deal.

Middle East News reported that, on 6…

8 March 2013News in Brief

Palestinian activists erected three more tent villages on Palestinian land in February. (See PN 2554 for a report on Bab al-Shams, the first of these new Palestinian settlements.)

On 2 February, the Israeli defence forces violently evicted 200 Palestinians from just outside the village of Burin, near Nablus. They had put up two large white tents and eight metal huts.

On 8 February, a tent was set up on…

8 March 2013News

Gaza’s Ark is a new project to refurbish a boat in Gaza’s port, then fill it with Palestinian goods, and set sail to export them in defiance of the Israeli blockade.

David Heap, spokesperson for Gaza’s Ark in Canada and Europe, told Peace News in late February, that the project, run by Palestinians and international solidarity activists, aims ‘to continue to challenge the inhuman, immoral blockade and to stand with the people of Gaza very concretely in their…

8 February 2013Letter

Surely the first point about Israel is that it is colonising and de facto annexing the occupied West Bank, contrary to the UN and international law. That, in my view, should be the immediate focus of pressure from outside and not the nature of the Israeli state around which debates can easily slip into anti-semitism.

I would suggest, secondly, that the peace movement and the left generally should stop making a cult of the Palestinians.

I say this because they are in…

8 February 2013Letter

The Peace News editorial comment on ‘Antisemitism, Zionism, BDS and PN’ (PN 2552-3) was thoughtful, informed and principled on the first two. That’s what makes its cack-footedness on boycott, divestment and sanctions so surprising. 

There are things the editorial simply got factually wrong. And then there are issues of political principle and practice. The incorrect facts are used to support the, in my view, wrong conclusions. Let’s start with the errors:

l The boycott…

5 February 2013Feature

Gill Knight has been doing solidarity work in Palestine for a number of years.  This autumn she helped bring in the olive crop.

The olive harvest, it’s not as romantic as it sounds, emailed my Aussie friend and fellow IWPSer before I set off for my second ‘tour’ volunteering with the International Women’s Peace Service, based in the village of Deir Istiya in the Salfit governate, in the West Bank.

And in a way my friend was right: gruelling sun, long hours in the sun, and a bit monotonous sometimes. Returning, eating and showering were all we were fit for, but there were clothes to hand-wash (olive-picking…

5 February 2013News

On 10 January, over 300 Palestinians set up camp in an Israeli-occupied area north-east of Jerusalem known as ‘E1’. The Israeli government recently authorised the expansion of a large Jewish settlement in E1, which will cut Palestinian East Jerusalem off from the West Bank and make a two-state solution impossible. 

The purpose of the Bab al-Shams (‘gate of the sun’) occupation was to create ‘facts on the ground’ by founding a Palestinian settlement on privately-owned Palestinian…

15 January 2013Blog

Is 'the Gate of the Sun' tent camp the beginning of a new form of non-violent resitence?

The jubilant celebrations I witnessed in Palestine when the UN General Assembly voted for an observer state status are in direct conflict with the grim reality on the ground.  All non-violent demonstrations that resist the occupation of Palestine are deemed illegal and suppressed by the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) – relabelled to reflect its real role as the Israeli Occupation Force (IOF). Any place where a demonstration…

1 December 2012Letter

On the long and extended train journey from Brighton to Liverpool I found the stomach to finally read the letter about my diary entry and I would like to support the editors in their response, primarily because the writer has specifically asked for a response.

On a very personal level, I feel more able to speak up at the moment because I am a really good jew, I go to synagogue every week, try to observe the Sabbath, love and am loved by a community that has been decimated. So, say…

1 December 2012News

Assassinated Hamas leading was contemplating truce with Israel, says Israeli peace activist.

The Israeli-initiated conflict over Gaza in mid-November, which left 105 Palestinian civilians and four Israeli civilians dead, began with the assassination of a hard-line Hamas military leader who was contemplating a long truce with Israel, according to a leading Israeli peace activist.

The assassination of Jaabari was a pre-emptive strike against the possibility of a long-term…

1 December 2012News in Brief

Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails continue hunger strikes against their indefinite detention without trial and against their conditions of imprisonment (see PN 2546).

On 21 November, Samer Issawi, on intermittent hunger strike for 118 days, began refusing water as well as food. His condition was unknown as PN went to press.

On 26 November, it was reported that Ayman Sharawna had declared…

1 December 2012Comment

PN's editors respond to criticism from a reader.

In the last issue of PN, a Jewish reader wrote that she was ‘often very surprised and saddened at the extent of the anti-Jewish feeling and writing in the political Left, and in Peace News particularly’. We promised to reply this issue.

Jen asked whether there was ‘a visible and vocal place for Jews (or Arabs and Gentiles) in the peace movements in general, and in Peace News in particular, who believe in a Jewish…