I have just returned from a trip to Palestine with my solidarity choir, San Ghanny (‘We Shall Sing’ in Arabic) where we visited a farming community in the South Hebron hills called At Tuwani where we learned about their everyday lives and accompanied them in planting olive trees.
We planted olive trees on land owned by the community and immediately next to a fence marking off more land that used to be owned by the villagers, but has been stolen by the illegal Israeli settlement next…
On 7 April, scores of Palestinian and Israeli activists held a ‘Stop Annexing the Jordan Valley’ Freedom March organised by Combatants for Peace (CfP).
In the Jordan Valley, the Israeli government conducts live firing near Palestinian homes, deprives Palestinian farmers of water, restricts Palestinian sheep-herding, and demolishes Palestinian homes, while giving full support to illegal Israeli settlements.
The Freedom March went from a settler-only road to the Palestinian-…
On 19 May, 200 Palestinian and 200 Israeli women held ‘Grassroots Peace Negotiations’ in downtown Tel Aviv, Israel. The talks, organised by the Leon Charney Resolution Centre, aimed to formulate solutions to the conflict.
There have been dozens of such grassroots Palestinian-Israeli peace conferences over the years, many organised by ‘Minds for Peace’. The Israeli group held an Israeli-Palestinian ‘Congress of the People’, with perhaps 2,000 people, in Rabin Square, Tel Aviv, on 17…
On 27 March, two 19-year-old Israeli women, Tamar Zeevi and Tamar Alon, reported to Tel Hashomer army base and once again refused compulsory military service – because of their opposition to Israel’s actions in the West Bank.
By this point, both women had served five prison sentences and spent over 110 days in prison for refusing military service.
This time, Zeevi was given conscientious objector (CO) status and released, while Alon was sent back to jail.
Mesarvot, an…
The Palestinian Solidarity Campaign is sending a new legal opinion on the British government’s antisemitism definition to every public body in the UK.
According to British human rights lawyer Hugh Tomlinson QC, it would be illegal to cancel an event on the grounds that it criticises Israel.
In his view, the government’s own definition of antisemitism would require evidence that the event involved ‘hatred of Jews’.
Nonviolent Palestinian activists are facing a new wave of repression, demonstrating again that the Israeli authorities fear effective nonviolent action.
Israeli officials themselves know ‘we don’t do Gandhi very well’, as the then director of policy and political-military affairs at the Israel ministry of defence, major general (reserves) Amos Gilad, said in February 2010. Gilad, who retired in February after 14 years in that critical post, was talking to US officials about the…
On 3 March, Llandudno town council condemned the ‘inappropriate Zionist exploitation of Conwy HMD 2017’ and voted to cancel the grant it had allotted to one Roy Thurley for organising the event.
Every 27 January, the date that the Russian army liberated the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp in 1945, the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust asks people to ‘pause to remember the millions of people who have been murdered or whose lives have been changed beyond recognition during the Holocaust,…
On 11 November, Palestinian administrative detainees, Ahmad Abu Fara (29) and Anas Shadid (19) reached the fiftieth day of their hunger strikes to demand freedom from imprisonment without charge or trial. They were shackled hand and foot to hospital beds. Their lawyers lodged appeals to demand their release because of their deteriorating health.
Meanwhile, three brothers, Nour al-Din, Abdel-Salam and Nidal Omar, announced in mid-November that they had been on a co-ordinated hunger…
The Women’s Boat to Gaza campaign (see PN 2598–2599) has announced that it will continue to sail until Palestine is free, despite the seizure of its first vessel. On 5 October, two Israeli warships and four or five smaller boats surrounded the Zaytouna-Oliva in international waters and ordered it to stop sailing towards the Palestinian coast.
When the women-only boat continued its siege-breaking journey, the Israeli defence forces (IDF) boarded and commandeered the…
On 27 September, the Women’s Boat to Gaza (WBG) set sail in the boat Zaytouna-Oliva from its final port in Messina, Italy, to denounce and break the illegal Israeli blockade of Gaza. A second boat, the Amal-Hope II, was making final preparations and was scheduled to depart from Messina soon after. Both boats were expected to arrive…
On 25 August, 18-year-old Israeli conscientious objector Omri Baranes was finally accepted as a pacifist by an Israeli defence forces (IDF) committee and released from detention on conscientious grounds. She had served 67 days over three separate sentences. She is now exempt from military service.
Just over a month earlier, on 14 July, the IDF exempted Tair Kaminer, a 19-year old Israeli conscientious objector. She had received six successive sentences, amounting to 155 days…
On 11 September, Israel’s high court rejected petitions by human rights groups and the Israeli medical association (IMA) to quash a law the Israeli parliament passed last year permitting force-feeding against a prisoner’s will (if a doctor judges their life is in danger).
This flies in the face of the world medical association’s Malta Declaration that the practice is ‘never ethically acceptable’. The IMA abides by the Malta Declaration; so far no Palestinian hunger-striker has…
Zionism shows how an ideology can change over time with bad results (‘Behind Labour’s “anti-semitism crisis’, PN 2594–2595). In the 19th century, it was supported by socialists, communists and anarchists who went from the diaspora to Palestine. Their relationships with Palestinians were not perfect.
As the Stern-Weiner/Finkelstein article mentions, 1917 saw Lord Balfour’s ‘declaration’ which started to give traction to the state of Israel. It was part of the colonialist…
On 26 May, the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem announced it would end a decades-long policy of co-operating with the Israeli military justice system, saying it was a figleaf to legitimise the occupation.
In early July, the youngest Palestinian child held in administrative detention (without charge or trial), 16-year-old Hamza Hammed, originally detained by Israeli authorities on 28 February, had his detention extended for an additional four months.
On 13 June,…
Norman Finkelstein is no stranger to controversy. He is one of the world’s leading experts on the Israel-Palestine conflict and the political legacy of the Nazi Holocaust. Apart from his parents, every member of Finkelstein’s family, on both sides, was exterminated in the Nazi Holocaust.
His 2000 book, The Holocaust Industry became an international bestseller and touched off a firestorm of debate. But Finkelstein’s most recent political intervention came about by…
