On 24 April, Palestinian prisoners in Israel began a new open-ended hunger strike. The detainees are being held on rolling six-month administrative detention orders without charge or prospect of trial, and they are demanding their release on the grounds that they are being held in violation of international law, that they should be put on trial, and that there should be an end to the repeated renewal of detention orders.
At the time of…
On 19 March, two Palestinian prisoners suspended their 69-day hunger strikes after receiving assurances that they would be released within months. Muammar Banat and Akram Fasisi told Jawad Bulous of the Palestinian prisoner’s society that the Israeli authorities had finally agreed to set time limits for their administrative detention without trial: Banat must be released by May, and al-Fseisi by August.
The two were among six prisoners who had been on hunger strike since January and…
We are shocked at the current US campaign to rob a future Palestinian state of viability and genuine independence (see the front page interview with Norman Finkelstein).
The best case scenario in the foreseeable future for both Palestine and Israel is an authentic two-state solution which allows a Palestinian state on the 1967 ‘green line’ borders, meaning the West Bank , East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip. This means the evacuation of illegal Israeli settlements on the West Bank (…
On 31 January, about 300 Palestinian activists re-occupied Ein Hijleh, a village in the Jordan Valley that was forcibly depopulated when Israel occupied the West Bank in 1967.
The Palestinian popular struggle coordination committee, which organised the occupation, said the aim was to ‘refuse the political status quo, especially given futile negotiations destroying the rights of our people for liberation and claim to their land.’
During the occupation, activists began to make…
The village of Ein Hiljeh in the Jordan Valley was
reoccupied by Palestinian activists on 31 January.
Photo: Ryan Rodrick Beiler/Active Stills
The Middle East ‘peace’ negotiations being led by US secretary of state John Kerry will (unless there is significant resistance in Palestine itself) shortly demolish the international consensus on resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and impose a devastating ‘framework agreement’ that will turn the…
Since September 2000, Israeli security forces have killed a Palestinian child every three days, on average. Estimates of the death toll among Palestinian children range from 1,398 (children’s charity, Defence for Children International) to 1,518 (the Palestinian ministry of information in Ramallah). Richard Falk, the UN Special Rapporteur for Human Rights in the occupied Palestinian territories, stated in May 2011 that Israeli forces had killed 1,335 children in the…
Women in Black vigil in Jerusalem. Photo:Pat Gaffney
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.
That changed in 1999 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…
Palestinians and Israelis at the negotiating table in a town square.
Photo: Minds of Peace
Alongside official peace talks between Israeli and Palestinian negotiators which never seem to get anywhere, a group called ‘Minds of Peace’ has for over a year been carrying out what it describes as a ‘campaign of grassroots Israeli-Palestinian negotiations on the streets and public squares of Jerusalem’ and other cities.
…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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
