In January 2004 Rudi Friedrich met Gush Shalom activist and member of the Refuser Parents Forum Adam Keller at his home. A few days earlier five refusers, Haggai Matar, Matan Kaminer, Noam Bahat, Adam Maor and Shimri Tzamaret were sentenced to prison terms of one year by a military court - after more than 14 months' detention already - for their refusal to “serve” in the Occupied Territories. Rudi asked Adam to discuss the situation and relevance of the refuser movement.
RF: How…
It is January 2004, the sun is shining and it feels like a warm day in Jerusalem. We are starting our journey early in the morning, to meet up with Ghassan Andoni from the Palestinian Centre For Rapprochement Between People, based in Beit Sahour. He has invited us to come to Bir Zeit, a Palestinian University close to Ramal-lah, where he is a professor of physics.
Ramallah is not far away from Jerusalem, just 20 kilometres. The town is located in the occupied territories and can…
In the face of the lack of progress in any official “peace process” in Israel/Palestine, there have recently been some unofficial proposals prepared - by peace campaigners or by less entrenched politicians on each side. The highest profile of these initiatives, the Geneva Accords, came from a group including former Israeli and Palestinian Authority ministers last November.
The aim was to provide a tangible demonstration that, contrary to Israeli claims, a partnership for Israeli-…
The principal focus of non-violent campaigns in Israel-Palestine is the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza strip. However, given the lack of symmetry between the situation of the Israelis (the occupiers), Palestinians (the occupied), and outsiders, actors from these different parties cannot apply similar roles and methods of intervention.
In this article, I will follow the categorisation offered by Amos Gvirtz, founder of Israelis and Palestinians for Nonviolence…
Bernard Shaw once said, “If you break a nation's nationality, it will think of nothing else but getting it set again. It will listen to no reformer, to no philosopher, to no preacher, until the demands of the nationalist are granted. It will attend to no business, however vital. Except the business of unification and liberation.” 1
Many Palestinians have conducted a non-violent campaign against the Israeli occupation, on the personal, NGO, political party, community…
One morning, during the recent invasion of Iraq, I was at home when I idly flipped the tv on.”Daytime tv!” I thought - haven't seen this for a good while. Expecting a banal chat, problem or quiz show. What I got was real time combat coverage from the British military's advance towards Basra. Real, live, war - and at 9.30am.
The Modest Manifesto - A Better World is Possible (1.2) “Neither Slave nor Master” - CamusWe need to start our manifesto with epistemology. Not just…
Many journalists enter their profession motivated by some idea, however vaguely defined, of doing some good in the world. Speaking truth to power; uncovering wrongdoing; bringing us the information we need to reach our own opinions, and make choices in a democracy.
Readers may find that idealism difficult to square with the journalism they meet in daily life. Various factors intercede between aspiration and reality - editors and reporters in different parts of the world are constrained…
This interview was conducted by email during October 2003.
PN: How and why did this project start, who is involved and what do you hope to achieve?
NP: We began the project after two years work on Electronic Intifada website, which has proved to be an effective tool in communicating a humanitarian perspective on the conflict.
We knew that Voices in the Wilderness would have people on the ground, and this perspective was the most important part of the site…
In recent years the German anti-nuclear movement has been quite successful in organising nonviolent actions against Castor-transports en route to the intermediary storagehall for nuclear waste in Gorleben/Wendland. This November the German government has again needed 13,000 policewomen and men to guard this eighth transport, containing 12 carriages of nuclear waste. About 3000 anti-nuclear protesters have again succeeded in showing that the struggle over nuclear energy is by no means over.…
When it all started, back in 1991, I could hardly imagine where it would end.
In the summer of 1991 we were just a handful of people concerned about inevitability of the coming war. For more than a year the situation was “cooking”, but it still looked as if a political agreement about the future of Yugoslavia could be reached. In the meantime, in fact since 1986 when Milosevic gained political power in Serbia, Serbian nationalism became political and received academic and media…
Sharman Sinaga's granddaughter looks bored as her grandfather demonstrates for the camera his favoured technique of market liberalisation: holding union activists upside down in flooded fields. He mimics their gargles as they choke in the mud. He could hold down two or three at a time he boasts; he seems faintly nostalgic in the dim light and the smoke; his only regret, that his arms and knees aren't what they used to be.
The orders to hold people upside-down came from the top, he…
Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines (RTLM) is the most recent and widely reported symbol of "hate radio" throughout the world. Its broadcasts, disseminating hate propaganda and inciting the murder of Tutsis and opponents to the regime, began on 8 July 1993, and greatly contributed to the 1994 genocide of hundreds of thousands.
RTLM, aided by the staff and facilitiesof Radio Rwanda, the government-owned station, called on the Hutu majority todestroy the Tutsi minority. The…
"The periodical graswurzelrevolution is the main voice of grassroots democratic activists." - Ralf Vandamme, social scientist. 1
"The group that has most consistentlytried to build a social rhizome and that comes closest to anarchist ethics is ...Non-violent Action. It is not by coincidence that this group's newspaper, amagazine with a relatively wide distribution, is called graswurzelrevolution…
The legacy of world domination by Western powers continues with further advances in military technologies. Far from resting on their deadly laurels, Western governments are still at the forefront of progress in the sector - and non-lethal weapons seem to be the next generation receiving research and development (R&D) funds. From sticky foam to malodorants and high-powered microwave weapons, increasingly sophisticated weapons will bring into line those who intend to challenge Western…
Although Brazil is not officially at war, the country has the one of the highest homicide rates in the world, with more than 35,000 firearm deaths every year. Brazilians are about four times more likely to die by firearms than the general world population.
Armed violence in urban Brazil is an epidemic, and we can think of guns as a vehicle of transmission that multiplies and aggravates violence; we can even identify the main risk group: young males from poor neighbourhoods (favelas…
The Defence Systems Equipment International (DSEi) is the highly-visible tip of a very large murky iceberg of UK government financial support for arms exports. Two years ago, in July 2001, the Oxford Research Group teamed up with Saferworld to publish The Subsidy Trap, which outlined how £420m of taxpayers' money was being used directly and indirectly annually to support the export of arms from Britain. That amounted to £4,600 for every job supported in defence…
One of the world's most famous arms dealers, Sam Cummings, said of the arms trade almost forty years ago: “It is almost a perpetual motion machine. We all agree that the arms race is a disaster, and we all agree that it could lead to an ultimate conflict, which would more or less destroy the civilised world as we know it. The old problem is, who is going to take the first move to really pull back?”
Since those days the Cold War order, and the omnipotent bipolar hostility that ruled…
Cheap, portable and readily available: every year more than half a million people are killed through the misuse of small arms such as handguns, assault rifles and grenades. Millions more are crippled. With poverty providing an ideal breeding ground for small arms proliferation, African countries are currently the worst hit by a global epidemic of armed violence which threatens the safety and well-being of people in developed and developing countries alike.
The human costs of small…
Since 9/11 the word “terror” has become known the world over-- its impact has become more vivid, glaring on us.
The television pictures of the air strikes on the “mighty” World Trade Centre, or some of the recent powerful explosions in many pockets of the world, turning human beings to disjointed bodies in a fraction of a second, are still very stunning to us. The sheer severity and suddenness of the incidents create a lasting impression in our minds. The magnitude and gravity of…
In 1991, during the first Gulf War, I joined an ad hoc demonstration to protest at president Bush's visit to the Andover, Massachusetts, Raytheon plant. Bush choppered in for a photo op of himself congratulating the workers for making the Patriot missile, while secular and religious activists did their best to rain on his bellicose parade.
This was my first demonstration at Raytheon, but hardly my first protest. I participated in long campaigns against the Trident submarine, made by…
