Israel-Palestine

On 11.30am, 12 December, two activists locked onto a concrete block inside Ahava, Covent Garden, while a protest took place outside, completely closing the store till 4.40pm, when police cutting teams arrived and arrested and removed the two.
Ahava is an Israeli company marketing products made from Dead Sea mud and minerals, extracted from a site in the occupied West Bank and processed in an illegal Israeli settlement. This was the third store closure.

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…

In 2001 legendary non-fiction cartoonist Joe Sacco travelled to Gaza on an assignment for Harper’s magazine to report on the fate of Palestinians in the town of Khan Younis during the second Intifada.

That visit prompted him to follow up a reference he’d read many years earlier in Noam Chomsky’s book The Fateful Triangle: a short quote from a UN document concerning a massacre in the town during the 1956 Suez Crisis, in which scores of unarmed men were shot in their homes or lined-up…

Bil’in

The small West Bank Palestinian village of Bil’in depends on agriculture for its livelihood, but since 1980 has lost some 60% of its farmland to illegal Israeli settlements and the illegal separation wall.

Bil’in’s response? For over four years, after Friday prayers each week, the Bil’in popular committee has organised a nonviolent walk to the wall, often with Israeli and international supporters, to demand access to its land, and has been stopped by Israeli troops…

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…

On 13 July the UK government announced that it had revoked five arms export licences to Israel, reportedly on the grounds that the exports breached “Consolidated EU and National Arms Export Licensing Criteria”.

These criteria state that arms exports should not be used for “internal repression” (although Gaza and the West Bank are not Israeli territory). These and other arms export licensing criteria have generally been ignored in relation to Israel, up till now.

The…

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…

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…

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…

In the wake of so much loss, grief and destruction, it is sometimes difficult to imagine how Gaza will ever recover. This is compounded by the fact that despite Israel’s massive assault officially ending in January, the Israeli military continues to attack the strip almost daily. Most of the international journalists have left and the international community considers the war as being over, but Palestinian civilians are still being killed and injured on a regular basis. Fishermen and…

More news on the disruption of the Israeli Jerusalem Quartet’s concert at the 2008 Edinburgh Festival (see PN 2502).

Campaigners from Scottish Palestine Solidarity (SPS) stopped the string quartet from playing several times during a concert in August 2008. They were protesting against Israel’s treatment of Palestinians and in support of a cultural boycott of Israel. Four were arrested and charged with “breach of the peace”. This charge was dropped, in favour of the more serious…

Part of a delegation from the European Parliament sent to report on the humanitarian situation in Gaza following 22 days of Israeli bombing, I prepared myself for the worst but the reality still shocked me. In parts of Gaza City whole streets had been reduced to rubble and survivors lived in tents on the sites of their former homes.

In the Al Hajaj house in Zeitoun, a young man told how his father and baby sister had been killed before his eyes when a bomb came through the roof. He…

The Free Gaza Movement is, at the time of going to press, preparing to break the Israeli siege on Gaza again. They hope to send a cargo ship (with building supplies and medical equipment), and a passenger boat (with at least 50 passengers), and are appealing for funds to enable this to happen. Whether or not they succeed in acquiring additional boats, they will be des Spirit of Humanity, which was turned back by Israeli gunboats in January, intends to depart for Gaza in mid-March.

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