Milan Rai
There’s not a lot of things that have been important to me throughout my life, since I was 16. That was in 1982, when dinosaurs still roamed the Earth, next to the Berlin Wall.
I first bought, and started selling, Peace News when I was at school. Its vision of revolutionary anarcha-feminist nonviolence has had a deep and lasting impact on me.
It has been an enormous honour to have been co-editor, with Emily Johns, and then the sole editor of PN. Emily, you’re…
The Israeli government has no desire to reach a ceasefire/hostage-release agreement with Hamas and is leading the Middle East into ‘a comprehensive, multi-front confrontation with no reasonable timetable for ending it’. That’s not some Western peace activist’s view; that’s the opinion of former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert, writing in an Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, on 25 August.
Olmert wrote: ‘Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu does not want the hostages back. There is no chance…
New details have emerged in the last few months about the intensive talks, just weeks after the full Russian invasion of Ukraine, that came very close to ending the war in April 2022 with an ambitious peace agreement negotiated in Istanbul, Turkey.
Both the New York Times (15 June) and Foreign Affairs (on 16 April) have carried out major investigations, with access to the draft agreements shared between the two sides and interviews with figures on both sides and in…
Since December, PN has carried a series of reports by the Electronic Intifada gathering together evidence that a number of Israeli citizens were deliberately killed by the Israel defence forces on 7 October last year, during the Hamas-led attacks (see PNs 2669, 2670, 2671 - print editions only).
The weight of evidence has finally broken through into the mainstream British press, in the Telegraph and the Guardian.
A long story on this…
Netpol has published an important investigation into the policing of recent Gaza protests, which shows that racism is one cause of over-aggressive policing.
The stories of two women being arrested for carrying a placard with Arabic writing on it, and a man being arrested for wearing a green headband with Arab writing on it, are shocking (see p6).
This is partly about racism against people of colour and partly racism against Muslims.
There is, quite rightly, great public…
As I write, there’s a lot that still isn’t known about the assassination attempt – especially about the motivations of the shooter.
Many commentators believe that the events of 13 July in Butler, Pennsylvania, USA, have sealed the deal for the Republican presidential candidate.
The bullet that clipped Donald Trump’s ear, and which so very nearly killed him, will energise his supporters, bring undecideds in his direction, and make his opponents hesitate. The image of his…
Throughout the last six months, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has ‘repeatedly torpedoed’ the progress of ceasefire talks in the Gaza War – ‘particularly when it came to decisive moments’ – according to Haaretz, the left-liberal Israeli newspaper.
As we go to press, Netanyahu is continuing this pattern, undermining the latest attempted ‘breakthrough’ in the ceasefire talks with impossible demands designed to drive Hamas out of the negotiations.
Netanyahu’s…
During the five years that Jeremy Corbyn led Labour, there was a constant stream of damaging accusations that he was allowing anti-semitism to take hold of the party.
Asa Winstanley of the Electronic Intifada has put together a devastating exposé, documenting a co-ordinated smear campaign by the Israel lobby in the UK, in partnership with the Labour Right and the Israeli embassy.
The campaign was designed to halt criticism of the illegal Israeli occupation and to bring…
‘In a world built on violence, one must be a revolutionary before one can be a pacifist: in such a world a non-revolutionary pacifism is a contradiction in terms, a monstrosity.’ The words of US radical pacifist AJ Muste, who lived an astounding life of commitment, in 1928.
This powerful statement about pacifism and nonviolence comes from Muste’s classic September 1928 essay, ‘Pacifism and class war’. A radical Christian pacifist, Muste warned against the assumption that ‘violence is…
The day before the UK general election was called, the government advisor on political violence and disruption published a 294-page report on Protecting our Democracy from Coercion.
The main theme of the report by lord Walney (John Woodcock) was the need for the government, the courts, the crown prosecution service and the police to crack down harder on ‘extreme protest movements’ such as Palestine Action, Just Stop Oil (JSO) and the organisers of the recent Gaza ‘Ceasefire…
Hamas stunned the world by agreeing to an Israeli-US-Qatari-Egyptian ceasefire proposal on 6 May. Israel then refused to accept the ceasefire deal it had previously agreed – and immediately launched military attacks on Rafah in the south of Gaza, where over a million Palestinians had fled for safety from other, more devastated parts of the territory.
Earlier, on 30 April, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu had ‘said he would invade Rafah “with or without a deal,” a vow that…
I know that thousands of PN readers are eagerly waiting for my long review-essay about nonviolent revolution and the new-ish book Revolutionary Nonviolence. It’s like the starter pistol for the uprising that is going to change everything. But then... urgent repression news... Rishi Sunak announces the 4 July election... as we’re putting this issue together... mice, (wo)men.... The essay is just getting longer and better. I promise. Again.
This is the most militaristic election in a while. It’s started with a bang, with prime minister Rishi Sunak’s ‘national service’ proposal (see here) and it comes against the backdrop of eye-watering promises on military spending by both the main parties.
Labour leader Keir Starmer said on 11 April that a Labour government would increase military spending to 2.5 percent of national income ‘as soon…
In this issue, we look at some proposals for cracking down on protest, from lord Walney, the government’s advisor on political violence and disruption, in his report Protecting our Democracy from Coercion (see here).
Walney doesn’t actually deal with the major forms of arm-twisting that interfere with democracy in Britain.
Walney doesn’t, for example, make any proposals for how to stop…
In the general election campaign, every candidate for the Westminster parliament must be told that if they do not call for an immediate, permanent, ceasefire in Gaza, they will not receive your vote.
Out of all the crises and pressing issues in the world, the slaughter in Gaza must be the most urgent question of the British general election.
Both the Conservatives and Labour pretend to be calling for a ceasefire, but all they mean by that is a few weeks’ pause to get…
