Over the past month or so, in the wake of Israel’s brutal bombardment of Gaza, the UK’s student population has witnessed a widespread political awakening. Campus occupations or sit-ins have been staged at some 20 universities around the country, by hundreds if not thousands of students, demanding action to help the people of Gaza and an end to the complicity of UK educational institutions in Israel’s crimes.
On the evening of 28 January, around 200 students had just finished…
The purpose of writing a letter is that it should be read. This may sound obvious but it’s important to consider your letter from the point of view of the recipient. Someone once rang the West Midlands CND office asking us to complain to the Birmingham Post because his letter hadn’t been printed. When he told us how long it was, we knew exactly why! Start positively, by thanking or praising, if you can (not always possible). Keep letters short, clear and concise – you want them to be read. Be…
Khoza’a is a small rural community in the south of the Gaza Strip which endured a brutal incursion by Israeli ground forces on 13 January, indicative of so many attacks elsewhere in Gaza during the three weeks of “Operation Cast Lead”.
Heavy missile strikes preceded the ground offensive, which destroyed 50 homes and razed farmland. Homes with families inside them were attacked by military D-9 bulldozers .
A group of women and children carrying white flags attempted to leave…
In 1963 a young Gene Stoltzfus, Mennonite conscientious objector, found himself working with International Voluntary Services in Saigon, Vietnam. Daily faced with the carnage of the Vietnam war, he had to ask himself “whether I was as willing to die for my convictions as the Vietnamese and American soldiers all around me were being asked to do.”
His answer led him to a 45 year career in peacemaking, first with a succession of Mennonite organisations, and latterly as co-founder of…
19 January 2009: Dr Atallah, a physician in Gaza, invited us to meet him in his home in Gaza City, just a few blocks away from the Shifaa Hospital.
Early this morning, he and his family returned to their home after having fled five days earlier when the bombing attacks on Gaza City had become so fierce that they feared for their lives.
“Believe me, when I would drive from the hospital to the place where my family was staying, I prayed all the way,” said Dr Atallah, “…
Twelve British companies produce components, many of them essential, for the F-16 fighter jets and Apache helicopters that attacked Palestinians in the Gaza Strip last month, according to the Stop Arming Israel website.
Several of these UK-based companies produce critical parts used in the Apache aircraft. Among these are Agusta Westland in Yeovil and Redmayne in Hampshire (“Jesus nuts”), Senior Aerospace Baxter Woodhouse & Taylor (air duct systems) and Meggitt Avionics (air…
One of the most powerful lies of the current Palestinian crisis is the claim that “there is no partner for peace” – and that Hamas in particular is an irreconcilable fundamentalist force of destruction. The reality, successfully suppressed throughout the British media, is that Hamas has long offered a long-term truce with Israel on the basis of the 1967 borders.
In other words, Hamas (while pursuing many other objectionable policies) has for many years been in close proximity to…
Gaza desperately needs aid, but more than that it needs Israel to lift the near-total closure of Gaza’s borders, according to aid experts. Palestinian estimates of the cost of the first fortnight of the Israeli assault range from $976m to $1.7bn.
Even before the latest attack, Gaza was reeling from the effects of the Israeli blockade. Unemployment was nearly 50%, almost all of Gaza’s 3,900 manufacturers had been forced to shut down, 80% of drinking water was substandard,…
The new crimes that the US and Israel have been committing in Gaza in the past weeks do not fit easily into any standard category – except for the category of familiarity. Literally, the crimes fall under the official US government definition of “terrorism,” but that designation does not capture their enormity. They cannot be called “aggression,” because they are being conducted in occupied territory, as the US tacitly concedes.
In their comprehensive scholarly history of Israeli…
All day I’ve been thinking about Gaza, listening to reports on NPR [National Public Radio], following the news on the internet when I can spare a moment. I’ve been thinking about the friends I made there four years ago, and wondering how they are faring, and imagining their terror as the bombs fall on that giant open-air prison.
The Israeli ambassador speaks movingly of the terror felt by Israeli children as Hamas rockets explode in the night. I agree with him – that no child should…
In line with a lot of the mainstream media coverage on both sides of the Atlantic, the New York Times editorial on 30 December argued: “Hamas must bear responsibility for ending a six-month cease-fire this month with a barrage of rocket attacks into Israeli territory.”
However, this not only contradicted earlier reportage by Israeli newspapers (including Ha’aretz and Yediot Ahronot) and Amnesty International, but also that of the NYT itself: on 12 November, the paper reported that: “…
Over two-thirds of the British public want all British troops withdrawn from Afghanistan within 12 months, according to a new BBC poll. Meanwhile, five million Afghans are facing a winter of starvation because of “donor fatigue”.
The BBC/ICM poll, published to coincide with a 13 November Radio 4 debate on withdrawal from Afghanistan, met with a resounding silence from the political establishment, and the barest of mentions within the mainstream media.
The Ministry of Defence…
To illuminate the credit crunch and to find a new way forward, Peace News has chosen four recently-published books about the financial crisis.
Charles R Morris, The Trillion Dollar Meltdown (Perseus Publishing, 2008; ISBN 9781586485634; pp224; £10.99)
By summer 2007, the American banking policy of lending to house buyers with fragile repaying prospects caught up with itself, leaving American banks with up to $400 billion in lending commitments. Morris predicts that over…
The credit crunch exposed many of the failures of the capitalist system and made us question where to go from here to be rid of the free market’s stranglehold: it seems as if the “invisible hand” of the free market has broken a few fingers. So what other options are being explored? The co-operative movement is one means by which, some argue, workers may find labour equality: being one’s own boss and having equal ownership of an organisation.
To explore the co-operative option, Peace…
Anniversaries are daunting occasions. Inevitably judgements will be made, achievements weighed up and failures raked over – and CND’s 50th anniversary was no exception. Of course there are those who hasten to point out that Britain still has nuclear weapons, as if this is entirely due to our failure to campaign hard enough!
When this has been said to me, I have pointed out that there has also been the small matter of the balance of world forces, superpowers, the Cold War, and enormous…
This year saw some outstanding court victories, including a legal breakthrough in Nottingham on 14 January when 11 East Midlands activists were allowed to present a legal argument known as “defence of necessity”. They had shut down the Ratcliffe-on-Soar coal-fired power plant in 2007.
The big court wins of the year were the 10 September Kingsnorth Six victory, securing an acquittal on charges of causing £30,000 worth of damage to Kingsnorth power station, and the 11 June Raytheon…
Here we are, in a world of financial and economic pain, with millions of people around the world facing unemployment, reduced pensions, and reduced incomes, all because of the “credit crunch” – and most of us are still in the dark as to how it all happened.
I’m a classically-trained economist (B.Sc. (Econ.), University College London, class of 1986), and I have only the foggiest idea of what’s been happening. I don’t feel too bad about this, though.
Alan Greenspan used to…
One million Iraqis
The most-censored story of the year was the estimate by a reputable British polling agency that over 1,000,000 Iraqis had died violently as a result of the invasion and occupation.
The story started in September 2007, when the mainstream polling agency ORB (widely quoted six months earlier and six months later for their work on Iraqi attitudes to the occupation) published an estimate of the number of Iraqis who had died violently since the 2003 invasion.…
Reactions have been mixed to The Baader-Meinhof Complex, a new film encapsulating the history of the ruthless German urban guerrilla group. The Red Army Faction (RAF), founded in 1970, led by Andreas Baader and radical journalist Ulrike Meinhof, killed more than 30 people.
Meinhof’s daughter, journalist Bettina Roehl, has called the film’s portrayal of her mother’s crimes the “worst-case scenario”: “it would not be possible to top its hero worship.” “It glorifies brutal killers as…
Let me begin by saying what I think this crisis is not. It is not a financial crisis. It is a systemic crisis whose first serious symptom happened to be finance. But this crisis has its economic roots and its effects in manufacturing, services, and, to be sure, finance.
From 1820 to around 1970, 150 years, the average productivity of American workers went up each year. The average workers produced more stuff every year than they did the year before. They were trained better, they had…
