Israel/Palestine

See our publications on Israel/Palestine, and articles on fighting left antisemitism.

Bernie Sanders: "a horrendous catastrophe" in Gaza

Bernie Sanders is trying to force a vote to direct the U.S. State Department to look into whether Israel is using U.S. equipment or assistance to violate human rights in Gaza. He spoke to Jake Tapper on CNN about it on 14 January ( click here for video ). What is going on in Gaza right now is a horrendous humanitarian catastrophe. 23,000 people have been killed, almost 60,000 have been wounded, and two thirds of the people who have been killed are women and children. 70% of the housing units in Gaza have been destroyed. If I use the word Dresden, Germany, you think about the horrific...

We believe in joint struggle, an interview with Rula Daood

Rula Daood is National Co-Director of Standing Together, a grassroots movement mobilising Jewish and Palestinian citizens of Israel in pursuit of peace, equality, and social and climate justice: standing-together.org Rula spoke to Kelly Rogers. Rula Daood’s first foray into political activism took place in a bakery in the southern coastal city of Ashdod during the 2014 Israel-Gaza war. As the air raid siren sounded, she found herself surrounded by strangers. Picking up a copy of the Israeli daily Haaretz , she began to read an article about the situation facing children in Gaza. One of the...

A tribute to Vivian

Vivian Silver (1949-2023) was an Israeli peace activist and women’s rights activist. She spent much of her life campaigning for Palestinian freedom and an end to the occupation. She was killed during the Be’ere massacre by Hamas on October 7 2023. This tribute was first published on 14 November. Samah Salaime is a Palestinian feminist and writer. The last time I saw Vivian was in Washington, D.C., at an ad-hoc meeting of Palestinian and Israeli activists on the fringes of a conference. We met for a brainstorming session on the difficult question of how to revive our camp — the liberal-left...

Halt the war. Peace. Two states

On 14 January, Israel’s assault on Gaza passed its 100th day. At the time of writing, the death toll was nearing 24,000. According to Israel’s own statistics, around 66% of casualties have been civilians. Of those, a large proportion were children. The UN says around 60% of homes in Gaza have been destroyed. Some 80% of the population is now internally displaced. With healthcare infrastructure severely degraded, additional crises arising from homelessness and the spread of disease could lead to even more deaths than the direct Israeli attacks. Large street protests have taken place recently in...

We look to solidarity with the movement in Israel, not the ICJ

International pressure on Israel continues to mount, but with little visible impact on its military action. On 11-12 January South Africa brought a legal case to the International Court of Justice (ICJ), accusing Israel of perpetrating a genocide in Gaza. However it rules on the “genocide” question, the ICJ is likely to issue a ruling condemning Israel’s war and ordering it to cease. A comprehensive judgement could take years, but an interim ruling could come within weeks. A cease-and-desist order will be good, but the ICJ has no binding power. A 2022 cease-and-desist order on Russia’s war in...

Peace with a Palestinian state

Yesterday, I spoke with Dr. Khalil Shikaki, the most respected opinion pollster amongst the Palestinian people. I asked him about the Palestinian people’s views regarding the peace process in the 1990s. He answered that 85% of Palestinians supported the Oslo Accords and the two-state solution. He added that, after Netanyahu’s election, these support rates dropped by 10%, only for them to reach 85% again in 1999. These high rates of support were not at the beginning of the conflict. They came after the First Intifada, after the war in Lebanon, after the bloody wars, and after the terrible Nakba...

Stop and make peace

Dear friends, we are here in these difficult times, in this difficult and unbearable time in all of our lives, to say in the clearest way possible, that we demand, first and foremost, a ceasefire agreement that will release the hostages and stop the killing of innocent people in Gaza. We are here to say that only an agreement like this, a bilateral ceasefire agreement, will bring the hostages back alive. Only an agreement like this can stop the killing, the destruction, and the hatred. We are also here today to demand the only thing that will allow us to end the deathly status-quo, to stop the...

A joint struggle for peace and liberty

We Palestinians do not get a lot of acceptance, and I want to speak about that a bit. Because of that, I also wore my keffiyeh. It’s a demand for peace, for our people in Gaza. And then I thought, I don’t want to talk about numbers, about statistics. I refuse for our deaths, or our humanity as Palestinians, to be some kind of topic for debate. However many dead Palestinians is too many, and the numbers of innocent Palestinians that are dying is justification enough to say: let’s end the killing. Ceasefire now! [...] I’m here as a Palestinian woman, asking you to fight for the liberation of my...

Was 7 October an act of “decolonisation”?

Click here for talk by Camila Bassi We are told by Eve Tuck and K Wayne Yang, the authors of a landmark paper in postcolonial studies, Decolonisation is not a metaphor , that decolonisation is meant to be unsettling, since after all, its primary task is to re-invade and repatriate stolen Indigenous land and life. It is not a metaphor for other general improvements in education and society. On the 7th of October 2023, for some academics, this fantasy politics came alive and "decolonisation is not a metaphor" became a mantra, a mantra to celebrate the re-invasion of indigenous land and a mantra...

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