Letter to local press from Notts Friends of Standing Together supporters

Activists in our Notts branch have written to local and national newspapers setting out our vision for peace and equality.

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Every single Sunday in 2024, and so far this year, a group of Jews, Muslims, Christians and people of no faith has been holding a short vigil in Nottingham city centre calling for a ceasefire and hostage deal in Israel-Palestine.

We have shared grief at the huge losses and the devastation caused by the war. Our conversations with those passing by have shown a huge well of support for peacemaking in this city.

We welcome Wednesday’s announcement of a ceasefire and hope it will be permanent. However, a ceasefire alone is not enough.This country has fueled the war by selling arms to Israel.

We also called for an end to the occupation and for a political solution to the conflict. We called for aid to flow to the devastated land of Gaza. We work with the group Standing Together, a peace movement of Palestinian and Jewish citizens of Israel, which has regularly demonstrated against the war, collected huge amounts of aid for Gaza, worked for social justice for all the people of the area and an end to what seems like an endless war.

Prior to the massacre and hostage-taking on October 7 2023 there was not peace, but nothing that happened before October 7 justified the massacre on that day and however awful that was, it did not justify the daily bombings and mass killings that followed.

Gaza has been nearly destroyed, with four-fifths of the population internally displaced. The physical and environmental damage will take a generation to repair and the area is full of traumatised people.

Today’s announcement can only be a first step in creating peace in the region but we also need peace with justice.

Ross Bradshaw, Melissa Cowell, Julian Griffiths, Farheen Khan, Uta Khendek, Pete Radcliff, Albert Salimov and Adam Turner, on behalf of Nottingham Friends of Standing Together