Around 37,000 Palestinian teachers from across all the Occupied Territories — the West Bank and the Gaza Strip — were on their second one-day strike last week in support of a demand for higher salaries. Most teachers earn a paltry $400 per month. This has barely changed since the Israeli occupation began in 1967.
SOME 185 people came to the Palestine Solidarity Campaign annual general meeting in central London last Saturday. Speakers included Jeremy Corbyn MP and Tony Benn. Basim Sbaih from the Palestinian Political Prisoners Society spoke about the Israeli tactics of collective punishments and sieges, and the limits of Israel’s release of prisoners.
Amnesty International has just published a disturbing report on the plight of women in Iraq. The report reveals how sanctions, war and occupation have wiped out years of advances made by Iraqi women. Two years of war and occupation have driven women into the home, seen their jobs disappear and their rights eroded.
The first Palestinian election since 1996 has been greeted with a great international fanfare of publicity and a groundswell of expectations that it will usher in a new era of peace and stability, the attack on the Israeli checkpoint of Karni notwithstanding.
HERE’S AN example of a curb on freedom of expression that none of the mainstream media have covered—attempts by the student union at Leeds University to ban the activities of pro-Palestinian activists.
Yasser Arafat, who died on Thursday of last week, dominated the Palestinian struggle ever since his emergence as head of the national liberation movement in the late 1960s.
John Pilger once made an excellent documentary called Palestine is Still the Issue. The news that Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat is seriously ill, and has had to be flown for treatment to a Paris hospital, is a reminder that Pilger was right.
