Palestine Follow

THE Marxist economist Michael Kidron, who died last week at the age of 72, made an enormous contribution to the Socialist Workers Party's development during the early years of our tradition in the 1950s and 1960s. Born in Cape Town in 1930, Mike emigrated after the Second World War to Palestine, where he became an anti-Zionist socialist. He moved to Britain in the mid-1950s.

WORKERS AT the BBC are fighting against the sacking of journalists Adli Hawwari and Adbul Hadi Jiad from the World Service. The journalists are Iraqi and Palestinian. Around 60 reps from the journalists' NUJ union met in London last week. They voted unanimously to condemn the management's dismissal of the two workers and to call for action.

WHAT IS going on at BBC headquarters, Bush House? Two World Service journalists were sacked last week. Adli Hawwari is a Palestinian. Abdul-Hadi Jiad is an Iraqi.

An attack on Iraq will lead to more instability in the Middle East.

BETWEEN 1987 and 1992 Palestinian youth undertook a heroic uprising-the first intifada-against their Israeli oppressors. Towards the end of this period the journalist and artist Joe Sacco took himself to the West Bank and Gaza to try to understand what was happening.

THE BITTER and bloody Israeli-Palestinian conflict is, you would imagine, hardly the subject for satire. Palestinian film-maker Elia Suleiman has achieved the impossible with his latest film Divine Interventions. It presents a funny and profound look at the situation.

SOME 400 delegates gathered in Ramallah on 27 December for the World Social Forum on Palestine. Encircled by Israeli roadblocks and checkpoints, Ramallah feels distant from Bethlehem and Jerusalem, let alone the world beyond the West Bank.

TWO IMPORTANT social forums took place at the end of last month. Activists met at the Palestine Social Forum in Ramallah, which is under Israeli occupation. It called for support for the international day of action against the war on Iraq on 15 February.

NEARLY 200 people took part in a debate at Edinburgh University last week on the prospects for peace in the Middle East. It was organised by the student society People & Planet. John Chalcraft, an Edinburgh politics lecturer, and Chris Doyle, from CAABU (Council for the Advancement of Arab-British Understanding), explained why Palestinians had rejected the "peace offers".

AROUND 500 protesters marched in Oxford last Saturday against war on Iraq and for justice for the Palestinians. People of all religions, political orientations and ages united in a display of resistance and solidarity, led by a brilliant band of student musicians. At the rally afterwards there was a determination to build for the European day of action on 15 February. Mike Cotgrave

IMAGINE IF an unarmed United Nations official was shot by Iraqi troops while he was inside a UN compound in Baghdad. Imagine if the Iraqi army then delayed an ambulance taking the official to hospital and the man died as a result.

End silence on new apartheid ALONG WITH five other members of my trade union, the rail workers' TSSA, I have just returned from a fact-finding visit to the Palestinian West Bank and Gaza Strip. We witnessed a frightening expansion of settlements and "Jewish only" roads linking these settlements.