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Hastings and District Palestine Solidarity Campaign
Newsletter 15 November 2024
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In this newsletter:
This weekend's activities: Saturday's Stop Arming Israel protest; Sunday's Campaign Planning Meeting; Sunday's table-top sale.
Saturday 23 November 7.30 - Poetry for Palestine Fundraiser
Saturday 30 November - National Demonstration for London
Divest: East Sussex County Council
What happened at Amsterdam?
Plus...Dates for your diary; Gifts for Gaza, local news; books for sale....
ACTIONS FOR PALESTINE: CAMPAIGN PLANNING MEETING
Sunday 17 November, 3pm - 6pm. Seafront Room, White Rock Hotel, TN34 1JU.
Please join us for a training and planning session to prepare for our next round of campaign actions. Whether it be protests at the General Dynamics arms factory, Barclays, peace camps or marches, we hope to step up our actions for Palestine.
This session will be a chance for us to discuss the next actions we want to organise, the values and principles that guide us, including principles of non-violent direct action (NVDA), and the different roles people can play in organising, supporting, and participating directly in actions. We need everyone's input, whether you are totally new to protest or a long-time campaigner - the more people who get involved, the more ambitious and effective our protests can be!
Please sign yourself up as 'Going' to this Facebook event page or email us so we can plan for the right number of people to expect on the day. We look forward to seeing you there.
REMINDER: BARCLAYS BANK: STOP BANKING ON GENOCIDE
Saturday 16 November 11am - 1pm. Barclays Bank, Queens Road, Hastings TN34 1QP
Barclays has £2 billion invested in companies that supply armaments for Israel's genocidal policies. This includes over £100 million in General Dynamics,
Please join us tomorrow for an action that vividly illustrates the ongoing dehumanisation of Palestinians. A clue is in the image below - we will be linking different aspects of Israel's genocidal policies: it's destruction of Gazan infrastructure, its attacks on civilian life including the increase in its imprisonment of civilians with documentation of widespread torture. More than 11,000 Palestinians are presently in Israeli prisons
Sunday 17 November 1.30pm - 3pm. West Hill Centre TN34 3JT. Sunday's table-top sale for the El Tibi family in Gaza. Hadeel, her husband and 3 children lost their home in the war on Gaza. The online fundraiser.
POETRY FOR PALESTINE OPEN MIC NIGHT - AN AL-MAWASI FUNDRAISER
Saturday 23 November 7.30pm. The Downstairs Bar, White Rock Hotel TN34 1JU
Poetry For Palestine - Poetry Open Mic Night. Fundraiser for the Al-Mawasi community. Tickets are £10 and £15. Tickets available at the door, online tickets available at Eventbrite and more information at our Facebook page.
Readings will take place from 7.30pm to 9.30pm, followed by Afrobeats and vintage West-African sounds from DJ Sam Ye Ye 9.30pm - 11pm.
WORKPLACE DAY OF ACTION
THURSDAY 28 NOVEMBER
Take action to call for an end to government and corporate complicity in Israel's atrocities. "Discuss with your colleagues in your branch about what kind of action is best suited to your workplace and its circumstances." Take action in your workplace.
NATIONAL DEMONSTRATION FOR PALESTINE: SATURDAY 30 NOVEMBER
End the Genocide - Hands Off Lebanon - Don't Attack Iran - Stop Arming Israel. Central London. Details to follow.
DIVEST: EAST SUSSEX COUNTY COUNCIL
A big thank you to everyone who recently sent in questions to the County Council demanding that the £4.8 billion (85,000 member) pension fund divest from companies complicit in Israel's war crimes. 48 were sent in. One of our members was able to ask a supplementary question before the Council. It is clear from the answer from the Pension Committee that it is unwilling to take on board the concerns of many local people. The majority of the points mentioned weren't answered; with no response to the important issue of international law.
The next part of the campaign is the petition to the Council. When enough signatures have been taken, the full Council is obliged to discuss it. In the meanwhile we are circulating information about the Pension Fund and its contents to the wider public so as to gain a stronger opposition to it. It's encouraging that the Waltham Forest pension fund has announced its intention to pull out of armaments companies that supply the Israeli military and the Islington pension fund has announced its commitment to divest from companies involved in illegal settlement activity in the occupied West Bank.
PETITION - EAST SUSSEX COUNCIL: DIVEST
WHAT HAPPENED AT AMSTERDAM?
The corporate media turned reality on its head in the case of the recent attacks by Israeli Maccabi soccer fans in Amsterdam. Videos of them attacking Dutch people, beating up Middle Eastern taxi drivers, carrying out vandalism using iron bars, celebrating the genocide in Gaza and chanting racist anti-Arab slogans were circulating online.
This wasn't reflected in the corporate news, with the exception of one report on Sky News. But this report was removed and reuploaded with selective edits which erased crucial context to overwhelmingly portray Maccabi fans as the victims.
It's worth watching this comprehensive analysis of the events made by Double Down News (YouTube).
Complain to Ofcom about Sky News' recent cover up of the violence perpetrated by Israeli football fans in Amsterdam. This is the PSC e-action to demand Ofcom immediately investigates the precise circumstances and wider context which led to the editing of the Sky News report.
PSC'S OFCOM COMPLAINT ABOUT SKY NEWS
GIFTS FOR GAZA - WINTER APPEAL
Thousands of displaced families are living in tents in Al Mawasi in Gaza with no means of supporting themselves. The Al Mawasi Community Resilience Committee is helping to support huge numbers of refugees now living there by distributing food, clothes and hygiene products. But the ongoing siege has forced prices sky high and aid is scarce.
If you are considering buying gifts this winter, please consider also giving a Gift for Gaza either in your name, or on behalf of a loved one. For more details go to our gofundme Gifts for Gaza page.
You can also buy Gift For Gaza gift cards from our weekly Saturday stall in Hastings town centre or at Stooge Coffee on Trinity Street in Hastings.
ONLINE WELLBEING SESSIONS
Clinical hypnotherapist Chris Dindar is running 30 min relaxation sessions to help decompress, process our emotions, and find a moment of peace and deep relaxation amidst the chaos. Chris is offering his services for free, as a token of his solidarity, to help nurture the well-being of our local group and maintain our collective resolve.
Please email Chris directly if interested in taking part. The sessions are the 1st and 3rd Friday of the month at 12 noon.
BOOKS AVAILABLE AT OUR STALLS AND MEETINGS
 
 
Now available at our stall, five great books to deepen our knowledge of the history of Palestine and Israel. We're grateful to Lee at Printed Matter in Hastings, for generously discounting the price for us in support of the work of PSC.
A Very Short History of the Israel-Palestine Conflict by lan Pappé. (Oneworld Publications 2024) £9. 'A Very Short History of the Israel-Palestine Conflict is the best primer available on one of the world's most persistent settler-colonial tragedies. Amid the carnage of the Gaza genocide, it is essential to listen to Ilan Pappe, a preeminent historian of the Middle East, and a heroic scholar committed to justice and freedom.' Abdel Razzaq Takriti, Arab-American Educational Foundation Chair in Arab Studies.
One State - The Only Democratic Future for Palestine-Israel by Ghada Karmi. £12. This profound and important analysis of the future for Israel-Palestine has never felt more necessary or urgent. Ghada Karmi, whose family were exiled to Britain during the 1948 Nakba, makes the powerful case here for uniting the land to create a just future for all Palestinians and Israelis, and allowing the Palestinian right of return.
The best-selling author of In Search of Fatima has lost none of her eloquence in this bold and engaging treatise which lays out the instability at the heart of the Zionist state, examines its impact across the region, and analyzes the decades of work to present a workable 'solution,'
In the end she is unequivocal in her view that, however impossible it may appear, the current apartheid ethnocentric state will be replaced by one democratic state, asserting: "The fact that something is difficult to realise does not make it any less the right thing to do."
And, moreover, the concept itself must be long-established "not as an immediately attainable goal perhaps, but as a vision, an aspiration and a belief in the ultimate humanity of Palestinians and Jews and all those who wish to see them prosper."
In Search of Fatima: A Palestinian Story by Ghada Karmi (Verso Books) £12."A captivating Memoir of a middle class Palestinian family, one of more than 700,000 Palestinians uprooted and displaced from their historic homeland, Palestine, in 1948. In this memoir Ms. Karmi has documented a sample of the continuing suffering and injustice brought upon the Palestinian People by the creation of the Illegitimate State of Israel. While expressing the complex social and cultural feelings, hardships, and struggles in coping with the brutality of displacement and diaspora, Ms. Karmi remains optimistic and hopeful that Justice and Right will prevail.
This book must be read by young Palestinians, Israelis, Americans, Europeans, and Arabs, to truly understand and appreciate the only solution that will bring a lasting Peace in Palestine."
The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Oneworld, 2007) £13 by Ilan Pappé, renowned Israeli historian, scholar and author who was forced from his position at the University of Haifa after publishing this book, and is now Professor of History and Director of the European Centre for Palestine Studies at the University of Exeter. In this book he exposes the facts behind the Nakba of 1948 with meticulous research into Israeli archival documents, making clear that ridding the land of its Palestinian inhabitants was always central to the founding of the State of Israel.
The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917-2017, Rashid Khalidi (Profile Books, 2020) £12. Khalidi is Palestinian American and the Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University in New York City. He tells this history from the perspective of his own prominent Jerusalem Muslim family using his family's extensive archives in Jerusalem, along with multiple other sources, documenting the extensive Palestinian resistance to colonization that began with the arrival of European Jews to Palestine and has continued to the present.
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PALESTINE - ISRAEL: FROM A DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVE
Much of the 'information' in the corporate media is misleading. Here are some useful sources:
Middle East Eye. Electronic Intifada. Al Jazeera. Middle East Monitor.
Mondoweiss. Palestine Chronicle. Al Mayadeen. Mintpress. The Grayzone.
The Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor. Jonathan Cook.
The Cradle. MediaLens. Declassified UK.
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Hastings and District PSC online membership and donations
Becoming a member of Hastings and District PSC is an important way of supporting our work.The annual subscription is £10 waged, £5 unwaged. We now have an online membership payment form. It can also be used to renew membership. If you would rather not use Paypal, you can pay directly to our bank: please contact us for the details. Or alternatively pay at one of our events.
The work of Hastings and District PSC could not continue without the donations from members of the public. If you would like to support our work without becoming a member please visit our shop page here and see the right hand column:
Donate to Hastings and District PSC.
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Recent Hastings and District PSC newsletters:
6 November 2024
25 October 2024
18 October 2024
Keep up to date with our website and social media:
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