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Hastings and District Palestine Solidarity Campaign
Newsletter 11 January 2025
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In this newsletter:
General Dynamics:
Support the trial of the #hastings3 - Wednesday 22 January 9.30
Protest at General Dynamics - Friday 24 January, 10am
Protest Rally Hastings Town Centre - Saturday 1 February, 12 noon
London demonstration - Saturday 18 January
Latest news from Al-Mawasi
Divest: East Sussex Pension Fund
Plus...Dates for your diary; local news and events; books for sale....
NO INFORMATION STALL THIS SATURDAY Due to poor weather forecast for this Saturday, the stall will be cancelled. But we plan to run the stalls on forthcoming Saturdays.
GENERAL DYNAMICS: STOP ARMS TO ISRAEL
 Israel has dropped 75,000 tonnes of explosives on Gaza - five times the power of the Hiroshima atomic bomb. General Dynamics, one of the biggest weapons companies in the world, makes many of these bombs, and right here in Hastings it has two factories making components for Israel's fighter planes and military communications systems. This year we plan to ratchet up our campaign against General Dynamics. Please support our upcoming actions.
Trial of the #Hastings3. Rally and Court Support
Wednesday 22 January 9.30 Brighton Magistrates Court, Edward Street BN2 0LG
While General Dynamics profits from Israel's war crimes ($3.3 billion in 2023), three local people who protested peacefully at the General Dynamics factory were arrested and charged with 'aggravated trespass.' Support the #Hastings3 at their trial and donate to legal costs.
More information (Facebook). The legal Fightng Fund.
Protest at General Dynamics, Castleham Road, Hastings TN38 9NJ Friday 24 January, 10am. More details to follow.
Protest Rally: Stop Arms to Israel from 'Genocide Dynamics' Hastings Town Centre, Wellington Place, TN34 1NN. Saturday 1 February, 12 noon. More details to follow.
NATIONAL DEMONSTRATION FOR PALESTINE: SATURDAY 18 JANUARY
 End the Genocide. Assemble 12 noon at BBC Portland Place, London. Catch the 10.31 Hastings train to London. If you would like to go but need help towards the cost of a ticket, contact us directly. We match donors with marchers. Please follow social media for the latest information, as the Metropolitan Police has made attempts to block the start of the march at the BBC. More information: PSC statement,
On the receiving end of the most barbaric, living hell of a genocide, the people of Al-Mawasi show that they won't give in, they won't be beaten. In no time at all they have finished building their bakery in a nearby bombed out building. The bakery will feed thousands with bread this winter and provide desperately needed employment to support several families. Most bakeries were destroyed by the Israeli military so there are very few working bakeries left and flour is scarce. We look forward to the first baked bread coming out of their oven.
 The next stage of the project is to repurpose another floor to create a space for recycling adult clothes into children's clothes. And the third stage is to build a classroom for students.
All this with some help from the folk of Hastings, Bexhill and from further afield. We smashed through our winter target of £10,000 through our Gifts for Gaza Winter Appeal along with other local fundraisers. Thanks to everyone who contributed and to everyone who worked so hard at our fundraiser stalls and other events. Just because we broke through our target, there's no need to stop there! Donations can still be paid to our Winter Appeal, by PayPal or at our stalls and meetings.

Jewish not Zionist: discussion with author and cofounder of Alternative Jewish Voices Marilyn Garson in New Zealand. Saturday 15 February 6pm-8pm. Seafront room, White Rock hotel, TN34 1JU. More information of Marilyn's book 'Jewish not Zionist' in our books section, below. Joint HJJ - HDPSC More details to follow.
Silenced, excluded, defamed and erased: Anti Palestinian Racism today with Dr Zahira Jaser. Saturday 22 February. 3pm at the White Rock Hotel. More details to follow.
PETITION TO EAST SUSSEX COUNTY COUNCIL: DIVEST FROM ISRAEL AND STOP SUPPORT FOR GENOCIDE
 "We, the undersigned, petition the council to divest the Local Government Pension Scheme (LGPS), and end procurement contracts, with companies enabling Israel's grave violations of Palestinian rights."
The printable version of the petition can be downloaded here. For more information contact Grace on the WhatsApp group or email us.
Please sign and share the petition:
PETITION - EAST SUSSEX COUNCIL: DIVEST
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, a number of 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. Thanks to Kay Green for providing us with Marilyn Garson's Jewish not Zionist.
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."
Jewish not Zionist by Marilyn Garson."What happens in Aotearoa-New Zealand when a Jew acknowledges Palestinians as her equals? What does anti-Zionist mean? For the first time, Jewish, not Zionist tells a very personal story of Aotearoa's Jewish solidarity with Palestine."
"As she unlearned Zionism, she uncovered a rich, outward-looking Jewishness. In her new book, she recounts her homecoming as a practising Jew seeking her faith community and justice for Palestine. Painfully excluded, she slowly constructed a liberatory Jewish identity - both activist and spiritual." Goodreads.
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.
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: 20 December 2024 15 December 2024 6 December 2024
Keep up to date with our website and social media:
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