There was a time when such a list would never have occurred to her. It was only after getting involved in New Profile’s youth group that she began to notice these things, to understand how the military had saturated the civilian realm.

New Profile (NP) was established just over a decade ago as the first Israeli political group with demilitarisation as its top priority. Its two main areas of work are around military enlistment – encouraging young people to think before enlisting and supporting those who decide to refuse – and educating about militarism. A current travelling exhibition features images alongside questions that expose militarism. There is a photo of a roundabout in Be’er Sheva. At its centre is a fighter jet; one of a number the previous mayor had chosen to decorate his city with. The text alongside asks: ‘Where have all the flowers gone?’

Long-time NP member Diana Dolev explains the importance of her work on the education team: ‘If you speak to people in Israel, Jews in Israel, and you point out that we are a militarised society, they’re shocked, they say “We, militarised?” It’s so much a part of our everyday life that we can’t see it … militarised mindsets are so deep rooted; it is like part of us.’

Her point is proved on the bus journey to my next NP interview when a conscript, surprised by my accent, asks where I am going (he proudly tells me he is visiting the hospital for an injury incurred in military service, before sheepishly elaborating that it is RSI from excessive computer use). I describe NP, showing him their leaflets. His reaction is a mixture of amusement, confusion and disbelief.

He completely rejects the idea of even asking ‘Should I enlist?’ and that the militarisation of Israeli society could be a topic of discussion. He also refuses to accept what I tell him a friend of mine reported from the aftermath of Operation Cast Lead in Gaza: thousands of chickens systematically bulldozed.

‘But he was there, he saw it with his own eyes, he took photos.’

‘No, that didn’t happen,’ he laughs. As with his reaction to NP, he completely identifies with the military; the military is unquestionable and always right. His is a militarised mindset.

Even a picnic basket

Similarly, the militarisation of everyday life, especially family life, takes on a habitual, unquestioned character, while being essential to the functioning of the army. Cynthia Enloe, a feminist international relations theorist, writes that even ‘making up a picnic basket can be militarised if it is packed with the intention of keeping up the morale of a soldier.’

Michal Gelbart talks me through the NP exhibition, which she helped put together. One of the pictures is an advert for bread yeast, with a mother and son and text that reads: ‘When my boy is home on his ordinary leave, he deserves extraordinary pastry.’

‘The mother is mobilised, we are all the time, from when they are small,’ she elaborates. ‘You go after them everywhere and you bring the schnitzels and all kinds of food. Now I’m aware of being mobilised, the whole society is mobilised around it.’

If militarism sustains the occupation and war, demilitarisation becomes an important anti-occupation and anti-war strategy. But for NP it is also distinctly feminist. While strains of Israeli feminism promote women’s enthusiastic entry and achievement in the military as demonstrative of their equal worth and as a path to societal equality, there is a more inclusive feminism present in NP.

‘When I told my mother I was going to resist the draft because I’m a feminist, she said, “If you’re a feminist, go be a fighter pilot,”‘ writes Shani Werner, another NP activist. ‘People tend to see feminism as an attempt to prove that “we can do it too”. They don’t get the message that means the most to me: feminism is a struggle against oppression. All oppression.’

‘It’s about demilitarising Israeli society in order to end the occupation but also to stop doing all the other terrible things that we do to our own citizens,’ Ruth Hiller, NP co-founder, tells me. ‘We don’t provide equality for women, Mizrahim [Jews of Middle Eastern descent], Ethiopian citizens, the Arab population, the handicapped …’

Much of that inequality stems from the unchallenged centrality of the military in Israeli society; the military is the institution through which you earn power and economic opportunity in civilian spheres. And since able-bodied, Ashkenazi (Jews of European descent) men dominate the combat units, home to the most valued roles in the army, they also dominate Israeli society.

The vision of feminist-as-fighter-pilot is not a solution, Orna Sasson-Levy of Bar Ilan University emphasises: ‘What I find in my research is that even when the army is trying to create an equal-opportunity environment, the culture is so gendered, so masculine that women cannot achieve an equal place without completely co-operating with its chauvinistic structure and reproducing it in their behaviour towards other women.’

‘When we’re talking about militarised, we’re also talking about patriarchal,’ Ruth Hiller argues. ‘Women do not have the same kind of input or the same sort of influence on society. Who are our prime ministers, who are our ministers? How many of them are from the military, how many of them are commanding officers? Why is it that in this country that has 51 per cent of the population women there are not even 30 Knesset [Israeli parliament] women?’

Something among men

Diana Dolev recounts to me a lunch with friends shortly after the attack on Gaza. She told them she had been against it right from the beginning. Her host said that was nonsense, everybody was for it in the first few days and then turned to her husband and started talking about the rights and wrongs of the attack. ‘It was like I didn’t exist because what I have to say is not as important. I see this happening all the time – war matters and high politics, that’s something among men, they understand better.’

‘The military creates a mindset where women are worth less,’ she concludes. Michal Gelbart had noted to me that it’s never a female soldier or a daughter who ‘deserves an extraordinary pastry’. The worth-less mindset also translates into lower pay for the same work and fewer opportunities for highly paid, high-status professions.

Hiller believes that soldiers in the occupied West Bank don’t leave their aggression at the checkpoint; they bring it back home. Indeed, when I explain to Or Ben-David that that my militarism article will be focused on women, she leans across the table, wide-eyed and animated: ‘I want to tell you about the women I met in [military] prison … There was one woman who had been in the jail for two months and didn’t want to leave; her boyfriend had beaten her for four years. I don’t know if you can really blame it on the army … but it is, it is the army.’

‘A militarised society altogether believes in force,’ Dolev says. ‘The first idea that comes into people’s heads of how to solve a problem is by force, no negotiating, no listening to the other side – no, you solve things by force. You see this everywhere in Israel.’

She admits that the process of educating a society into demilitarisation will be difficult and slow going, but she and New Profile believe it is possible. As Cynthia Enloe put it, ‘The world is something that has been made; therefore it can be remade.’

There is much that feminists today can learn from their daring. Their scope of ideas and action was gloriously wide ranging and radical: they sought the complete transformation of the home, of the relations of production and of reproduction, of the very nature of work, of themselves as individuals and as a sex. They made connections between situations – their consumption and the sweatshops that enabled it; between struggles – anti-sexism and anti-racism; and between the illusory public and private spheres – home economics opened up a new critique of the capitalist economy.

Rowbotham is excellent at translating their energy onto the page; and so, while noting setbacks and shortcomings, the overall feel of the book is celebratory (a crucial rebalancing act given the extent to which women’s role in history-making has been marginalised and even forgotten) and joyful. There were several occasions where I became so caught up in the women’s dreamy envisioning that it was almost jarring to close the book and find myself back in a world where so many of those dreams have been co-opted or left unrealised.

And then it’s Rowbotham’s conclusion that becomes most relevant. Writing that ‘perhaps this faith in possibility is their most precious legacy’, she quotes the ‘redoubtable’ Lois Waisbrooker (an American writer, campaigner and former servant, but that description doesn’t do her justice – read the book): ‘The first step … is to believe that it can be done; the next that it will be done, and lastly to determine to do it ourselves.’

Sharyn Lock entered Gaza as an International Solidarity Movement activist on a Free Gaza Movement boat. As a volunteer with the Red Crescent, she was at the centre of that horror and humanity. The medical services epitomise the pile-up of pain in Gaza. Already under strain from siege, they then have to contend with an insane and impossible mass of casualties; and as they do so, themselves come under direct attack by bullets, missiles and white phosphorus.

Being a blog-to-book enterprise, Gaza: Beneath the Bombs has its drawbacks. Entries jarringly alternate between tenses and it lacks an overarching narrative to pull the reader from page to page. This is not to suggest that Lock’s priority should be distilling Palestinian suffering into an easy literary experience but that readability is a key means to a vital end here: these stories so deserve and need to be read, and read widely.

The drawbacks are, however, a reasonable price to pay for the blog-to-book benefits. Lock kept her diary on a near-daily basis. She didn’t have time to step back and embellish; she simply tells us what she saw and what she heard that day. The spare adjectives, the spare emotion even (in a state of shock, Lock doesn’t cry over the corpses of children; she is without fear in terrifying circumstances), strips away the author and places us, the readers, in Gaza.

We fill in the adjectives, we feel the emotion. We also get lovely quotidian details, little asides that reveal big Palestinian generosity and Gazan humour. And so significant are these details when Israel’s actions rely on (and perpetuate) the dehumanisation of Gazans.

Pick up this book, read it, fold over the pages that tug and go re-tell those tales.

The King’s Heath neighbourhood streets scheduled for today’s outing are mixed: roughly half white, half Asian – Sikh, Hindu and Muslim. She switches neatly between Urdu and English, depending on who comes to the door, but each time her message remains more-or-less the same. She grew up in a house around the corner and so there are a handful of shared school-day anecdotes. But she is surprised at the wider and warm recognition she is getting, with many more people interrupting her doorstep introduction with, ‘Oh yes, I know you; I’ve seen you on Question Time.’

Yaqoob sums up people’s impressions of Respect, the party she has represented as a Birmingham councillor since 2006, as ‘up until recently: George Galloway, Muslims, war’. Ger Francis, her campaign manager, agrees: ‘Everyone knows we’re anti-war, what they don’t know are the other things we support.’ Other than troops out, the policy priorities on today’s leaflets are investment not cuts, a green new deal and anti-racism. Francis explains the major challenge as overcoming people’s misconception of Respect as the party of the Muslim community, a misconception that excludes 84 per cent of Birmingham’s population. The strategy is simply to explain what they stand for.

This is exactly what Yaqoob is doing on the doorsteps (‘We’re against cutting public services – it wasn’t us who caused the recession, it was the bankers, but they’re the ones getting the bonuses!’) and it seems to be working well. One young white man we bump into becomes an instant on-the-street convert: ‘I want a bit of change. I’ll do that, I’ll vote for you, love. Pleasure to meet you!’

Yaqoob’s doorstep sell includes the Green Party endorsement (the Greens stepped down in this constituency to back her), which she hopes will ‘reinforce our progressive message and reassure voters, stop them putting us in a box’.

The Respect canvassers are also making certain they talk about local concerns. Mohammad Ishtiaq, a local councillor, explains: ‘Last time we spoke too much about international issues and got slammed for not talking enough about local issues, so now we’re trying to get the balance of local/global.’ At the top of the leaflets is a declaration against cuts in council jobs and services, to be paid for by a small council tax increase for the richest. The fight to save Sparkhill baths in Springfield ward is going down well – and so too is Yaqoob’s impromptu anti-litter petition after residents of the street we are doorstepping complain about rubbish from the new takeaways.

At the canvassers’ meeting afterwards the volunteers relay their, mostly positive, feedback. Eugene Egan signed up as a volunteer after seeing Yaqoob on the television. ‘I thought she’d done brilliant; this is someone who can change things,’ he says.

‘My mother didn’t like it, because she’s narrow minded,’ he adds, laughing. He is clearly excited to be part of the action. He reports to the room warm response to Yaqoob ‘mostly from what I’d call the white Christian type people’. This aligns with the experience of a young Asian activist who exclaims, ‘The white people were nicer to us than the Asians!’

The other patterns that surprise the canvassers are the almost absolute absence of people professing other party ties, but at the same time voters’ ‘repoliticisation’ – their eagerness to engage with and talk about the issues.

They plan to step up the canvassing; the goal is to knock on every door in the constituency. Yaqoob ‘doesn’t like how other parties in the constituency have operated, leaving out white working class communities that then don’t get heard’. Nor does she have time for the cynicism of politicians who assume the white working class is racist. Her experience, she says, is one of being warmly received by people who ‘just want to be listened to, to know somebody cares’.

Reaching beyond the muesli eaters

Some 200 miles south, Brighton Pavilion, with its bohemian culture and penchant for the alternative, is an obvious choice for Caroline Lucas’s parliamentary bid. A specially commissioned ICM poll in December gave her Green Party an eight-point lead over the Tories and ten over Labour. And when I visit for their weekly action day a couple of months later, the volunteers are quite giddily excited with possibility, chirpily recounting the positive feedback they’ve been getting from voters.

A more recent, controversial poll told a different story, putting the Greens in third place, so unhatched chickens certainly shouldn’t be counted. But there’s a real chance, if the election campaign goes well, that Lucas could be Britain’s first Green MP.

Paul Steedman, a councillor for Brighton’s Queen’s Park ward and the Greens’ general election campaign manager, is keen to emphasise what he calls the ‘Brighton factor’: a sense of independence, a desire to try something fresh and exciting, wanting to be the first. The key to success, though, will be reaching out beyond Brighton’s centre – all quirky, independent shops and middle-class muesli eaters – and mobilising working class support.

Steedman doesn’t see a barrier here. He says the party has shown that it can get support from all sections of society (it now has 13 councillors in Brighton and Hove) once people see that it isn’t just interested in abstract issues, such as peace and the environment, but is ‘delivering real things to real people’.

Lewisham Deptford doesn’t have its equivalent of Steedman’s ‘Brighton factor’ and its demographics are vastly different: it’s a lot more working class, a lot less white. Still, the Greens began to make inroads here by mobilising ‘the white middle-class Guardian readers in the conservation areas,’ as parliamentary candidate Darren Johnson puts it. It took five years for him to become the first Green councillor in the borough and begin to amass support among working class and ethnic minority voters.

‘I’m not from a middle-class Guardian reading household,’ Johnson tells me. ‘I joined the party aged 20 and as a working class boy it was a culture shock. I was intimidated by these well-spoken posh people with very big beards.’

With this in mind, he is meticulous about avoiding ‘high-falutin language and the jargon that has grown up around the green movement’. He’ll often cross words out in drafts of local party literature to make sure it is ‘accessible to everyone – not everyone has had the benefit of university education’. The ‘Green New Deal’ is one phrase he found had ‘no resonance, was just jargonistic waffle. Instead, I’ll explain what it actually means, the types of jobs it would create: plumbers, engineers, care workers.’

As well as jobs, the Greens in Lewisham and in Brighton have been prioritising opposition to public spending cuts and NHS privatisation. They’ve also been demonstrating their social and economic policy credentials on the local level, having helped secure a living wage for everyone employed through Lewisham Council and convince its mayor to overturn some £1.8 million cuts in services for the elderly and disabled.

The response has been positive, sometimes surprisingly so. Johnson tells of Dean Walton, his partner and fellow councillor, remarking of the canvass cards: ‘Was there a mistake filling in the forms? It says all these people on the estates are putting up “Vote Green” posters!’ And as I follow him canvassing council estate blocks in his Brockley ward, we encounter regular and new supporters. One black woman is very pleased to meet him, announcing ‘I always vote Green,’ while a young Muslim mother listens to the manifesto priorities and replies, ‘My auntie votes for you, I’ll definitely do it!’

The simple practice of knocking on doors is key. The Greens have been maximising communication with the Lewisham electorate: sending out regular newsletters and attending all sorts of meetings. They are regulars at tenants’ meetings and later in the evening Johnson is off to a Latin American community event.

In terms of breadth of representation, the Greens have certainly come a long way since Johnson joined, some two decades ago. But they still have some way to go. Johnson concedes that this is especially the case with their members and volunteers, who don’t yet reflect Lewisham’s demography, but he is pleased that they will be fielding ethnic minority candidates in winnable council seats at the local elections on 6 May.

Ultimately, whether the Greens make a breakthrough on polling day will probably come down to the same factor as with Salma Yaqoob and Respect. As one of the residents of Brockley’s Syringa House estate put it, ‘I’ll think about it but I’m Labour born and bred, and it’s hard to kick the habit.’

This is the essence of LCAP’s strategy of ‘direct action casework’, in which direct action is used to pressure an institution to accept the demands, rights and needs of individuals, families or communities. The tactic has proven successful in breaking through the cynical ‘gatekeeping’ ruse employed by London’s Homeless Persons Units (HPUs).

Eran Cohen, a HPU service user and secretary of LCAP’s Tower Hamlets section, explains: ‘Gatekeeping is denying people a service or right they are entitled to. For example, preventing them from submitting a homelessness application, which is a right regardless of whether they turn out to be homeless or not. We do direct action casework around that.

‘If someone comes to us who has been to the council and refused an application, then we’ll go down to the office, stage a sit-in, and demand that they see the application. So far that’s worked in every case.’

Ellenor Hutson helped organise the recent ‘Gatekeeping Roadshow’, which toured ten London boroughs, mobilising people to fight gatekeeping and raise public awareness: ‘Central government gives councils targets for the percentage by which they have to reduce homelessness, but there’s no way to reduce homelessness in London without money or more council houses, except by massaging the figures.’

‘Gatekeeping provides the statistics that allow the government to hide the fact that there’s a huge housing crisis in London,’ Hutson continues. ‘What we’re asking for is many more council houses and a cap on the rent that private landlords are allowed to charge. But of course we’re nowhere near being in a situation where we can demand them until we’ve built up a lot more strength at the grassroots.’

Springing individuals over the gatekeeping hurdle is ‘often a bit of a hollow victory’, Hutson says, ‘because the housing that they’re given in the hostels is so poor and then there’s another fight to be had.’

LCAP has entered this tussle too, with its semi-autonomous hostel residents group.

The ten-storey Alexandra Court hostel may sit directly above Hackney’s temporary accommodation office, but given the council’s snail-paced response to its state of disrepair, seems to exist in some impalpable vortex.

Ellie Schling, who has worked on the campaign for two years, lists bed bugs, mice infestations, broken boilers, out-of-order lifts, cramped living spaces and cut-off drinking water among the appalling conditions that Hackney Council has left residents to cope with, sometimes for months on end. Only when residents marched on the Town Hall in protest did repairs begin to be done.

The most challenging part of LCAP’s work is getting people to the point where they feel able to take action. ‘When people come to us for help they have suffered a lot of knockbacks and they have an expectation that they’re going to be kicked when they’re down and there won’t be anything they can do about it,’ says Ellenor Hutson.

‘It’s about introducing people to the idea of collective action and demonstrating to them it will work. Then things escalate quite quickly because it’s very empowering.’

She recalls the first hostel residents meeting, ‘where people were saying, “Nothing will ever change, we can’t do anything.” About a month later we had a march and managed to very quickly get the council to install new security doors with really very little effort. After they had that taste of power then they were like, “Right, we can have everything!” It was brilliant.’

‘It’s really important for people to organise with each other, partly because they’re much more protected when they’re together,’ says Schling. ‘Recently a family was told verbally that they had two days to leave, which isn’t allowed at all, but because they’re involved in the campaign and had our support they were able to fight it off.

‘The temporary accommodation campaign shows that collective action is possible even when people are in one of the most unstable positions and facing multiple problems. That they’re still able to organise and fight together is really inspiring.’

That’s what makes LCAP so special. As Cohen says, ‘It’s pretty much the only actual campaigning group that works around these issues. Everything else is either just an advisory service or a charity.’

The challenge now is developing collective action for broader as well as individual change. As LCAP recognises, ‘taking on individual problems one by one is in no way sufficient. Collective organising and mobilising for broader change is its necessary complement. In the Great Depression, casework took place as part of a mass movement, which forced Roosevelt to institute the New Deal – a product not of the benevolence of politicians, but of the activity of unemployed and working people.’

www.lcap.org.uk

At the age of 16, Montasser was arrested by Israeli soldiers from his house in the West Bank town of Abu Dis and sentenced to two years in prison in Israel. This widespread practice (each year, on average, 700 Palestinian children are prosecuted in Israeli military courts) is deeply troubling both in the plain fact and the particular manner of its occurrence. I travelled to Montasser’s home to speak with him, his parents and siblings in the hope of comprehending its effect on the child, the family and wider Palestinian society.

Montasser’s father, Talal, translates between Arabic and English for me. However, it is only later, when I speak to Ferdoos Al-Issa, a counsellor who works with child ex-detainees, that I am able more fully to decipher the exchange so that Montasser’s evasiveness instead becomes enlightening. His reticence, I discover, is revealingly symptomatic of the psychological scars typically left by Israel’s detention process.

Arrest and detention

For Montasser the process began in the early hours of a rainy January day in 2007. Talal recalls how ‘the soldiers came around one in the morning. They knocked hard on the door in their famous way and asked me to bring my children outside.’ With his hands tied and his eyes blindfolded, Montasser was bundled into a jeep and taken to an interrogation centre in the nearby settlement of Maale Adumim.

There he was interrogated by two officers who beat him all over his body. He was accused of throwing stones and being a member of a banned organisation. His cousin, Ahmad Attallah, now 19, had been arrested from Abu Dis at the same time. The officers told Montasser, ‘Listen, your cousin has confessed. He has signed already and is now with his father and your father is waiting for you outside. So sign and let me release you.’ Ahmad was spun the same tale about Montasser and they both signed the confessions, which were written in Hebrew, a language neither boy understands.

Although alarming when juxtaposed against basic conceptions of human rights and due process, Montasser’s account is run of the mill according to a June report by Defence for Children International (DCI): ‘From the moment of arrest, Palestinian children encounter ill treatment, and in some cases torture, at the hands of Israeli soldiers, policemen and interrogators. Children are commonly arrested from the family home in the hours before dawn by heavily-armed soldiers.

‘The child is painfully bound, blindfolded and bundled into the back of a military vehicle without any indication as to why or where the child is being taken. Children are commonly mistreated during the transfer process and arrive at the interrogation and detention centres traumatised, tired and alone. These children will generally not be permitted to see a lawyer until after they have provided a confession to the interrogator.’

Khaled Quzmar, the chief lawyer for DCI’s Palestine section, explains that ‘what they want the child to feel during the interrogation is an atmosphere that nobody else in the world can help you, only your confession.’ Quzmar believes the mere hour and manner of the arrest, which delivers a tired and traumatised child, are enough in themselves to invalidate any confession.

Further pressure to exact a confession comes in the form of torture, threats and trickery. Children as young as 12 are often beaten and painfully shackled for long periods. One boy was told, ‘I will shoot you in the head if you don’t confess and stick your head in a bucket of water until you choke and die.’ Another yielded after a knife was held to his neck. The DCI report also details the case of a 15-year-old who was shot and arrested and later deceived into signing a confession in hospital when officers convinced him the Hebrew was an approval for his operation.

The experience is worlds away from that of children on the other side of the separation wall. Indeed, Israel’s very definition of a child diverges across the divide: up to 16 years for a Palestinian but 18 for an Israeli. ‘They never arrest an Israeli child in the middle of the night, they wait until the day. And then they ask the father by phone to bring the child and they interrogate the child with the father there,’ says Quzmar. Israeli domestic law also requires that the interrogation be video recorded.

Montasser was sentenced to 26 months in prison and his cousin Ahmad to 30. They were detained in prisons in Israel, a practice in breach of the Geneva Convention and with the consequence that many children do not receive family visits as their relatives are denied permits to enter Israel. Ill treatment continues beyond interrogation into imprisonment, where conditions include harsh handling by prison guards, overcrowding, poor ventilation and access to natural light, and poor quality and inadequate amounts of food. Montasser’s diet consisted of mainly rice and potato soup, and for dinner mainly jam and bread.

Medical and dental care is poor – Ahmad lost his front teeth while detained – and educational provision close to non-existent. Children under 16 receive a few hours of teaching a week in a limited range of subjects. Geography, history, physics and chemistry are all banned for ‘security reasons’. Children over the age of 16 are not allowed to continue formal education. ‘They used to confiscate school books and we never had any teacher inside,’ Montasser recounts.

Back at home

Now back at home, ‘He insists that he is fine, but I can see that he is not,’ Talal confides. ‘He’s more aggressive now.’

‘He’s not close to his brothers anymore,’ adds Hanan, Montasser’s mother. ‘He gets nervous easily. He used to accept everything I said; now it’s completely different.’

Ferdoos Al-Issa explains this behaviour as typical of ex-detainees who have been stripped of all control over their own lives by the Israelis and are now responding to what they see as their family’s attempts to control them. ‘Because everybody is trying to control them and they feel they have no control, they try to control other people with their anger or by their withdrawal. They want to have their own identity, which the experience of torture has destroyed,’ she says.

Developmentally they are often frozen at the stage of their arrest and upon release are still children emotionally; they are traumatised and lack the mechanisms to cope with their trauma. But having gone through their ordeal they are seen as heroes in Palestinian society and feel an enormous pressure to live up to this image by acting like adults and refusing to reveal any emotional weakness. Adding to this the fact that the prison experience has inculcated a deep sense of insecurity, distrust and suspicion, it is hardly surprising Montasser is so taciturn in front of a foreign outsider like me.

Al-Issa sees the cruelty of the detention practices as systematic and institutionalised. ‘They target the children because they are the future for the whole society,’ she argues. ‘By depriving them of their schooling, they create a whole generation who don’t have a future. They are humiliated and destroyed and it affects their family too – a family can’t have any normal life if their kid’s in prison. So in this way they target the first unit of building a society. It’s the whole fabric of society that’s destroyed when they destroy that generation.’

Ultimately, child detention is just another sinister manifestation of the logic of occupation: destruction and control. This was the conclusion reached in an August 2008 report, The Social Rehabilitation of Palestinian Child Ex-Detainees, published by Save the Children Sweden and the YMCA in Beit Sahour, where Al-Issa helps co-ordinate the child ex-detainee rehabilitation program:

‘The practice and purpose of torture and cruel treatments by Israeli forces goes beyond the scope of obtaining information from the detained person. Rather it aims at affecting the well-being of children in the long term, at breaking down their personalities. Thus, violence by Israeli forces during detention represents just another form of control imposed on Palestinians. Confiscating land is a tool to control the resources of Palestinians, setting borders and checkpoints leads to controlling their movement, issuing military orders has the scope of controlling Palestinian lives, and practising torture and violence ultimately means controlling their minds.’

These interviews were made possible with the help of the Camden-Abu Dis Friendship Association, who run a child prisoners campaign. More info: www.camdenabudis.net

The organisation says its mission is to ‘ensure the orderly and humane management of migration, to promote international cooperation on migration issues, to assist in the search for practical solutions to migration problems and to provide humanitarian assistance to migrants in need, including refugees and internally displaced people’.

But the experience of migrants in the UK – and across the European Union – most readily translates the acronym IOM into ‘International Organisation against Migrants’ (a slogan now adorning the banners of the many groups currently protesting against the institution).

Established in 1951, the IOM has 125 member states and offices in more than 100 countries, including the UK. It takes pains to stress that it is not part of the government, yet it is 80 per cent state funded and undoubtedly plays the good cop to the Home Office’s bad cop.

While the Home Office brandishes the sticks of detention, destitution, and deportation, the organisation serves up the carrot of monetary incentives for return, a pleasingly value-for-money strategy compared with the costly appeals process. The IOM is essentially the shinier side of the same anti-migrant coin. It is the invisible – but no less solid for it – wall of Fortress Europe.

IOM UK runs two ‘voluntary’ return programmes – the Voluntary Assisted Return and Reintegration Programme (VARRP) for asylum seekers, and another for irregular migrants (those who have overstayed their visas or were smuggled or trafficked into the country). It arranges transport ‘to the home doorstep’, as well as offering ‘reintegration assistance’ in the case of asylum seekers.

Denise McDowell of Greater Manchester’s Immigration Aid Unit (IAU) – a charity that provides independent legal advice on immigration and asylum issues – is adamant in her refusal to refer her clients to the IOM. ‘Our view is that it is too closely tied to government funding and the Home Office. It has no credibility as an independent organisation,’ she says.

‘They want to return people as much as possible, but most of the people we work with cannot be and do not want to be returned. They tempt vulnerable people with a huge amount of money, but the price people may end up paying is their life or their health when they go back to a dangerous place.

‘People get given IOM literature in letters from the Home Office, and when they go to sign on for their benefits. They are not simply waiting for people to come to them; they promote themselves directly to the most vulnerable people. It is coercion.’

These problematic practices are starkly evident in the case of Iraqi refugees, as explained by the No Borders network, who have been at the forefront of the IOM counter-propaganda campaign.

‘The claim that the system they operate is voluntary in nature is undermined by the UK’s policy of withdrawing even minimum financial support from those Iraqis who fail to
sign up for voluntary return,’ says No Borders. ‘Faced with the alternative of destitution, several thousand Iraqis have returned.’

In Iraq, the IOM’s own representative states: ‘The situation for those returning is grim and isn’t necessarily an improvement from when they were displaced.’ Despite this, the IOM in the UK still encourages Iraqis to return home. Worst of all, those who volunteer to return are required to sign a waiver that reads: ‘The IOM has no responsibility for me and my dependants once I return to Iraqi territory, and I hereby release IOM from any liability in this respect.’ This shields the UK government from any responsibility for what happens to those who return.

In spite of its proclamations that it exists to serve society, the IOM’s practices – which include migration warning systems, the advocacy of migration-hostile policies, the training of border police and troops, and the operation of detention camps, including Australia’s notorious Nauru camp – are an exercise in global migration management in the service of governments and the wider neoliberal project.

Indeed, for all the shiny, happy, repatriated faces gleaming out of its glossy pamphlets, the IOM is a baleful manifestation of an ethno-nationalistic, profit-over-people ideology that dichotomises ‘foreigners’ and ‘the indigenous population’, holds national identities to be static, and assumes people ‘belong’ in their land of origin – unless of course it serves certain economic interests.

My mum kept taking me to peace activism and demos and I watched Uncle Mil and Emily [author Milan Rai and artist Emily Johns, co-editors of Peace News and Justice Not Vengeance activists] do peace activism and direct action. I wanted to be part of it, so I started a group called Children Against the War when I was seven. I’ve basically been doing demonstrations and vigils and organising and trying to aim for children to come so they understand what’s happening to other children in the world.

How did you set it up Children Against the War and how did you get children involved?

Well, I had the help of ARROW [Active Resistance to the Roots of War] and Voices in the Wilderness and they helped me set up the group by making leaflets. I wrote the leaflets and I organised demonstrations and vigils and basically on the demonstration I did a speech to get them aware of what’s happening.

Were you nervous to give a speech when you just seven years old?

It was a bit nerve-wracking. It was scary but I started and I was okay. Someone had to do it, someone had to tell children what was going on in the world and I wanted to tell them myself because children have the right to live and be safe.

What do your friends and the other kids at school think about your activism?

My friends don’t really know. They don’t understand. They think I’m a bit strange, because of their backgrounds, what their parents are teaching them – we live around an RAF base.

What about your family?

My mother is also a very strong peace activist. She’s been going to demonstrations for many, many years and going to different countries, like Palestine, and doing direct action and she’s taken me since I was four. I liked to get involved. I liked to give out leaflets and stuff.

Can you tell me about the film you made in Jordan?

Yeah, because I’ve always been demonstrating for children and Iraqi children and I actually wanted to give them a voice so they could speak out. We heard that these families fled to the neighbouring countries, such as Jordan and Syria, so I went there with my filming equipment to give them a voice and I interviewed them and they spoke and I made a film about it.

What was that experience like? Was it very upsetting? Did you find you had a lot in common with the children?

I found that we had a lot of things in common – no-one would have known that they’re from Iraq and I’m from Britain if we were put together because we had so much in common. When they were telling the stories I met this boy who was kidnapped and got hurt and tortured and I was really upset to find that out and had nightmares when I went to sleep and I really felt strongly about this.

What are you busy with at the moment?

I’m doing interfaith stuff – getting young people from different backgrounds to come together in understanding. I’m also helping with a Justice Not Vengeance film on Islam. I’m going to be interviewed about it, because I’m a Muslim myself and I’m interviewing some children.

How has your faith helped you as a peace activist?

At the moment I’m reading about the prophet Mohammed and how he brought peace, because Mohammed has been a big influence on my life. Also all my family are very religious as well and Mohammed, my prophet, basically inspired me – he taught us compassion and peace and not to hurt anyone and nonviolence.

What message would you like to send to the children of this country?

I think it’s really important they be aware of what’s going on around the world and they should meet people from other backgrounds and faiths. We’re all like a bouquet of flowers – all different, but all beautiful and the same.

The exhilaration of the beginnings of a movement for social liberation can never be recovered with its original and particular intensity. But surely the aspiration for liberation persists within a generation and perhaps more importantly across generations? ‘The women’s liberation movement set my soul on fire,’ recalls Sue O’Sullivan. ‘It started something which isn’t finished yet.’

The Italians have a good metaphor for the way that movements disappear, but their ideas and visions often reappear in a fresh form in a new context. They talk about carsici, those mountain streams which at certain points go underground and reappear quite unexpectedly on new terrains with a fresh bubbling energy. (Well, that’s the optimistic version!)

Paradoxically, the apparent disappearance of the women’s liberation movement, as with other movements of liberation, is in part a product of what it had to do to campaign for reforms in the direction of its vision of liberation. To make allies and gain institutional footholds, parts of the movement found themselves focusing on specific changes and becoming immersed in pursuing them. The work of nurturing the long-term vision is difficult to maintain.

History seems to indicate that movements are only rarely able to sustain themselves long enough to nurture and develop their vision and values. The ‘labour movement’ might seem an exception but what have lasted in this case are institutions – not necessarily the same as a movement – and these institutions only occasionally show signs of the movement’s original emancipatory values.

Men discussing the movements of the 1960s and 1970s often remark with a tinge of jealousy on the longevity of the legacy of the women’s movement. This is not to imply that it achieved the most by way of demands and actual reforms; indeed, much of what it did achieve has been reversed. It is, rather, that its fluid legacy lives on through the lives, friendships and work of the women and men influenced by it and the culture they create. Maybe this is because one of the distinctive features of the women’s movement is that it broke down many of the divisions between politics and daily life that underlie the brittle life of much of the radical left.

Feminism is now being rediscovered and remade by women influenced indirectly by this cultural legacy of 1970s feminism, but facing a society in which women are still treated in all sorts of ways as subordinate. This seems to be a moment when it might be useful to look back to the original hopes of the women’s liberation movement to see how present realities fall short, to learn lessons and avoid the same mistakes.

An infantile disorder

Michelene Wandor

There is no point pretending that feminism – in its three main political varieties: radical, bourgeois and socialist – has had much significant impact on larger political and social structures, or even on many micro-cultural phenomena. Social and sexual divisions of labour have scarcely, if at all, been altered. And yet within the generations who seized 1968 and the two generations that have followed, no doubt some gains have been made in terms of some of their professional and lifestyle choices.

This isn’t really surprising. Without mutually transforming visions between socialism and feminism, not a lot was ever going to change.

I assumed in the early 1970s that everyone believed passionately in the political ideals we/they expressed. And I assumed that belief was so fundamental that it could never change. After all, that is the definition of this kind of idealism, of these visions of better futures. Looking back, radicalism (feminist and socialist) now appears to have been, indeed, a kind of infantile disorder, or just a career stepping stone for some people. When professional and political careers took over working energies, the analyses and ideals lost their appeal and relevance.

This points to the genuine difficulty of linking the two halves of that powerful banner of all feminisms – that the personal is the political; that the individual and the group/collective/social are symbiotically so entwined that the one cannot function without the other. At their best and highest, feminist moments really did aim to integrate these into something more than the sum of differences and individualities. Fighting against a world that is constantly dividing individuals from groups and from each other was and is exhausting.

Michelene Wandor is a playwright, poet, critic and musician, who has just published The Author is not Dead, Merely Somewhere Else, a critique of creative writing courses. She edited the first collection of women’s liberation writings, The Body Politic, in 1972, helped facilitate Spare Rib magazine, and worked on the socialist-feminist paper Red Rag

Sweet and sour

Sue O’Sullivan

In 1968 I had a baby. In 1969 I became part of what would become the women’s liberation movement in London. Twenty years later, in 1988, I wrote about my memories of my first ‘small group’ meeting: ‘I know, even if I can no longer touch its electricity, that I left with a wonderful feeling, a spinning head and a churning stomach.’ Also, ‘I sensed huge personal contradictions to come, and was anxious even as I lunged forward.’

I recall feelings and experiences from that year when something started for me which isn’t finished yet. The women’s liberation movement set my soul on fire. I treasure the embers even now.

Even by 1988, when things were falling apart, crashing together – clear portents that the end of the women’s liberation movement was upon us – I felt grounded in my attachment to the perspective and activism of the feminism I was involved in.

By then, different forms of feminism and various identities were demanding rights – human rights, women’s rights, lesbian rights, black women’s rights; a proliferation of rights, often based around identity, and this continues today. Liberation slumbers.

Even at the end of the 1980s, I didn’t have a clue, realist that I thought I was, how horrendously wrong things would go by 2008. Not that all is lost by any means, not that I had illusions of continual progress – only that the whole context for women’s liberation in this country has changed. Many of the ‘words’ of the movement have been tamed: gender obscures women, rights obscure liberation and freedom, advocacy obscures radical activism, and the divisions and inequalities of class, race, age, ethnicity and sexuality reverberate as they reconfigure – reconfigurations we ignore at our peril. Things change even if it’s change we neither wanted nor worked for. (Religious fundamentalisms of all sorts spring to mind.)

We’ve got a long way to go, but who will set the scene, provide the wild energy, paint the new visions? I don’t see my generation setting the agendas of a resurgence of women’s activism via a casting back to the politics of the 1970s and 1980s. If a new women’s movement arises, I hope that it might learn from our mistakes and not end up re-inventing the wheel. In fact, I hope there are other forms of transport out there that I haven’t begun to imagine.

Now I keep on in a less expansive way. I maintain my political soul, my feminist, women’s liberationist, socialist, anti-racist, lesbian soul, even if it’s a bit crinkly, by working around women and HIV/Aids internationally. I got involved in this area of work while part of the women’s health movement, an outgrowth of the women’s liberation movement. I’ve sustained involvement in HIV/Aids work for almost 20 years – my feminist health concerns of the 1970s and 1980s melded into the specificity of the global Aids pandemic – and for the last 12 years I’ve worked for the International Community of Women Living with HIV/Aids (ICW).

I work with and for incredible women from around the world. Their difficulties surpass anything I’ve ever known. By coming together in networks and support groups they set in motion the energy of women’s liberation. They may speak of ‘empowerment’ – a ‘development’, UN, World Bank word if ever there was one – but they mean both gaining their rights and liberation, not waiting for handouts. Many are religious, but as far from fundamentalism in life as imaginable. Some have never heard of or met a lesbian before and yet are interested – even personally so because of their poor experiences with men. I use the skills and pleasures I learned in the movement to produce ICW News, which presents the personal ‘testimonies’ of HIV-positive women around the world, their projects, and ICW’s international, activist, political analysis.

I draw on my feminist experiences and analysis in my work and gain much from the women I work with across the world. They say ladies, I say women; they say empowerment, I say liberation. Increasingly, and somewhat tentatively, we say feminism together. I try to represent them as best I can in the pages of their newsletter. I try in my editing to remain true to their experiences, language, hopes and fears. I may celebrate progressive HIV-positive women’s voices with more enthusiasm than I feel for those who are more conservative, but my aim is to support a desire to write from the reality of their lives.

Watching TV or reading the newspaper or listening to friends with younger children telling their tales, at times I could succumb to cynicism or despair. Globally and here at home, barbarism sometimes feels very close. So perhaps it’s my power to suppress that means I don’t feel as grim in my daily life as others do.

I joined Women Against Fundamentalism when it restarted a couple of years ago. I got a new lover when I was 65 and that’s a dare and great fun. I don’t go on as many demos as in the past. But as we used to say, the struggle continues, life and politics are complex, there’s pleasure and there’s pain.

Sue O’Sullivan works for the International Community of Women Living with HIV/Aids, is a member of Women Against Fundamentalism, and ‘still a socialist – although who knows what sort’. She hates the vast majority of mainstream politicians, the war in Iraq, racism, fundamentalism and the idea that women have won – ‘We haven’t!’

The air that I breathed

Lucy Whitman

For my piece in the ’68-’78-’88 anthology, I wrote about my involvement as a feminist punk in Rock Against Racism in the late 1970s, when the National Front was on the rise. I said then, and I still strongly believe, that Rock Against Racism, along with all the other anti-fascist organisations of the day, played a major part in stopping the National Front in its tracks. We helped to destroy the influence of neo-Nazism in English politics for a generation. Unfortunately, it is now gaining ground again in the shape of the BNP.

I also spoke about the ravages of Thatcherism, the looming menace of Section 28, and my own struggle to find enough time to combine writing, activism and earning a living. I ended by wondering whether I would manage to keep all these strands going if I realised my other ambition, which was to have a child.

The answer to that question turned out to be: no, I wouldn’t, but actually this wasn’t so much to do with being a mother as with being a daughter. I did manage to have a child, in the nick of time, just before my 40th birthday, and I am glad to say I enjoy being a mother. But very soon after my son was born, both my parents – who were well into their eighties – became seriously ill, and my sister and I spent the best part of ten years fire-fighting on their behalf, trying to look after them and keep them safe, and accompanying them on their journeys to their deaths.

Activism and writing both went out of the window for a long time, and it is only now that I am beginning to emerge from what I call my ‘care and wear’ or ‘wear and tear’ years to rediscover myself. I now have a much keener sense of the powerlessness of very old people in our callous, throwaway society.

What strikes me now, on re-reading what I wrote in 1988, was that at that time, despite the fact that the women’s movement had fragmented into a trillion pieces, I still had a strong sense of being part of a living, ongoing, movement.

I also had a strong sense that despite all the horrors of the Thatcher years, in terms of consciousness – the general level of awareness of the injustices of sexism, racism and all the rest of it – we were still making progress.

Twenty years later, I have become aware, firstly, that the women’s movement of the 1970s and 1980s, which used to be the very air that I breathed, is no more. And secondly, that consciousness, like share prices, can go down as well as up. I have to confess that I am utterly amazed by the fact that some of the gains we made in the 1970s and 1980s have been reversed.

The sexism we objected to in adverts and popular culture back in the 1970s seems laughably tame compared to what we are subjected to now, on TV, in music videos, in both women’s and men’s magazines. Never in a million years would I have guessed, back then, that by 2008 cosmetic surgery would be a multi-billion-pound industry and that countless women would willingly go under the knife to acquire plastic breasts, or even to have their genitals ‘improved’.

No doubt each of us here could produce a long list of all the things which are very, very wrong in the world today. I will mention just one glaringly obvious issue: the intractable problem of male violence, both here in the UK and in every country of the world, where we still seem to have made so little headway.

Despite all of this, I still strongly believe that our generation of feminists achieved a huge amount. The legal position of women, and of lesbians and gay men, affecting all areas of our lives, has been completely transformed.

We have to be vigilant, because our precious gains are continually under threat, but there is no doubt in my mind that women have more rights, more freedoms and more opportunities than they had before the women’s liberation movement came along. I now suspect that there were far fewer of us actively involved than I thought at the time.

We really punched above our weight, and our achievements have made a huge difference to the lives of millions of people (not just women).

I feel really proud to have been a part of this movement.

Lucy Whitman, founded a punk fanzine, Jolt, in 1977, in which she attempted to introduce punks to feminism, and went on to write for Spare Rib, where she attempted to introduce feminists to punk. She is currently working on a book about looking after people with dementia

Feminism ’08

Andrea d’Cruz reports on the recent upsurge in feminist campaigning

It’s possibly fallen under your activist radar but over the past year or so, pockets of feminist resistance have begun to materialise across the UK. It may not quite merit the title ‘resurgence’ or ‘revival’, but whatever you call this micro-phenomenon, there’s no denying that it’s all very exciting. All the more so because this isn’t just any old feminist upspring; it’s a radical feminist upspring.

And what a joyous change it is to see ‘the F-word’ prefixed with something other than post- (or in fact liberal-). Radical is certainly a complicated and contested term, and all too often a demonising one: shoved in front of ‘Islam’ as shorthand for ‘an uncivilised, murderous ideology’, and affixed to ‘feminism’ to conjure ‘essentialising, man-hating separatists’. But in this context, and indeed its Latin one, it’s all about roots: grass-roots action aimed at the roots of inequality.

The emphasis is on liberation from below, on DIY, self-organised, non-institutionalised women’s activism. The other key feature is a deliberate focus on the wider underlying and interconnecting systems and manifestations of oppression: this feminism is synonymous with anti-capitalism and anti-racism.

From north to south, socialist to anarchist, and cyber-space to squatted space there are myriad examples of these radical ventures, a small selection of which are listed below.

However, participation is yet to reach a critical mass and although collaborative efforts have flowered into large national demonstrations – such as the Million Women Rise march, on International Women’s Day in March – it’s far from being a strong and cohesive movement. The seeds are there, for sure, but it’s too early to assess the potential depth, breadth, or longevity of these developments, so perhaps we shouldn’t quite be celebrating the imminent crumbling of the patriarchal edifice. That said, the energy, enthusiasm and sheer optimism of the women involved makes it awfully hard not to.

Feminism ’08 is diversely manifested in ‘zines, on blogs, and across the web; via conferences, demonstrations and workshops; on the streets, in squatted buildings and around the bronzed military men on their Trafalgar Square plinths. Here is just a small selection of the myriad groups involved in this activist upsurge.

Feminist Fightback

A London and Manchester-based socialist feminist network. The group links its struggle for women’s liberation to all struggles against capitalism and exploitation and focuses on grass-roots action, to empower women to fight their own exploitation rather than to depend on others for protection.

The F-Word

An online magazine and blog created by young UK feminists. It provides a
place for emerging and new feminist voices, and to show that feminism ‘is
as relevant to the lives of the younger generation as it was to those in
the 1960s and 1970s’.

London Feminist Network

A women-only networking and campaigning organisation formed in 2004 to unite feminist groups and individuals in action. LFN
re-launched the Reclaim the Night march in 2004, which has grown
each year since, mobilising 1,500 women last November.

Feminist Activist Forum

Set up in April 2007, FAF is dedicated to feminist history and popular education and strongly committed to intergenerational feminism, uniting younger feminists with activists from the second wave. It is anti-capitalist and actively challenges all forms of oppression.

Wominspace

In March this year women squatted an abandoned building in Hackney and transformed it into the autonomous, self-organised Wominspace. Unfortunately Wominspace was evicted in May. However, the activists decided to form an anarcha-feminist collective and provide a platform for people to come together to share advice related to all aspects of squat-living from a trans/woman’s perspective.

womenorganise@yahoo.co.uk

Feministas

Bradford-based women’s collective, who don white Feminista boiler suits to stand out as a feminist ‘bloc’ on various demos and actions.

Feminist Library

Established during the heyday of the women’s liberation movement in 1975, the Feminist Library has recently had fresh air breathed into it after a few years when its continued existence was in doubt. Its large archive is particularly focused on second-wave feminist materials from the late 1960s and 1970s and includes 5,000 non-fiction titles, 2,500 fiction titles and more than 1,500 periodical titles.

5 Westminster Bridge Rd, SE1 7XW

020 7928 7789

London Pro-Feminist Men\’s Group

A men’s group that meets fortnightly for workshops and discussions about feminism, in an effort to ‘support each other in our personal struggles to rid ourselves of sexist behaviour, discuss issues around pro-feminism generally and to plan what kind of action we can take as pro-feminists’.

’68-’78-’88: from women’s liberation to feminism, edited by Amanda Sebestyen, is an anthology of women’s liberation history, with more than 30 feminists of every stripe offering personal snapshots of their experiences in the movement. The book was published in May 1988, 20 years after the struggles of 1968. This year’s debate at Housman’s bookshop and the contributions featured on these pages, in turn, mark both the 20th anniversary of the book’s publication and the 40th anniversary of the ‘May events’.

’68-’78-’88 was published by Prism Press

For details of monthly political debates at Housmans bookshop, see www.housmans.com