Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU) for allowing the Memorial Lecture to take place on its premises, to the many people who helped with planning, logistics and with chairing the lectures over the years, and, of course, to the distinguished guest speakers who gave their time to travel to Manchester to speak without a fee to support this cause. The chapters in this book follow, in the order they were given, the topics that were presented, with some amendments to the texts in some cases to situate the lecture. In some cases we have included new pieces of writing by the lecturers that reflect the contents of their lectures. These contributions provide diverse perspectives on the struggle that Tom lived and died for, and they also remind us of the history of struggle to put and keep Palestine on the political agenda. They are of a time and a place, academic pieces written for a particular context, with a commitment to history and truth. The Tom Hurndall Memorial Lecture Group (THMLG) has no institutional funding. The organising group brings together colleagues from MMU, the University of Manchester, the University of Salford and the University of Central Lancashire. There is a blog page with details of upcoming lectures at https://hurndallmemoriallecture.wordpress.com/ and a Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/groups/113162458703983.

Many thanks to the Hurndall family for the photographs of Tom Hurndall, and those taken by him that we have included in the book. References to the ‘ISM’ in the photo captions are to the ‘International Solidarity Movement’, a group of volunteers dedicated to the use of non-violent protests against the Israel Defence Forces, IDF, in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. References to Rafah are to the part of the Gaza Strip bordering Egypt, and the site of a separation wall erected by Israel and of a no-go or sterilised strip created by Israeli troops through the evacuation and/or demolition of homes between the border and Rafah City. In March and April 2003, when the photos were taken, the ISM was seeking to prevent demolition by protests and/or occupation of the houses affected. Rachel Corrie, a member of the ISM, had been killed by an IDF bulldozer the previous month.

Fig. 2 Israeli-controlled territories, Wikimedia (2018), public domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Israeli-controlled_territories.png.