Palestine Is Still The Issue

John Pilger returns to the Occupied Territories of the West Bank and Gaza where, in 1974, he filmed a documentary with the same title — Palestine Is Still The Issue — a film about the same issues, a nation of people, the Palestinians, forced off their land and subjected to military occupation by Israel. This is an occupation condemned by the United Nations and almost every country in the world, including Britain. But Israel is backed by a very powerful friend, the United States.

25 years later the basic problem remains unchanged: a desperate, destitute people whose homeland is illegally occupied by the world’s fourth biggest military power. What has changed though, is that the Palestinians have fought back. Stateless and humiliated for so long, they’ve risen up against Israel’s huge military machine, although they themselves have no arms, no tanks, no American planes and gun ships or missiles.

Pilger hears extraordinary stories from Palestinians, though most of his interviews are with Israelis whose voices are seldom heard, including the remarkable witness of a man who lost his daughter in a suicide bombing. But for Palestinians, the overriding, routine terror, day after day, has been the ruthless control of almost every aspect of their lives, as if they live in an open prison. This film is about the Palestinians and a group of courageous Israelis united in the fight to be free.