Public meeting with Gilbert Achcar

Cross Street Chapel, 29 Cross Street, Manchester M2 1NL

Free. All welcome. Lift access to the meeting room.

Three years on, Gaza has slipped down the running order. The killing has not stopped with it. Gaza’s health ministry counts 1,145 Palestinians killed since the ceasefire of October 2025, and Israeli strikes were still landing in the last days of September.

Gilbert Achcar grew up in Lebanon and has spent half a century writing about the Arab region. His books run from The Arabs and the Holocaust through The People Want, on the 2011 uprisings, to Morbid Symptoms, on how those uprisings were beaten. Last year he published The Gaza Catastrophe (Saqi), which sets what Israel has done since October 2023 against the longer history its subtitle promises. He is Emeritus Professor of Development Studies and International Relations at SOAS, University of London.

It would be easy to treat Iran as a separate war that happened to follow Gaza. Look closer and the separation does not hold up, though the shortcut that makes Tehran the defender of Palestine holds up even worse, and Achcar has been one of the sharpest critics of that shortcut on the left. The war is one war, fought by Israel with American backing across the whole region, and the Palestinians have no reliable friend among the states fighting it.

Britain is in it too. The government suspended some arms licences in 2024 and went on supplying F-35 parts through the global programme. Since Palestine Action was proscribed in July 2025, people have been arrested in their hundreds for holding a cardboard sign. Some of us remember the pickets outside Elbit’s Ferranti plant in Oldham, which Elbit sold off in January 2022 after years of protest and direct action at its gates.

Hundreds of thousands have marched since 2023, many of them for the first time, and the marches have not changed British policy in any way that matters to a family in Khan Younis. We do not know what a movement that size does next, or whether it can turn the numbers into the kind of pressure a government cannot absorb, and the meeting on 29 October is one place to argue that out with someone who has thought about it longer than most of us. ★