emned 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.

In 2002 Pilger made another film of the same name. "In 25 years," said Pilger, "if we are to speak of the great injustice, nothing has changed. What has changed is that the Palestinians have fought back. Stateless and humiliated for so long, Palestinians have risen up against Israel's huge military machine, although they themselves have no arms, no tanks, no American planes and gun ships or missiles.

"Some have committed desperate acts of terror, like 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 is the story of the Palestinians and a group of courageous Israelis united in the oldest human struggle - to be free."

In a series of extraordinary interviews with both Palestinians and Israelis, John Pilger weaves together the issue of Palestine. He speaks to the families of suicide bombers and their victims; he sees the humiliation imposed upon the Palestinians at myriad checkpoints and with a permit system not dissimilar to apartheid South Africa's infamous pass laws. He goes into the refugee camps and meets children who, he says, "no longer dream like other children, or if they do, it is about death."

E-Mail John: pilgereditor@gmail.com

Occupation

In April 2002, the troops and tanks of the Israeli army attacked Ramallah and other towns in occupied Palestine. This was reported as an 'incursion' to stop terrorism. In fact it was also an attack on civilian life: on schools, offices, clinics, theatres, radio stations. This systematic vandalism is typical of one of the longest military occupations in modern times.

Even the Culture Ministry was destroyed. The director, Liana Badr - Director of the Palestinian Ministry of Culture and a distinguished novelist and filmmaker - showed the devastation to John Pilger shortly after it had happened.

In the administration room files were strewn over the floor and all office equipment had been deliberately vandalized.

Liana Badr

This was a place which promoted Palestinian cultural projects - film making, book exhibitions and exhibitions of children's' work, which had been effectively destroyed by Israeli troops. Liana Badr explains:

"Now we don't have anything to begin with, we don't have computers, equipment, furniture. And we have this feeling of humiliation".

Elsewhere in the Ministry, Israeli soldiers had smeared their own excrement on the walls and on office equipment and vandalized an exhibition of paintings made by Palestinian children.

"They have destroyed everything", says Liana, "They don't respect anything, they just want to come and destroy and this is the systematic terrorism of the Israeli state."

Fatima's Story

The effects of the occupation are not only felt during attacks such as those in Ramallah. Palestinians must also contend with the day-to-day control over freedom of movement. During curfews people live under a form of house arrest. Without notice they can be locked inside their homes. Their ordinary lives are a maze of controls, road blocks, checkpoints. This is how John Pilger remembered apartheid South Africa. "The hidden effect is the same", he says, "Humiliation and anger and death".

Fatima Abed-Rabo

Fatima Abed-Rabo is one Palestinian woman who knows all about the effects of the checkpoints. Last October, she was about to give birth to her second child and she and her husband set out for the nearby hospital. They were stopped at an Israeli roadblock where they pleaded to be let through. Fatima explains what happened next:

"There were six or seven soldiers. We argued. One of them pushed my husband, hitting him with a rifle and throwing his ID card back at him. We had to go home.

"We tried again later on hoping they'd have calmed down. We offered to walk to the hospital but they still wouldn't let us through.

"Then I had my baby.

"My mother-in-law used a razor to cut the umbilical cord. The boy started crying. My husband wrapped him in his jacket.

"One of his relatives found a back route and drove us to the hospital. But the baby had died by the time we arrived."

"We don't know why they did this to us. It wasn't personal. This is the way they treat all Palestinians. I'm sorry to say this but they'd rather help an animal than an Arab."

Palestinians try to lead a normal life. But life is never normal. During Israeli military operations, curfews stop everything. Ambulances are denied access to the sick and wounded. Children are stopped from going to school. The Israelis claim this is necessary for their security. If that's true, it's clearly not working. And the security of Palestinians is almost never mentioned.

Lama Hourani, a Gaza resident, describes the effects of the conditions in which she lives:

Lama Hourani

"You feel all your life that you are humiliated. You don't control yourself, you don't control the air you are breathing? I don't want? to talk about planning for anything, this is something that we don't even dream about. Plan to next hour or next day what we will do. This is something we don't even dream about because our destiny is not in our hands.

"It's in the hands of the others who decide how we would live. How we even get married? to come and live with my husband in this country, I had to take the permission of the Israelis."

The Soldier's Story

Some Israelis have spoken out. More than 500 soldiers have refused to serve in the occupied territories. 'We are', they've said, 'like the Chinese student who stood in front of the tank in Tiananmen Square. We are the conscience of our country'. Ishay Rosen-Zvi is one of them.

Ishay Rosen-Zvi

"I really think the real story of the occupation is there in the checkpoint. I cannot forget this kind of picture, you know, five in the morning, quarter to five in the morning? hundreds of people waiting, you know, to pass? the checkpoint. And you're standing there. And you see their eyes? the humiliation, the frustration, the hatred. Then you are the occupation. You have all the power, they have no power".

Closure

The half-built buildings of Gaza are a testament to the hopes raised - then dashed - by the talk of an independent Palestine. Without Israeli permission, most people can't leave and they can't return. They can't get to jobs, their produce can't get to market. Most struggle to live on about a pound a day - a poverty compounded by an Israeli policy called closure.

Dr Mustafa Barghouthi, of the Union of Palestine Medical Relief Committee, explains the effects of Israel's policy:

"You see for Israel to sustain this unsustainable occupation, it is transforming every city and every Palestinian town and village into a prison, basically. Surrounded by tanks, surrounded by walls, surrounded by fences. And it's not like they're building a border between us and Israel. It's building border inside West Bank and Gaza. Between our cities and towns for the sake of their settlements. They are obliging us to be occupied people. And not citizens".

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John Pilger

John Pilger Biography

John Pilger is a world-renowned journalist, author and documentary filmmaker, who began his career in 1958 in his homeland, Australia, before moving to London in the 1960s.

He regards eye-witness as the essence of good journalism. He has been a foreign correspondent and a front-line war reporter, beginning with the Vietnam war in 1967. He is an impassioned critic of foreign military and economic adventures by Western governments.

"It is too easy," he says, "for Western journalists to see humanity in terms of its usefulness to 'our' interests and to follow government agendas that ordain good and bad tyrants, worthy and unworthy victims and present 'our' policies as always benign when the opposite is usually true. It's the journalist's job, first of all, to look in the mirror of his own society."

He believes a journalist also ought to be a guardian of the public memory and often quotes Milan Kundera: "The struggle of people against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting."

Noam Chomsky wrote: "John Pilger's work has been a beacon of light in often dark times. The realities he has brought to light have been a revelation, over and over again, and his courage and insight a constant inspiration."

Harold Pinter wrote: "John Pilger unearths, with steely attention, the facts, the filthy truth, and tells it as it is."

For more biographical details, go to the introduction in Articles

This Much I Know - Observer interview with John Pilger

Family

Son Sam, born 1973, and daughter Zoe, born 1984

Recreations

Swimming, sunning, reading and mulling

Education

Sydney High School

Four-year journalism cadetship scheme, Australian Consolidated Press

Career Summary

1958-62: Reporter, freelance writer, sports writer and sub-editor, Daily & Sunday Telegraph, Sydney

1962: Freelance correspondent, Italy

1962-63: Middle East desk, Reuter, London

1963-86: Reporter, sub-editor, feature writer and Chief Foreign Correspondent, Daily Mirror

1986-88: Editor-in-Chief and a founder, News on Sunday, London

1969-71: Reporter, World in Action, Granada Television

1974-81: Reporter/Producer, Associated Television

1981: Documentary film-maker, Central and Carlton Television

Accredited war correspondent Vietnam, Cambodia, Egypt, India, Bangladesh, Biafra, Middle East

Contributor

BBC Television Australia, BBC Radio, BBC World Service, London Broadcasting, ABC Television, ABC Radio Australia

Publications

Daily Mirror, The Guardian, The Independent, New Statesman, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Nation: New York, The Age: Melbourne, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Bulletin: Sydney, plus French, Italian, Scandinavian, Canadian, Japanese and other newspapers and periodicals.

Books

See Books

Films

See Films & DVDs

Play

The Last Day (1983)

Honours

D. Litt, Staffordshire University

D. Phil, Dublin City University

D. Arts, Oxford Brookes University

D. Laws, St.Andrew's University

D. Phil, Kingston University

D. Univ, The Open University

1995 Edward Wilson Fellow, Deakin University, Melbourne

Frank H.T. Rhodes Professor, Cornell University, USA

Awards include

1966: Descriptive Writer of the Year

1967: Reporter of the Year

1967: Journalist of the Year

1970: International Reporter of the Year

1974: News Reporter of the Year

1977: Campaigning Journalist of the Year

1979: Journalist of the Year

1979-80: UN Media Peace Prize, Australia

1980-81: UN Media Peace Prize, Gold Medal, Australia

1979: TV Times Readers' Award

1990: The George Foster Peabody Award, USA

1991: American Television Academy Award ('Emmy')

1991: British Academy of Film and Television Arts - The Richard Dimbleby Award

1990: Reporters San Frontiers Award, France

1995: International de Television Geneve Award

2001: The Monismanien Prize (Sweden)

2003: The Sophie Prize for Human Rights (Norway)

2003: EMMA Media Personality of the Year

2004: Royal Television Society Best Documentary, 'Stealing a Nation'