My Story by David Mottram
I was born in 1954 in Hyde with parents from Ashton-under-Lyne, so my origins lie in Cheshire and Lancashire - Ashton being in Lancashire (pre-1974). My early working life included fifteen years with the Open University, and later I was successively chief officer of Salford Council for Voluntary Service and Stockport District Citizens Advice Bureau. My partner, Ian, and I moved to Lancaster from Manchester in 2017. I am currently co-chair of the North Lancashire Green Party.
My first Palestinian solidarity meeting was at university in 1975. People there advocated for a single, secular and democratic Palestinian state. This woke me up to the cause. So much has changed for Palestine since then. But I still keep to that original idea and hope.
A few months ago I read Raja Shehadeh's We Could Have Been Friends, My father And I: A Palestinian Memoir (2023). He describes his shock at discovery in 1984 of a map showing the Israeli occupation authorities' plan for a new West Bank road network on an east-west axis. This proved to be a foundation for the large scale illegal Zionist settlements we know today. It astonished me reading this to reflect how much has been lost even since the mid-1980s.
But there is hope. At a Gaza protest in Manchester, ten years ago, someone asked me to help hold a banner. It was for Jews for Justice for Palestinians. At first I felt slightly bewildered by this. But did it matter that I was a non-Jew? Of course not. The banner simply made a claim for a common humanity.
In Lancaster since October 2023 I have seen some of the best of humanity in contributions to weekly protest and witness for Gaza, and in other acts of Palestinian solidarity. One of the great strengths has surely been the active engagement of people of all ages.
Sometimes in politics it feels as though all the activists are my age. Not for Palestine, it doesn't. Whether it's standing up to speak in the Market Square, blockading the factory gates at BAE Systems, and in so many other ways, young people are at the centre of this.