It's time to cancel the European Union's trade association with Israel if their government persists in violating international law

EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW

Lord David Steel spent four years of his childhood in Kenya at the time of the Mau Mau uprising in the fifties and sixties, when thousands were killed rebelling against British colonial rule; now he is one of the longest serving leaders of the Liberal Party. This early experience became an important part of his life and has affected his approach to morality and his political career. "Looking back on it as a student I was horrified by the assumptions of superiority of one race over others", he explains.

Hadeel Al-Ramly's dream is to study cinema directing, though first she must finish her masters in economics; she believes that exploring a country through both disciplines will help develop it. Economics, she says, helps her understand different communities, offers a different angle on life, and gives her background information to work on artistic ideas.

Now, Al-Ramly lives in Italy. Her family are originally from Masmiyya, a town within the 1948 Palestinian borders. She grew up on a refugee camp in Jordan, stayed behind when her family immigrated to Europe, and then travelled to Gaza to discover herself, her nationality and to build a personal vision of the Palestinian conflict.

Inside the Strip, Al-Ramly studied journalism and spent two years working as a writer and editor. But as time passed she felt stories were being increasingly distorted to support newspaper policy, rather than reflect what was happening in the real world. "This for me was not acceptable," she says. "So I tried to find a way to speak about the truth without feeling like the newspaper would change it."

"People don't have to be on one side or the other, just stand up for international law."

EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW

The former Secretary of State for International Development, Clare Short, became an MP for Birmingham Ladywood in the UK shortly after the end of the 1982 – 83 Lebanon War. Invited on a trip to Beirut she travelled through Damascus and over the mountains, passing destroyed houses left behind by the Israeli invasion. Prior to that she had little knowledge of the Middle East and four years later, she returned to the region. Arriving in Israel during the first intifada she witnessed civil disobedience, children uprising and young people with broken limbs.

EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW

Ken Livingstone's first encounter with Palestinians was in 1966 on a hitchhiking trip through North Africa. Stumbling across the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) office in Algiers, he spent hours inside listening to stories of their parents who had been driven out of their land. "It's really only then that I became aware of the scale of the problem," he explains.

"I thought no one lived there and that's why the Jews went there. I think there just wasn't anything like the blanket media coverage that you get today, no one had film or even photographs of the expulsion of the Arab communities during 1948 or anything like that."

Livingstone is from the 1960s generation, one that protested against inequities across the world, such as the Vietnam War. "We were challenging injustice everywhere, so the Palestinian cause fitted in with that," he explains; but back then speaking out about the conflict was hard. "The one big difference was that because of the Holocaust it was much more difficult to get people to engage with."