Publisher's Synopsis
Teaching demands many talents and takes many forms, but few teachers devote most of their working life to the teaching of those who are oppressed. Eleanor Aitken did, and her story -- a detailed and shocking account of the plight of Palestinians -- makes remarkable reading. Having seen at first-hand how cruelly mistreated and maligned they were, she felt strongly the need to help more people to understand the Palestinian situation, their history and their culture. Ariadne's Thread is an autobiography tracing the steps which led Eleanor to become involved in one area of injustice after another. Horrified by the cruelties and wholesale murder that the Second World War inflicted, regardless of nationality, her first task took her to Le Havre, a town devastated by the RAF, doing relief work with the Quakers. There followed involvement with CND, the Committee of 100 -- which landed her a spell in prison -- Amnesty International, and its special efforts on behalf of political prisoners in Greece. Similar work on behalf of prisoners in the Soviet Union took her to the Middle East, where her eyes were opened to the Palestinian plight.;This is a book for the twenty-first century, for those that believe that there has been violence enough in the twentieth. Above all, it explodes the myth that to sympathise with the plight of Palestinians is to be anti-Semitic.
