THE first national demonstration for Palestine of 2026 will again draw hundreds of thousands onto the streets this weekend. And the need to march for peace and justice is as great as ever.

It has been a truly terrifying January, in which the lethal aggression of the Donald Trump regime in the United States has been unleashed.

It began with the illegal abduction of the president of Venezuela, a bloody kidnapping that killed more than 80 people. Trump is now tightening the noose around Cuba, bullying Venezuela and Mexico into stopping oil supplies and now threatening any country that sells it oil with punitive tariffs. The socialist island faces an imminent energy crisis.

The month saw a further crisis over US threats to annex Greenland, instilling European states with a sudden concern for international law notably absent in Venezuela’s case, and it draws to a close with what Trump calls a US “armada” threatening to bomb Iran. All the while his armed goons have been terrorising US residents themselves in the streets of Minneapolis, including through two brazen street executions.

Amid the sound and fury, Palestine is still the issue. The “ceasefire” struck last autumn has slowed the pace of killing, but Palestinians are still killed by Israeli soldiers daily. The ethnic cleansing of the West Bank proceeds apace.

Palestine is a test case for Trump’s new world order. Israel’s recognition of the breakaway Somalian region Somaliland is tied to proposals for the forced displacement of Gaza’s population there — mass deportation and resettlement on a scale not seen since the second world war.

Israel’s apartheid state has become a cause celebre for racists and white supremacists across the West, who see its race war as an inspiration — ironically since many, from Viktor Orban to Trump himself, combine championing Israel with anti-semitic conspiracy theories in which a shadowy cosmopolitan elite directs mass migration to bring down the West.

Trump’s “Board of Peace” to determine Gaza’s future — which has no Palestinian representation whatsoever — has already morphed into a body with a far wider remit, which the US president says could replace the UN itself.

But Palestine is also the focus of the resistance to Trump’s might-is-right lawlessness.

The genocide case against Israel taken to the International Court of Justice by South Africa — prompting ludicrous retaliatory accusations from the US that it is committing genocide against white farmers — is a serious bid to turn institutions long used to assert Western authority over the global South into channels to hold governments accountable for their actions on an equal basis.

The International Criminal Court arrest warrants for Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu and ex-defence minister Yoav Gallant made history in the same way, and have led to public attacks on the court from the US, exposing its hypocrisy before the world.

Within Britain, the Palestine movement is at the sharp end of state repression and marching with it is a defence of democracy itself.

Ministers refused to meet hunger strikers protesting at grossly extended pre-trial detention under inhumane conditions, denied books, library or gym visits, even when some seemed close to death.

They are proceeding with plans to withdraw jury trial rights in most cases while enacting legislation increasing prison sentences for breaching the ever more obstructive police conditions on protest.

Next month, peace activists Ben Jamal of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign and Chris Nineham of Stop the War will go on trial for leading a peaceful demonstration a year ago to lay flowers in front of the BBC in memory of Gaza’s slaughtered children.

Justice for Palestine is the focal point in the fight for our freedoms at home and for respect for self-determination, human rights and international law globally.

This weekend, our numbers must make it clear to the Washington toadies on both Westminster front benches that those are not fights we are prepared to lose.