THIS WEEK, Palestinians across the globe marked the Nakba, not as a moment of collective trauma enduring in memory but rooted in the past, but as an unbroken, ongoing catastrophe.

Today, as we march again in our hundreds of thousands in the streets of the capital, we do so at a moment where the roots of that catastrophe, the zionist project for the erasure of the Palestinian people, is now manifesting itself with unashamed brutality into an open project of genocide. A genocide whose tapestry, since Israel tore up the ceasefire and cut off all food, water and supplies, is woven with new details and images of unsurpassed horror.

Earlier this week, Tom Fletcher, former adviser to Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and David Cameron, and now UN emergency relief co-ordinator, asked the UN security council to consider what words they would give to future generations to justify their actions now in the face of this genocide.

He spoke viscerally about the impact of the three months of blockade on Gaza during which, as another UN official recently put it “nothing has entered Gaza, no food — only bombs.” 

“I can tell you,” Fletcher said, “from having visited what’s left of Gaza’s medical system that death on this scale has a sound and a smell that does not leave you.”

On Wednesday, hundreds of PSC activists who have been the backbone of the community of resistance we have built in Britain queued for hours to get into Parliament to hold their MPs to account with the same challenge — what are you doing to end this genocide?

At the end of the rally, I reminded the audience of the depth of British complicity in the 77 years of Nakba, the decades-long denial of Palestinian collective rights, a complicity that stretches back beyond 1948 to the Balfour Declaration of 1917, which promised Palestinian land away. A complicity that has been sustained ever since, even in the face of genocide.

How have we arrived at a place where the government, in order to justify the continued shipment of F-35 parts to Israel, is sending its lawyers into court to argue that preserving Britain’s role in the F-35 programme takes precedence over the need to comply with its own regulations on arms export controls? How have we arrived at a place where the government can openly declare in the same court that maintaining the confidence of a US president, currently proposing the removal of all Palestinians from Gaza to create a “riviera” for Western elites, is more important than upholding international law?

How have we arrived at a place where we have a Health Secretary less energised by the need to vigorously oppose the destruction of Gaza’s hospitals and killing of its health professionals, including British citizens, than he is about issuing new measures to discourage health professionals in Britain openly demonstrating their solidarity with an oppressed people and with their fellow medics in Gaza?

How have we arrived at a place where, rather than upholding its responsibilities under international law, we have a government proposing to strengthen police powers to repress those protesting for that law to be upheld, and justifying these manoeuvres by shamefully endorsing the conflation of anti-semitism and legitimate advocacy for the rights of Palestinians?

Right now, the truth that we across the solidarity movement have asserted through decades of activism — that the struggle for liberation of the Palestinian people is central to the struggle against all forms of injustice — has never been more starkly true.

The battle we are engaged in is a fundamental battle for the world we want to inhabit and have all our children grow in. Is it a world where might is right, where the rule of law means nothing, where the principle that rights belong to all regardless of race, ethnicity, nationality or religion is cast to the wind? Or do we want a world founded upon those principles, which we can have faith will be safeguarded by our elected representatives?

So today, once more, we bring our demands to the streets of London. We continue to make demands not just on the government but on public bodies to end all complicit investments. We will continue to call on supermarkets and stores not to stock Israeli goods, and we will continue to target complicit companies like Barclays Bank.

The community of resistance that gathers today is weary but knows that we do not have the luxury of genocide fatigue because the Palestinians do not have that choice. We must be and will be inspired by their endurance even in the face of genocide.

After 77 years of Nakba we know that the denial and pretence that has allowed the political establishment to normalise genocide is wearing thin and being torn apart — when even Tory MPs are openly saying they cannot support Israel any longer, and the former head of the joint intelligence committee is calling for a full arms embargo on Israel.

Our struggle for a better world continues to be one that is founded on the hope that is the wellspring of all solidarity — a hope that has been the cornerstone of 70 years of Palestinian sumud (steadfastness). A hope manifested in the words of our great brother, Dr Ghassan Abu-Sittah, delivered to students in Glasgow, “It is your world to fight for — it is your tomorrow to make. We will own tomorrow. Tomorrow will be a Palestinian day.”

Free Palestine. Exist, resist, return.

Ben Jamal is the director of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign — Palestinecampaign.org.