TODAY marks the 78th International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian people. The day was initiated by the UN in 1977 via a general assembly resolution to mark the deep concern that the Palestinian people had still not attained their inalienable rights of self-determination and return. Seventy-eight years later those rights have still not been attained, and this year the commemoration comes after two years of genocide which is ongoing.

The polish poet Czeslaw Milosz who was a witness to the Warsaw ghetto once wrote: “If we are capable of compassion and at the same time are powerless then we live in a state of desperate exasperation.”

All of us will have experienced that sentiment across the past two years as we have seen Israel’s genocide unfold and may be  experiencing it now as we enter what could perhaps be described as the second phase of this genocide, whose gateway has been constructed via the so-called ceasefire introduced in October and now the UN security council resolution passed last week.

It is a ceasefire agreement that asks us to tolerate, while still regarding it to be intact, the ongoing killings of Palestinians in Gaza and Israel’s use of access to aid as a weapon of war.

Since the agreement was signed on October 10 Israel has killed over 300 Palestinians and destroyed in the zone it fully controls over 1,500 Palestinian  homes. Last week Israeli forces killed 33 Palestinians in a single night, leading to the latest images of infant bodies once more being pulled out from the rubble, hanging in the rescuers’ and their parent’s hands like limp ragdolls.

Scenes that ought to be ones of unimaginable horror, but which have become normalised after two years of genocide. Scenes which we are being asked to accept as consistent with an ongoing functioning ceasefire. All while Israel allows in less than half of the food and supplies needed urgently as winter arrives and two million Palestinians live without adequate shelter.  

And now the UN security council, having failed for two years to prevent the genocide due to the US veto, finally acts. But it acts not to enforce international law but to violate it. Not to respect the core purposes of the UN but to abrogate them. It passes a resolution that effectively hands control of Gaza over to the US, a resolution that allows for Israel’s participation in decision-making over Gaza’s present and future but denies that right to Palestinians.

The security council, through this resolution, has become an instrument for continued illegal occupation and a wilful violator of international law. The International Court of Justice in July 2024 confirmed that the Palestinian people have a right to self-determination on their land.

This resolution empowers foreign forces to govern them in violation of that right. That same ICJ judgement determined that Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestinian land should end immediately.

This resolution empowers states to support the continuation of the occupation of Gaza and says nothing about rest of occupied Palestine.

Further it contains no mention of genocide even though Israel is on trial at the International Court of Justice for perpetration of that crime and its leader indicted by the International Criminal Court.

Nothing about the ongoing ethnic cleansing in the West Bank and escalation of settler violence. Nothing about the over 9,000 Palestinians held in illegitimate detention subject to the most brutal forms of torture including rape.

As Craig Mokhiber put it, “not since the UN partitioned Palestine in 1947 against the will of the indigenous people, setting the stage for 80 years of Nakba, has the UN acted in such a baldly colonial way and trampled so recklessly on the rights of a people.”

The resolution also of course mandates an armed force reporting directly to Trump’s “Board of Peace” which will act in collaboration with Israel, the perpetrator of genocide, to demilitarise Gaza — meaning disarming the Palestinian resistance but not Israel. So this is  Trump’s vision of peace for which he is being applauded by the lap  dogs who endorsed this resolution, including Keir Starmer — no right of self-determination for Palestinian people, a mandate for Israel to continue the occupation of Gaza and by default the West Bank, and to sustain its system of apartheid on all of the land between the river and the sea.

So in this moment we need to reassert the fundamental truth that there can be no pathway to peace that is not rooted in justice, rights and respect for international law.

This is a question which pertains not just to the international arena but to the domestic one. Peter Oborne addresses this well in his recent book, Complicit, where he outlines how support for Israel’s genocide has torn the fabric of British democracy. It has been sustained via an ignoring of public opinion. It has been sustained via the complicity of the media, including the BBC which has fundamentally failed to fulfil its role to tell the truth about the genocide to a point of refusing even to utter its name. It has been sustained via increasing usage of draconian powers to suppress protests and dissent that are specifically motivated by a desire to repress the Palestine movement but threaten the rights of everyone

So this is our core task — to resist this process of renormalising Israel and to continue to build the movement required to establish a true peace, one founded upon an end to Israel’s oppression of the Palestinian people and the realisation of their rights.

That, as it always done, requires two conditions — the ongoing resistance of the Palestinian people and their refusal to submit to Israel’s plans for their erasure and secondly, external pressure exerted on Israel by a global solidarity movement that answers the Palestinian call for boycott, divestment and sanctions.

And so we overcome any sense of desperation by recognising the power of our collective voice. Israel did not want to end its full-scale military assault on Gaza but was forced to do so because of its increasing isolation — in the general assembly, within global civil society and across global public opinion.

Donald Trump for once told the truth when he said to Benjamin Netanyahu that you cannot fight the whole world — he was referring to the increasing threat of boycott and sanctions against Israel.

Here in Britain, we have been winning important BDS victories. Twenty seven councils have now committed to divest, the Co-op has withdrawn all Israeli goods from its shelves and there has been nearly a more than 17 per cent reduction in import of Israeli  goods to the UK.

Over 5,000 customers have closed their account with Barclays bank and music festivals have dropped it as a sponsor.

So this is the message we take to the streets of the capital once more today. We do so knowing that the struggle is long, but it’s also a struggle not just for the rights of the Palestinian people but for the world we want for ourselves and for our children.

We know that that world cannot come into being, that none of us can be free, until the Palestinian people are free. Join us.

Ben Jamal is director of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign.