‘Over 70,000 Palestinian children are facing treatment for acute malnutrition so we continue to campaign, we continue to protest… inspired by the hope manifested by the Palestinians’ – Ben Jamal
Labour Outlook’s Sam Browse reports from this weekend’s Palestine solidarity demonstration commemorating the Nakba and opposing the genocide.
Last Saturday, over 400,000 people poured onto the streets to protest the ongoing genocide against the Palestinian people. The demonstration came as Israeli violence against the people in Gaza continued to escalate. Today, UN officials warned that 14,000 babies could die in the next 48 hours if they did not receive the aid denied to them by the Israeli military.
While there have been regular solidarity marches, all reaching into the hundreds of thousands, this weekend’s demonstration was also timed to commemorate the Nakba – the 1948 ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians from Palestine. In addition to the usual array of Palestinian flags and placards, demonstrators held aloft large keys – the symbol of the homes lost during the catastrophe and the right of the Palestinian diaspora to return to their houses.
Ben Jamal, of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, said “we have marched over 400,000 strong. We’ve marched to commemorate the Nakba, not as a a moment of collective trauma rooted in history, but as an ongoing catastrophe that right now is manifesting itself as a full-blown genocide.
“Right now, over 70,000 Palestinian children are facing treatment for acute malnutrition so we continue to campaign, we continue to protest. We do so inspired by the hope manifested by the Palestinians who marched in front of us carrying the keys, the enduring symbol of the Palestinian promise of resistance and return.”
Speaking from the platform and drawing the links between the Nakba and the assault on Gaza today, British Palestinian activist, Leanne Mohamad, reminded her audience that “this genocide is perpetrated by Netanyahu, but it is armed and funded by Biden and Trump. It was fed through intelligence and reconnaissance served up by Sunak and Starmer. It was given diplomatic cover by Ursula von der Leyen of the European Union. This is a joint enterprise… it is their Nakba.”
Apsana Begum, Member of Parliament for Poplar and Limehouse, told the crowd “our movement against war and injustice continues to bring people from all around the world and from all walks of life together, and today we demand aid to support the starving, the injured, and the dispossessed.
“We call for justice and accountability and we reassert the inalienable truth that Palestinian people have a right to self-determination – no ifs, no buts, or indeed ‘eventually’ or ‘sometime in the future’. We demand an immediate recognition of the state of Palestine now.”
We agree. Let’s continue the fight and ratchet up the pressure for an end to the genocide – and for a free Palestine.
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