“Now is the time for us in the solidarity movement to make sure that no more warnings can be ignored.”
By Ryvka Barnard
Whilst the horrific images from Israel’s genocide in Palestine may no longer be headline news, the genocide is far from over, making our role in the solidarity movement that much more important.
This week, an independent UN inquiry reported that Israel’s crimes of genocide continue, evident in the specific and deliberate targeting of Palestinian children with engineered starvation, debilitating and deadly violence, and arbitrary arrest and detention during which extreme mistreatment and torture are routine.
Israel’s cruel targeting of Palestinian children is part of its larger project, intent on eliminating the Palestinian people as a whole. This includes Palestinians displaced from and in exile from their homeland, including thousands in Britain who have spent the past years pushing for the British government to stop facilitating Israel’s genocide against their people, a demand which has been largely ignored, even when echoed by millions in the solidarity movement across Britain.
The devastating violence against Palestinians in their homeland, and their deep frustration with the British government’s complicity, was described to us in detail in the past weeks by the renowned Palestinian human rights lawyer Sahar Francis, who was a visiting guest speaker in town for PSC’s launch of a new campaign focused on tech companies involved in Israel’s genocide and apartheid.
Sahar Francis spoke powerfully from her position at the coalface of the liberation struggle about her ongoing work on behalf of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli detention. She told us that in her nearly 30 years of lawyer visits to prisoners held in Israeli jails, she has never seen conditions so appalling. “I’ve been documenting cases of torture and ill-treatment for decades”, she said, “but the cases we’re seeing now have gone beyond our worst nightmares.” Over 9,000 Palestinians are held in Israeli detention, more than one-third of whom are held in administrative detention, a form of arbitrary imprisonment used routinely by Israel to keep thousands imprisoned without charges, without scheduled trial dates, and renewable indefinitely. Of these thousands imprisoned, some 350 are children.
Sahar was keen to remind us that the ill-treatment of prisoners is not an isolated set of abuses against individuals, but rather part of Israel’s long-term apartheid system and colonial occupation, which is not only immoral, but has been categorically ruled illegal in 2024 in the world’s highest court, the International Court of Justice.
Israel’s system of arrest and detention is connected to the unprecedented destruction of Palestinian homes, schools, hospitals, and essential infrastructure in Gaza and the West Bank. And this, in turn, is connected to the unspeakable and brutal violence of Israeli settler attacks on Palestinian communities in the occupied West Bank, attacks on farmers and destruction of their olive trees and other crops that make up their livelihoods; settlers setting fire to Palestinian churches and mosques across the West Bank, attacking families in their homes.
Of course, the Israeli settler violence is connected to the rapid settlement expansion that continues at pace, despite whatever piecemeal slaps on the wrist Israel receives from the British government, whose recent announcement of limited sanctions on six companies and an individual was nowhere near enough. The inadequacy and hypocrisy of the government’s announcement were all the more striking when it allowed an Israeli real estate fair to go ahead in London only a few days later, despite full knowledge that the fair was advertising properties in illegal settlements, selling homes on land stolen from Palestinians.
Israel’s illegal settlement expansion, its continued bombing in Gaza, its refusal of food and medical aid, its use of arbitrary detention and torture as collective punishment—all of these phenomena need to be understood and opposed in their own right, but we can’t lose sight of the bigger picture: that Israel is carrying out a system of colonial apartheid; that it has been for decades; that this system of apartheid set the stage for the genocide we have been witnessing in Gaza; and importantly for us in Britain, that these crimes have been planned, prepared and carried out with willing and open complicity of the British government, along with institutions and companies based right here in Britain.
Every element of this was preventable. Palestinians have been warning about it for decades, and the UN and civil society have given clear instructions about what the British government is obligated to do to prevent further harm. Now is the time for us in the solidarity movement to make sure that no more warnings can be ignored.
Recent polling conducted by Opinium on behalf of Palestine Solidarity Campaign has provided clear evidence of what many already suspected, that in the recent elections, previous Labour voters abandoned the party over its appalling positions on Palestine. 70% of those who switched their vote to other centre or left parties say their opinion of Labour would improve if the next leader were to adopt a strong position on Palestine, such as imposing sanctions on Israel. Any new Labour leader must remember that these statistics represent the wishes of former Labour voters, but also reflect the policy voted by Labour members at last year’s conference.
No matter how people voted or intend to in the future, the work of the solidarity movement here in Britain is clear. We must bring as much pressure as possible on the government to finally fulfil its obligations under international law, to take heed of the testimony and warnings of Palestinian civil society groups and to listen to the millions in Britain whose solidarity with the Palestinian people is as strong as ever. Next week, PSC will hold our annual summer mass lobby of parliament, in which you can bring these demands directly to your MP. Following that, in the days after a new Prime Minister may be announced, we’ll be bringing these demands to the fore at our next national march for Palestine on 18 July. We need to make both as big as possible to respond to the Palestinian call for solidarity and show the incoming Prime Minister that now is the time to change course.
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