 Hello everyone. Welcome to this panel discussion on a very important day, the International Day for Solidarity with Palestine. Which is really, you know, solidarity with Palestine now is more important than ever and is actually an urgent action. I'm Dena Wata. I'm the chair of the Centre for Palestine Studies at SAWAS and I also teach in the media department. I'm just going to be moderating the panel because we have an exceptional collection of scholars who are going to talk about or around the title of accept Palestine solidarity rights and activism. And we're going to do this in terms of alphabetical order in terms of people's names. And then I'll just introduce the speaker and the title to make sure that we have enough time for the speakers to say what they want to say today. This is a town hall discussion, which means that the interventions are interventions. They're about seven to ten minutes long, and so we will have plenty of time for questions at the end. I don't want to talk that much because my voice is going to be lost in a minute, but I want to thank everyone for coming. But most importantly, thank the panelists, some of whom, like Gilbert Ashkar, arranged to come today because two of our original speakers are not well. And I want to just pass on to Mavish Ahmad from the LSE Human Rights because this is the second series of such town hall style discussions around the idea of accept Palestine. That doesn't mean that we do adopt the argument around exceptionalism, but we have to think beyond it and we have to think how to interrogate it and what does that mean. So the first event, and Mavish will come and talk about it in a minute, was at the LSE on the 7th of November. And now I ask Mavish to come and give us a briefing on it. Thank you. Thanks. Hi everyone. Thank you, Professor Matar. I'm just going to share very few words about accept Palestine as a town hall series, how it started, why we felt it was necessary to emphasize, think through and reject the exceptionalization of Palestine, and what you can, what you all can do, and possibly some of the panelists, to bring this town hall to your university to refuse the silencing intimidation and Orwellian framing of Palestinians ongoing Nagbaz. Accept Palestine was first held as a town hall event featuring eight speakers, including Professor Matar, Dr Mai Taha, who's also in the audience, and myself, at the London School of Economics in the aftermath of a systemic campaign to try to silence and intimidate students and academics through social media pylons, articles in the right-wing press, anonymous complaints to the university, and mass reporting of anyone speaking about Palestine to police and to prevent. LSE human rights and law joined forces to refuse the shutting down or attempts to shut down university spaces as sites to speak freely and openly and think together about Palestine and to express political solidarity with Palestine. The purpose of Accept Palestine was to emphasize the undeniable fact that there is both something very unique about Palestine, about the way that it's systemically excised from our classrooms, our universities and our public debate, because it's categorically labeled as criminal and terroristic politics and speech. But it was also to think that this systemic excising reflects perhaps a curious universal list excising to unpack. It was an attempt to think with it to unpack and to chart how attempts to remove Palestine and Palestinians as a land, a people and a politics tells us something about our shared universal condition. The particular censuring of Palestine tells us something that there is something perhaps paradigmatic about Palestine. Both the uniqueness of how Palestine is treated tells us that Palestine is a universal that tells us about all of our worlds, all of our universities. They're here and everywhere else. Professor Matar reached out to say that we must mark today with a similar kind of town hall, 29th November, International Day of Solidarity, declared in a UN General Assembly Resolution in 77 to mark the day that the UN partitioned Palestine. And we agreed that Accept Palestine should travel from LSE to here to SOAS. And tonight I invite all of you to accept Palestine as a series to refuse its exception elsewhere, maybe to UCL and Kings. Now they have to do it. See, I said it out loud. But also elsewhere and in other universities, because as I said at that event, and I'll say again, we need Palestine more than Palestine needs us because the liberation of Palestine there and here is tied to the liberation of us all. Thanks. And you will see as we go through the speakers that it is a cross university collaboration of speakers coming from UCL and from Kings and from Goldsmiths as well as from SOAS. So I want to invite our first panelist, Professor Gilbert Ashgard. He's a Professor of Development and International Relations at SOAS. And I leave him to talk. I don't know what his title is, as I don't know what anyone's title is going to be. But looking forward to reading you, Gilbert, and thank you for stepping in last minute. Yes. Thank you. Is it working? Yes? Okay. Thank you, Dina. And, yes, you just heard I'm replacing at the last minute, well, my SOAS colleague, Nimmer Sultani, who fell ill and it turns out that also another colleague couldn't be here. But the truth is Dina wanted me to be here to start with someone with SOAS because my name starts with A. So quickly, four points. We have very limited time each one. So the first I will be making is that what we have been witnessing. And I would say it's the first time in history that such an event is witnessed, is broadcast daily, is a genocide. You can't think of any previous genocide having been followed day by day, hour by hour by the media. And that is exactly what has happened under our eyes. 15,000 people killed in less than seven weeks. 40% of these are children. More children killed in those seven weeks than in all wars in 2022 on all fronts in the world, including the Ukraine war. All of them together had less children killed during those seven weeks. This is from the New York Times, not any source that you could suspect of being anti-Israel or whatever. So this has been definitely a genocide, a genocide of the war. If you add to it also the displacement of 1.5 million Gazans from the north to the south, that's more than half the population of the Gaza Strip. So you have a massive displacement of people and that's also part of the qualification of genocide. All the more that the intention is clear among people in the Israeli government wanting these to go and resettle elsewhere either in Egypt or in the rest of the world. That's point one. Point two is that it couldn't be but a genocide. Any idea that a war, whose goal is the eradication of Hamas between quote marks, can be anything else but a genocide would have been completely stupid. And that's obvious. Anyone knowing what it means to eradicate an organization of tens of thousands of members that have been ruling a territory, a little territory like Gaza, the idea of eradicating this organization meant necessarily the perpetration of a genocide, meant necessarily what we have seen. Until now just for one half of Gaza 15,000 people killed, if it carries on you can imagine what the rest will be all the more that the population density now in the southern part where they are going to continue the war is much higher than the northern part because of the displacement of this 1.5 million people. Therefore point three, because it couldn't be anything else, all those who supported this operation, the Israeli onslaught on Gaza and supported it unconditionally without even wanting to call for a ceasefire, objecting to the calls for a ceasefire and describing the calls for a ceasefire as pro Hamas or whatever. All those and the UK government is among them in the first place of course and the US government, all of those are complicit in this genocide. This is absolutely important. There are accomplices of this absolutely appalling genocide that has been going on. And the fourth, my fourth and last point is that solidarity in this case is not just letting out your anger. It is effective. It is absolutely crucial actually and we can see the effect of the global wave of solidarity including in the United States itself, including in polls showing the impact of the Biden administration's position on their electoral prospect for next year. We can see how much this has impacted them. They sent Blinken today to Gaza to try to convince the Israeli government to prolong the truth and are trying without saying it to turn that into a permanent ceasefire, but they won't say the term and trying to find solutions that could be agreeable to the Israeli government. And I have a little optimism actually about the ability of getting that because this is a relatively weak US government with a Congress hostile to it and very much pro Israel. And you have a far right government in Israel and which is part of the picture that should have been taken into account by those Western governments that supported this genocide. So that's why it's absolutely vital and crucial to carry on our solidarity with Gaza. Thank you. Thank you, Gilbert. That was on time and an important intervention to start our town hall event tonight. Feryal Awan is our next speaker and she is a lecturer in media and postcolonial studies at the Institute of Education at University College London. Thank you for inviting me and thank you for having me so much. What an incredible honour. I'm sorry I've lost my voice a bit so I'm going to be reading from my paper, not because I've lost my voice but also because I think every word matters and I want to get every word right. So I'm sorry I'm going to do that terrible presentation thing where I'm going to be reading from my paper. So thank you for inviting me. What I want to use my seven or so minutes is to talk about the French colonisation of Algeria and to talk about this exceptionalisation of Palestine to make connections between Algeria and Palestine and also to talk about the importance of transnational solidarity and how it's very important that we make these very important connections between different struggles for national and for liberation. So my mother is Algerian. She comes from a family that was very active in the movement for national liberation. So Algeria, as you all probably know because you're a soas, won independence after a very violent war fought against the French from 1954 to 1962 and in the 1960s and the 70s it became a very important hub for international movements. So under the two socialist regimes of Ahmed Ben-Bella and Hawari Bou Midian, the country attracted a lot of leftists and revolutionaries of all different kinds of stripes including the American Black Panther as well as South African and Palestinian liberation movements as well. To the extent that Amil Kharkabral, one of the foremost African revolutionaries called it the Mecca of Revolutions. And this in the 60s and 70s was a very important time for transnational solidarity. So you can imagine the Black Panther movement, the Black Panthers, the Algerian Liberation Movement, the FLN, the PLO, the South Africans that were all together in close proximity and they were organising together, they were discussing together and they were seeing these links against racism and imperialism. So to give an example, in 1969, the very famous Eldritch Cleaveridge from the Exile Black Panther movement, he set up the new African American Information Centre in Algiers. And at that event, to celebrate this event, the PLO was there and was represented obviously by Fatha and they issued a statement entitled to our African brothers. And in this statement they contended that while they're not part of Africa, the continent, they wholeheartedly supported it and they were part of Africa the cause. So this shared history of oppression against occupation, against colonialism, against police brutality has inspired a history of Black Palestinian solidarity. And it's recently been awakened in the Black Lives Matter movement after the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson in 2014, you saw those kind of connections being made again. And there's also a long history of Palestinian identification with the Algerian Independence Movement and vice versa. And there are many, many parallels that you can see from France's colonial occupation, to the checkpoints, house demolition, separation barriers, whereas as well as other forms are more kind of like gentile violence. So having lived through this war of Algerian national liberation and a new free Algeria, my mum has a lot of stories of Palestinians. So the stories she has are the ordinariness of Palestinian life. So Palestinian men in their cafes, playing Shakespeare, playing coffee in these cafe shops. But she also has stories that are more significant to her. So the Palestinian teachers who taught her Arabic in primary and secondary school whose name she still remembers. So these kind of attempts at diminishing the Arabic language and hence Arabic language and culture from the public sphere is another tactic that the Zionist regime and the French regime had in common. So during the French rule, Arabic was completely banned in schools. So Algerian children were not allowed to learn Arabic. They only could learn French. And when Algeria gained its independence, Algerian government reversed the situation, but they had nobody to teach Arabic. So nobody knew Arabic, the actual Arabic. So they invited teachers from the Sharm region, from Syria, from Palestine to come and teach Arabic. So my mum's Arabic teachers were all French and she has lots of stories of Palestinians. So it's really no surprise that I chose to study Palestine. I did my PhD research in Palestine. I've been to Palestine many times. The first time I visited Palestine was in 2007 and that was the year that Gaza was besieged. For the next 10 years, I visited annually for research, for workshops, weddings, birds, funerals, you name it. I was there every year. Anyone here with a Muslim name or an Arab face or Muslim looking will know that navigating the Israeli racist regime is very hard. It's very hard entering Palestine as a Muslim and Arab person. But for most of us, at least it's possible. And that's not what I can say for my Palestinian friends who live in exile. So lots of my Palestinian friends who live in the UK or in Jordan, in Lebanon, in Syria, they don't have that right of return. So they can't return to Palestine even as tourists. Actually, in fact, it's near to impossible for Palestinians in the West Bank or those who have green IDs to travel to Gaza or to travel to historic Palestine or even travel to Jerusalem. And as you all know now that the situation in Gaza is even more desperate where a lot of the people will have never left the Gaza Strip. So my ability to move freely and travel to Palestine has made me feel very uneasy, uncomfortable and also very ashamed. And I always feel like why should I enjoy this privilege of getting to know this beautiful land and those that have farmed the land who have connections going back centuries are not allowed to enter this land. And it's not just me. There are many, many people who have this privilege of entering Palestine. So you may be surprised to know that Ramallah, which is the de facto capital of the West Bank, is full of international organizations and people as well. You have lots and lots of foreigners, what Palestinians call Ajanab in Ramallah in East Jerusalem, working for Save the Children, working for Who, working for news bureaus, doing all sorts of stuff there. And Palestine is also a very heavily researched area as well. So you'll have lots of researchers there as well. And then you'll have lots of people who just kind of like digital nomads who just travel in Palestine and they'll be working there, living there, paying Palestinian rent whereas paying their taxes to the countries where they're from. So what you see is that lots of people, so people with lots of powerful passports have access to Palestine and Palestinians. And under normal circumstances these people are talking a lot about Palestine. So what I mean about normal circumstances is kind of like safer when we're not in the midst of a genocide but you have like normal, ordinary killings happening every day. People are talking about Palestine, they are using the knowledge that they've gathered in Palestine to publish in prestigious journals, to write books, to give talks, get promotions and all of that sort. But what I'm finding now is that many of these people that I've encountered in the last 10 years who've built their knowledge or built their careers on the back of Palestinian knowledge are very eerily silent. I know lots of people who study Palestine who are very silent. There are many reasons that people are silent. There's the hostile environment and many people worry about their visa status. Other people are worried about their family's safety or the safety of their own selves or their family. And I believe that there are many people who don't feel the duty or obligation to speak up. And I totally disagree and I think that the only way that one can ethically travel to Palestine and work there or research there is for your central aim or central goal should be one of liberation. And now in particular with the genocide in Gaza and these threats to our academic freedom, it's not the time to be silent. Now is the time that we must really use our voices however cracked they are. We have to use our voices and use our platforms and to amplify Palestinian voices and the Palestinian cause. So like Mavish was saying what we see in 2023 is Palestine is really becoming the defining moment of our time. The global implications of this occupation is becoming clear for everyone to see. And we know that settler colonialism, the struggle against settler colonialism is a very shared one. You can see from the Algerian example and also the example in America. And I feel like all of this oppression is linked and Palestine is at the intersection of pretty much all of these systems of oppression. So by seeing the struggle as a shared one rather than exceptionalizing Palestine, the people on the ground, so the activists on the ground, those in Gaza, those in Ferguson, those in Standing Rock in Congo in the Sudan, everywhere, Calais, Lesbos, Algiers, they're kind of picking up the mantle of revolutionaries past, revolutionaries of the past. And they're showing the importance of transnational solidarity in challenging these kind of racist and imperialist structures that govern our lives. And I believe that a free Palestine is necessary for our liberation, it's necessary for the liberation of all the people. And none of us is free like that cliche or that common thing we hear, none of us is free until all of us are free. All of us are free and peace can only be attained when justice is served. And I'd like to quote Egyptian comrade who says, we are not freeing Palestine, Palestine is freeing us. It's thanks to the people of Palestine and Gaza that we're able to taste this bit of freedom. We owe them everything. Thank you very much. Thank you, Feryal. I now invite Professor Des Friedman, who is Professor of Media and Communication at Goldsmiths. And I apologize ahead of time because we couldn't put up his PowerPoint, but I hope it's going to be okay. Just use your imaginations. So I just wanted to say a few words about the media and Gaza. And I know it's a truism to say this, that there is an information battleground that reinforces the military battleground. But just because it's a truism doesn't mean it's not important to repeat this and to hold to account all those media outlets who are complicit in the genocide. Now, the first point I want to make is that I don't believe it is the fault of all journalists. Actually, according to the latest figures from the independent non-profit group, the Committee to Protect Journalists, at least, this is a minimum of 57 journalists and media workers have been killed since the 7th of October in the region, all but four of whom have been killed as a result of Israeli airstrikes. There's also a further 11 journalists who have been injured, three missing and 19 reported as arrested. So this is partly a war on predominantly Palestinian journalists as well, which is what I'm going to talk about, as a war in which Western journalists are playing a central role through their asymmetrical framing of what's going on. Now, there is nothing new about this. There's nothing new about a lot of what we're going to be discussing here. Just as this war did not start on the 7th of October, there is a long history of reporting on Israel and Palestine in a way that marginalises history, that marginalises context, that doesn't speak of occupation, and that too often uncritically reproduces official Israeli government and military sources. Evidence of this was from, this is a long debate, back in 2006, the BBC governors as they existed at the time, they commissioned an internal report to look into this and they remarked in their own words on quote, how little history or context is routinely offered when reporting on Israel and Palestine. They noted in their words, the failure to convey adequately the disparity, the disparity in the Israeli and Palestinian experience, reflecting the fact that one side is in control and the other lives under occupation. These are the words of an internal report of the BBC, so you might be scratching your head thinking, have we got from those words to the actual coverage today which is replicating precisely these problems. One evidence that I like, a piece of evidence I like to talk about is the explainers. I've become slightly obsessed by the explainers that all news organisations feel they have to give. The BBC one, which is updated regularly, I checked it earlier today, it still starts, its chronology starts on the 7th of October 2023. For example, the Al Jazeera explainer starts by arguing, this is in the very first sentence, that the current conflict quote has its roots in the colonial act carried out more than a century ago. Which one is lacking context, which one is acknowledging that this is a deeply historical situation. So just as we need to insist on historical memory, we also need to make clear the difference in power between the Israeli state and Palestinians. One side has the upper hand in terms of guns, bombs, aircraft, propaganda machines, as well as support in palaces, parliaments and the press, while the other has little to defend itself with apart from widespread support on the streets, which I'll return to at the end. How does this manifest itself inside the media? I would argue, I've only got time to give two explanations. One very obviously is in the language that is used, where Israeli and Palestinian lives are treated differently and unequally. The former are hostages, the latter are detainees, the former are described as children, the latter are described as, I'm sure you're familiar with this, teenage males. Israelis are citizens while Palestinians are human shields. Let me just focus on the BBC, not least because the BBC, as with other public service broadcasters, is supposed to be required to be impartial, whereas newspaper outlets have no such requirements on them. So you would expect the BBC to try and address this requirement to be impartial. There's lots of examples I could give. Tweets all the way through since the 7th of October treat these two peoples in very, very different ways. One of the earliest tweets on the 9th of October, with 25 million views, stated that, quote, more than 500 Palestinian people have died in Gaza, but in the same tweet they mentioned that more than 700 Israeli peoples have been killed. In another report on the 17th of October, Israelis murdered at the Rayyan Music Festival were described as massacred in the same tweet Palestinians were merely killed in airstrikes. A BBC story about pro-Palestinian marches across the UK on the 22nd of October specifically drew a distinction between the, quote, atrocities committed by Hamas but the suffering in Gaza. You find these across output all the time. That's one element, just what's the language used, but I think also it's worth thinking about the agendas. What is not just there but what is also not there. So what we do see is, for example, lots of IDF footage of tunnels and in the case of the BBC they're very, well I would say unhelpfully tweeted in the middle of October I think it was and this was a tweet with something like 25 million views again. This matters when it's this kind of audience and the tweet was, quote, does Hamas build tunnels under hospitals and schools? Using the hashtag BBC your questions answered. It's obviously a question that the IDF would be much happier to ask than the people of Gaza. In terms of what is not shown, I'm just thinking today, what about the babies and incubators at Al Nasser Hospital? What about in particular, as we've already heard today, about investigating whether this is a genocide or not? You find Al Jazeera obsessed, that sounds like it's unhealthy. They are very interested in answering this question. The BBC, I looked at the hashtag, there's been one reference to genocide on the BBC World X feed since the 7th of October and that was only when it was reporting on a very negative criticism of the US Palestinian congresswoman who mentioned genocide. The story wasn't even about whether there was genocide, it was just attacking her. This is a huge matter of public debate. Other outlets are investigating this but there's this silence, there's an absence and I think that's just as important when we're thinking about what's going on. I think all of this supports a conception that Palestinian lives are somehow less valuable than Israeli ones or indeed I should say less value than Ukrainian ones. The BBC has had dozens of stories mentioning genocide in relation to Ukraine in the last year but as I say, nothing in relation to what's going on in Gaza. Now there are of course lots of exceptions and you can't paint the media with a single brush. It was interesting, Reuters, for example, as an international news agency as soon as the pause was announced they actually did very uniquely referred to both Israeli and Palestinian hostages. They called them equally. That's very much the exception that proves the rule for me, that by and large Western media are working within a frame that takes for granted Israel's security needs and its place in the world kind of sees at a very general level Palestinians as rock throwers and potential or actual terrorists. Now some of this conception has had to change a little bit precisely because of the severity of what's going on in Gaza and the fact that its actions are generating so much international protest. So you have started to see critical headlines in places like New York Times and CNN who traditionally firm supporters of Israel not because they have suddenly changed their world view I think it just reflects the fact that the US administration is a little embarrassed and frustrated that it's had to justify the bombing of hospitals and the killing of babies and so you start to see some cracks in this very well established consensus. Just to finish, what does that mean for all of us? Well the first thing for me is that where there are some small cracks in this consensus as I say it's not down to them changing their minds or some kind of in a pluralism in the media it's as a result of what we have already done of international protest and so I think for those of us who want an end to occupation and a permanent ceasefire we need to step up our campaigning and increase our noise that for me is the best way to prize apart the consensus on Israel and Palestine that has dominated Western Government and media for so long. The sheer scale of the international mobilisations to demand a ceasefire to show solidarity with the people of Gaza has started to crack open this consensus and the hope by many Western leaders that we're going to get tired of organising resistance and that protest will somehow fizzle out we need to actually show we are not yet tired and we will not be tired until there is peace and justice for the people in Gaza. Mainstream media will not represent our movement nor hold to account those governments who are complicit in the destruction of Gaza because they are overwhelmingly tied to an imperial world view. The responsibility I'm afraid lies instead with people like yourselves it lies with the striking school students who have taken action in the last couple of weeks it lies with the dot workers who have shown amazing courage and solidarity refusing to load some of the boats for arms to Israel and it lies most immediately with the marchers across the world who have absolutely intensified the pressure on governments and the media to make it impossible to justify what is going on now. It is for those of us struggling for justice and peace in the Middle East to intensify our action as the best response to the media's failures. Thank you. Thank you, Des. And now is Professor Alison Scott Bowman who is Professor of Society and Believe at Ours. Thank you very much. It's lovely to be here and Rana. Thank you very much for being here. Rana is one of my team. She's brilliant. I want to talk today about talking to strangers would be my title if I had a title. Rana and I work together on a project which involves us pricking the bubble of Westminster actually going into the corridors of power and speaking truth to power and insisting on being heard and insisting on not being silenced and also the price we pay is that we have to have conversations with people with whom we fundamentally disagree and who are not going to change their view but with whom there may be some arrangement possible about a peace for Palestine and a peace for Israel because none of this is good for Israel either. Think about 2008, 2014 on both those occasions the mantra was not to destroy Hamas at that point but we will take down Hamas. We will weaken them immeasurably. The world woke up, the world became struck with compassion and then the world went to sleep again. This must not happen this time and one of the ways in which you could if you're interested I better look at my time so I don't get carried away one of the ways you could if you're interested work with us is to actually decide that talking to strangers whose ideas you don't like might be useful. First point is we issue briefings we issue one page briefings in everyday language written by experts they go to every MP and every member of the House of Lords and we've issued two on this situation one on Gaza at the time it was quite early on when maybe 4,000 were dead and the other one was written by two NHS doctors about the health situation which is now immeasurably worse but we were desperate because I mean why should the government actually be voting on a ceasefire they shouldn't have to vote on whether they want a ceasefire or not whether they want to support it so we were enraged our anger fuelled us and those went out as I say we do a lot of briefings and those went out and we will do more we also can tell you I don't know if everyone's told me at the end where I've missed anything out there are interventions whatever you think about this government or any future government there are procedures that are not damaged not contaminated by anybody who's in power procedures like asking a question of a minister through an MP procedures like forcing an early day motion which means on the floor of the House of Commons Gaza would be discussed we have to discuss it if we provide a briefing which gives the basic data for an MP they are grateful this has been done before with our work we also have the possibility to work with other groupings in parliament that leads to my next point which is that we have actually now set up an all-party parliamentary group which means that we are allowed physically run sessions in the House of Commons in the House of Lords same place just a different corridor and in Port Cullis House where all the MPs have their rooms we've run sessions on reparations that was a very hot session very complicated but very good we've run sessions with other APGs on Afghanistan I think we should run this is such a long job isn't it the chaos that's been created in Gaza is going to take years to resolve nobody knows how to do it so for the long haul we've got these structures set up and we can animate your rage by giving you a platform by running these panels the next point I want to make is that we now have a student society attached to ICOP if you look up to us ICOP I know it's a bit cheesy but ICOP stands for influence in the corridors of power nothing like hubris to keep you going student society we've taken students with us into the House of Commons we ran a session we ran a panel the other week on prevent and we had a doctoral student from SAAS giving evidence and we also had the government's advisor on counter-terrorism on the panel so we bring in people who disagree with us this is what I mean about talking to strangers he disagreed with us we disagreed with him but he was prepared to share a space with us and to possibly make some modifications in due course you have to hope you have to hope may I also say that we believe very strongly that when the election comes we can facilitate we can improve we can work with the student union to improve the possibility that you're going to vote so automatic voter registration is coming on stream I think I think there are lots of ways in which we can ensure that students it's called the Sheffield model there's a Labour MP in Sheffield who's been working on this for some time we can make it more likely that you will sort of hold your nose against the political structures and the possibilities of who's going to be in power and nevertheless vote so this is really important and you could exact a price in a metaphorical sense you could choose candidates or prospective candidates and suggest to them that you will vote for them if they show compassion for this crisis if they are prepared to sue for peace if they really are seriously prepared to engage with the Palestinian crisis so there are many things that can be done and I hope that you won't turn away from these ideas because we are we can make a difference and your voice needs to be heard in Westminster it's terrible swirly carpets an awful neo-gothic architecture it's laughable it's fun to be there because it's so silly and all these dead white men lining the corridors and yes, some of the live ones are also the other thing you can do can I give a little plug for my husband's book if you really want to understand the situation you should work with Dina and Gilbert and others on the panel who've done very deep sophisticated work my husband has written what one might call a primer this is the American version the English version is called Palestinians and Israelis a short history of conflict and you do need to maybe you know all this already but I don't, I'm still struggling to know the facts that it's a very very complex situation that's been going on for what, 75 years plus and the ups and downs and the machinations of the power that has been abused against the Palestinians is extreme so if you're if you're prepared to talk to strangers you need to be able to counter the commentaries they come out with and present to them the facts, the facts are very powerful and they speak for themselves and I think, have I missed anything out Rana? I probably have but anyway Rana's brilliant doctoral student here fantastic team you will join us in the struggle which is possible to do something about in Westminster if you believe me I don't know if you believe me but I hope you believe me thank you okay and now we have Dr Emir Shalang who is director of the educational, Palestinian educational organisation Makan and she's the chair of the British Palestinian committee thank you I'm going to focus a little bit on the co-optation of international solidarity and the shrinking space for those speaking out against the ongoing repression of Palestinians today I mean it has been truly devastating to witness over the last seven weeks the horrific scenes of Israel's destruction of Gaza and the ramping up of its military violence mass arrests and forcible displacement of Palestinians in the west bank as well while the unequivocal support and encouragement for Israel's genocidal attack by Britain, the US and other international actors has been deeply wounding for Palestinians everywhere on a more positive note and has already been mentioned amongst the public we've seen the largest upswell of solidarity with Palestinians ever with millions of people around the world taking to the streets shutting down train stations in some cases people resigning for their jobs in protest and refusing to load boats with weapons meant for Israel as a colleague of mine put it recently there is however an unprecedented radical intimacy to what we are experiencing today the situation in Palestine is having an impact on people's personal and professional relationships outside in a way that is extremely challenging not only for Palestinians but for those who want to stand in solidarity with us and I want first of all just to talk a little bit about the international day of solidarity with the Palestinian people and the way that it is observed by the United Nations on or around the 29th of November every year in accordance with general assembly mandates contained in two resolutions one that was passed in December 1977 and then again in December 1979 according to the UN the 29th of November was chosen as we heard a bit earlier because in their words of its meaning and significance to the Palestinian people but of course on that day in 1947 the general assembly adopted resolution 181 which became known as the partition resolution dividing Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab state it's important to remember here though the role of the Balfour Declaration as well and the British mandate that paved the way for the partition resolution which was in no way wanted by the Palestinian people promising a way Palestine as Edward Said put it in flat disregard of both the presence and wishes of the native majority one of the many issues with the Balfour Declaration is that it promised political rights to Jewish communities in Palestine but relegated what it designated as non-Jewish communities who represented over 90% of the population as just having civil or religious rights and much less protection essentially then the partition plan officially legitimized and legalized settler colonialism and is an early example of how or the extent to which the UN's function has in fact been to take the lines of European powers and operate as a vehicle to legitimize their agendas today the hypocrisy of international law has been writ large on behalf of Gaza with governments in the global north not just turning a blind eye but defending the indefensible as Israel has imposed a complete siege on the people of Gaza killing over 15,000 people raising whole neighborhoods to the ground targeting hospitals, schools and places of worship so when we talk about solidarity today it's important to remember the way in which the UN's previous 1977 resolution to mark the way in which the 1977 resolution to mark the 29th of November as a day of solidarity superseded a previous UN General Assembly resolution in 1975 that had been led by Arab states with the help of the USSR and that one has situated the Palestinian struggle as an anti-colonial anti-racist movement and connected Israel with the racist regimes in Zimbabwe and South Africa at that time calling for the elimination of racial discrimination in all its forms as well as recognition of the dignity of peoples and their right to self-determination that resolution was then ultimately revoked in 1991 following pressure from Israel and the US and from then on the notion of Palestinian liberation was reduced to a peace building narrative that fails to take into account key historical facts or to address root causes including the mass dispossession of Palestine's indigenous population which prefaced the creation of the state of Israel and the raft of discriminatory policies and practices that it has carried out ever since. It is against this background that it has become so difficult today to be vocally supportive of Palestinian liberation without coming under extremely hostile attack. These attacks come in various forms from the demonisation and defamation of people and organisations to surveillance and suspicion of particular groups and attacks on nonviolent civil society tactics such as the boycott divestment and sanctions movement which are really calling for Israel's accountability. At the same time the chilling effect of the IHRA definition which has been adopted by many educational and cultural institutions has a malleability that means it can be used to justify virtually any allegation of antisemitism. People then are frightened to speak out or simply exhausted by the relentless attacks. But amidst all this there's a new generation of Palestinians who are seizing the opportunity to revive regional and international solidarity movements connecting with a global reawakening against racism authoritarianism and the new populist right. The links here with these intersectional grassroots movements they're fostered not based on identity politics but on a shared recognition of similarities between their experiences and the systems and conditions that they face and their struggles for equality and freedom. In this context then what does solidarity mean today? It means centering Palestinian voices not only so that they can tell their family histories their personal stories of dispossession and displacement and their lives under military assault but so that they can shape the conversation about their right to self-determination and their right of return. It means using language that acknowledges the Palestinian struggle as an anti-racist and anti-colonial struggle and it means resisting the chilling effect of hostile policies and practices that close down critical thinking and transformative education by weaponising the very notion of safeguarding to the extent that public institutions have been focusing on protecting people who are upset by the use of terms like apartheid or ethnic cleansing or genocide rather than protecting those who are suffering a devastating impact of these very real policies and practices. So what we truly need at this moment is not safe spaces but many more brave spaces like this one. Thank you. Thank you very much. Last but not least I invite Dr Rafiw Ziade senior lecturer in politics and public policy at King's College London but best known as a poet and activist. Thank you, Dina. Thank you everybody for being here. I wanted to start by being very honest. I am a poet technically and academic and both of these things deal in words but it's been very very difficult to find words and I want to acknowledge that and it's not just the televised massacres that we have seen it's not just the numbers of deaths it's the life changing injuries the flesh and bones burned and broken the trauma we will all live with the trauma that for most Palestinians is on repeat and has been on repeat for 75 years I was born into a siege of a different city I was born into the siege of Beirut with a different bombardment and the scenes we have seen in Gaza have been no different just more intense the hills, the babies shaking no fault except being Palestinian it is also not the women and children although that has become a mantra the women and the children and we all repeat it and it's true that the majority of Gaza's population are under the age of 18 but it is not just the women and children our men every one of them a life, a moon an entire constellation they have lifted the world on their shoulders for a month now comforting babies saving lives, looking under the rubble they are no less worthy than the women and the children and I will not be mourning them any less and unfortunately unfortunately to be Palestinian is always to be thinking ahead of the next massacre and the next genocide how do we organize to make this stop for us it's not periodic it's not episodic it has been our life for 75 years it has not only affected Palestinians it has affected the entire region the Lebanese people the Syrian people the Iraqi people the fact that Israel has existed in our region the way it has traumatized all of us and has caused violence for all of us and I want to acknowledge that but this ugliness and brutality by Israel that was unleashed and cheered by this British government the US government and the EU the same states that give Israel consistent diplomatic cover and continue their military aid to the settler colonial project over the entirety of the Palestinian people and the opposition in this country that has made it a commitment to get into power by being the most boring policyless opposition in the world could not get it to even vote for a ceasefire so I appreciate the nods to working in the halls of power but the halls of power have completely abandoned Palestine they have worked against Palestine and I think if we really want to move them we need to build people power and that's what the demonstrations have been about in the past month we have seen many so called liberal values come crashing down freedom of expression out the door freedom of protest we never really needed it anyway academic freedom well maybe for some but not for others if they don't happen to be Ukrainian if you happen to be Palestinian you're not blonde blue eyed academic freedom doesn't really apply to you we have seen academics questions for tweets we have seen our marches called hate marches we have seen MPs not responding to their own constituencies and voting against a ceasefire even though public opinion is for a ceasefire so it's not just Palestine that is facing the brutality of the bombing it is the system here that has been really put under a magnifying glass they keep telling us that these are liberal democracies how is it even a liberal democracy when there are a million people on the street calling for a ceasefire and public opinion is for a ceasefire and MPs sit there gaslighting all of us and saying it's a pause not a ceasefire that's what we want playing around with words when we have an entire city decimated to the ground and I know we keep talking about the violence and the decimation but Ghazeh is also beautiful Ghazeh is a Mediterranean city it is like every other Mediterranean city has seen the violence and the savagery of many many colonizers and it will rise out of this stronger at the same time we have seen mass mobilisations impressive creative actions by ordinary people workers and students all around the world students have walked out from London to Australia dark workers have refused to handle Israeli ships there is a lot more work to be done each of us who is an organizer in this room is exhausted just to tell you the level of racism we have been enduring one of the unions I was speaking to in Europe a German union said these statements can't be coming from Palestinian trade unions because the English is too good that is what we have had to battle in order to get work going but we have done it because this is what we always do because the burden is on us to stand for justice and the burden is on us to mobilise people and the burden is on us to be the activists to have to watch every word that we say while we are consistently interrogated whenever we are on the media and here I want to give a shout out to every Palestinian that has been on the mainstream media including my co-panelists because that is also a violence that we endure consistently being interrogated in public knowing very well that the atmosphere in this country is against us that also takes bravery but there is a continuous need to explain the specifics and the operations and the intricacies of Israeli settler colonialism and what the project has looked like for all Palestinians I know that when we are in western academic spaces we often think of this onslaught against us and the silencing against us and I know it's very difficult with the media in this country to realise that the majority world stands with Palestine and it's not because Palestine is an exception and it's not because a Palestinian child is different from a Yemeni child it is because freedom for Palestine is freedom for all it is because our struggle is connected to struggles of the oppressed everywhere and Palestinians have been very clear about that over decades Israeli settler colonialism has been acting with support of western powers and their regional allies to fragment the Palestinian people it is a very purposeful policy of disintegration of Palestinians resulting in a set of disjointed dispersed territories hoping that we will forget that we are one indigenous nation this stratification is reflected in the categories they call us Palestinians of 48 Palestinian citizens of Israel Palestinian refugees Palestinians from the West Bank Palestinians from Gaza Jerusalem is now being cut off from the West Bank as if it's its own separate territory being occupied Jerusalem used to be the economic heart of the West Bank in other words Israeli settler colonialism and power relies not just on the geographical of the Palestinian nation but on assaulting our very history dehistoricizing the Palestinian experience and reducing it to accepting fragmentation as de facto permanent it is especially difficult to be in this country with its colonial past the country that passed the Belford declaration and continues to celebrate it they had celebrations for the Belford declaration as if Palestinians don't exist and the suffering of 75 years did not exist it is this fragmentation that makes it possible today to speak of Gazans for example with no reference to how this category itself was constructed through the fragmentation of the Palestinian people as a whole we keep saying the majority of Gaza are refugees the majority of Gaza are refugees because this was created with the ethnic cleansing of Palestine and the Israeli strategy has been the same has been the same from 48 to 67 it is to control as much of the land with the least number of people that basic strategy hasn't changed we can make it academic we can write lots of books about it I know many people who build their careers writing about it but that's the basic premise of this settler colonial project it is a testament to the Palestinian people that we have not broken that across Palestine and in our exile we still remember that we are Palestinian and we still claim our right to return to our lands so this is an important moment to remember that Gaza is part and parcel of the Palestinian nation today it stands as the best of us today it stands as our symbol for return and remember the marches of return when they keep claiming why aren't you nonviolent the marches of return people walked through to the gates and Israel responded with violence the ramifications of this fragmentation geographic temporal economic it's a process that is far reaching it contributes to narrowing down our political vision and our imagination it leaves us wanting slivers of land and some autonomy to collect the garbage and maybe run a hospital but not real freedom and this was what the Oslo process helped to entrench it helped to entrench this idea and it helped with the fragmentation of the West Bank from the Gaza Strip so when we analyze Israel as a settler colonial state we are organizing against this fragmentation we are organizing for real freedom as Israel's campaign escalated Palestinian trade unions called for their counterparts internationally and all people of conscious around the world to end complicity with Israel's crime I have been one of the international coordinators for this campaign and I am very proud to say that some of the we are starting to have some results at the international level the call most urgently focused on the arms trade as the bombs were dropping and funding for military research the call asked clearly the time for action is now Palestinian lives hang in the balance it also called on other worker actions historically from Italy, South Africa, United States when people refused to handle South African goods but also the way the trade union movement acted against Pinochet's chili for example and all the inspiring actions that happened then and the asks were very simple refused to build weapons destined for Israel refused to transport weapons to Israel I am very happy to say today that all major trade unions in the Spanish state have called for a military embargo and signed the statement and declared it today I am very happy to announce today that tomorrow for the first time we are going to have coordinated action across nine ports in Europe for work stoppages in the middle of the day against the arms trade with Israel these things did not happen accidentally they happened because we organized they happened because Palestinian trade unionists under fire and under bombing signed that call and decided that we want to ask for ethical solidarity the demonstrations are important clearly in this country it was very important to go out in mass numbers against Soella Braverman thank god she is gone but it's also important to continue to organize in the university sector UCU branches up and down the country are passing motions for boycotts divestments and sanctions again we need to make these actionable our union technically has a position on BDS we want to see the action that comes out of these motions a lot of activist energy goes into these motions we really need the research to end that complicity I do not want my pension fund I do not want my pension fund invested in arms companies it's that simple we work, it's our money we don't want it invested in arms companies we have to highlight the destruction of the Palestinian educational sector every university in Gaza has been bombed bombed there was disgusting footage of Israeli soldiers celebrating inside a hall of a Palestinian university that is unacceptable students in their student unions are also organizing and we need to bring that work from our UCU branches with the student unions to start mobilizing for long-term action as I said for Palestinians this is not episodic it has been our life for 75 years so we have gone out into the streets we have demonstrated but more than anything I don't want to go back to normal because there was no normal there has been under siege the West Bank has been occupied and the death rate since October 7 has been a thousand people in the West Bank the ethnic cleansing is continuing as we are speaking Palestinian refugees are denied the right to return Palestinian citizens of Israel are treated as third class citizens and their lands are being stolen there was no normal so if there is anything we take out of this moment and all of this organizing is let's take our rage and turn it into long-term organizing and people power because we don't want to go back to the normality of no normal that we used to have thank you thank you Rachif a very good browsing speech that I hope people will take and think about in terms of what we do but I remember because you mentioned something I remember that we wrote once in a book called being Palestinian in diaspora and my cousin wrote something and he said it's actually a pain to be a Palestinian because you're always reminded of it but in very violent ways with this in mind I would like to ask whether any of the panelists want to comment on other panelists papers and whether we have any questions we have a microphone that can go around if there are any questions there are any questions so there's one there two one thank you Kelly so we're going to take a couple of questions or maybe three together okay Kelly thank you very much this is a question for Dr Ziar my name is Dr Khan I'm an NHS surgeon hi Dr Ziar looking at your your title I think it says your senior lecturer in politics and public policy at King's College London I've been on demonstrations myself for the past four weeks I think I've been on four demonstrations in total and one of the things that left me a little bit disillusion was that people in their hundreds of thousands come to the demonstrations they come, they wave flags, they chant and then they get to the front of the demonstration and they leave and they're left none the wiser in terms of how they can really you know effect change now I've been talking to a couple of people about how we need to be involved in politics a little bit more my understanding is having spoken to an MP recently is that some two years ago or was it maybe in four years ago a conscious effort by Zionist lobbies was made not to control one particular party but to have control of both the conservative party and the Labour party and by having control of those two parties whoever came into power they knew what the public policy and international front policy would be and the question is how are we as a group mobilising to ensure that the hundreds of thousands of people that turn up turn up with the intention of supporting MPs who did not vote for a ceasefire and that they turn up to support MPs that do support a ceasefire and they go back to their constituencies and mobilise in numbers and support those people that way politically because I think we need to be a bit more active on that side and only when we have the right people in power will we be able to effect change and I understand that US foreign policy kind of dictates a lot of what we do but at the same time if we were to reverse that it would make a statement do you have any comment on that and does anybody else in the panel have any comment on that please thank you and I think you had your hand up at the back there just oh sorry yep I'm really bad with names but the lady who talked about speaking to strangers you plugged your husband's book yeah so I'm really bad with names I would be very interested in hearing more about kind of what the type of negotiation or what you can achieve because I'll be honest I'm somebody who very much like the sister who last spoke I don't believe in power I believe in working outside structures even when the government didn't vote for a ceasefire I do a lot of social media and I even made a video asking people why were they upset when a government that is formed on racial capitalism and other exploitative models acts exactly how a racial capitalist state meant to act which is to prioritise well not prioritise people so you know I would I am open to hearing what you meant because even when you said that a type of negotiation could be found in my head I instantly thought oh it's it's doing some meeting in the middle and kind of giving you something in order for me to gain something I'm very tired of playing these city capitalist games I'm very much again power to the people I don't believe in government so I just would be open though to hearing what you meant okay thank you there's a question at the back at the very back and then we will have the answers no no the microphone is coming hi I just wanted to thank you all for having this panel I won't keep you long it's really appreciated by students and I know faculty as well in the current environment which has been really suffocating as I'm sure most people know there were students who were suspended just for protesting outside of the main building and we don't need to recap the whole situation here but I really encourage anybody who is a student here MA, BA of any kind we have department statements from anthropology history of archaeology, art and archaeology postcolonial studies, development studies every single department is working on putting pressure internally to give reps and professors a mandate to be able to push on this issue and to try and return the suspended students before Christmas because currently SOS is violating its own disciplinary policy and is trying to make it so that these students miss their entire first term and don't come back until term 2 so I just hope that we can all keep harnessing this energy I really support and respect all the work that you are all doing and we're hoping to push forward to get more BDS and actions and stuff happening at SOS and if you're part of a society we're also all writing statements and submitting them through the SU as formal demands and complaints about how the administration has made this a hostile environment for all students but especially Palestinian, Arab, Muslim, Asian non and anti-zionist Jewish students and their allies so if folks are interested there's lots of statements that are happening right now and being submitted so come have a chat if you're curious there's a link tree with a list of all the statements and hopefully by next week we can have every single department so as having to talk about this whether they like it or not. Thank you. Shall we start with Rafif and then maybe whoever wants to answer maybe. To tackle the point about the health sector first we're actually working on a statement from Palestinian trade unions in the health sector right now to mobilize health sector workers and I completely share your frustration and I have relayed them to the organizers of the big marches is that it's great to have numbers on the streets but if we're not mobilizing them for action afterwards it all dissipates and we take our anger out into the street and we say great there are big numbers but we need to do more with the numbers that are there and I think that is starting to happen and we're thinking about a lot of Palestinian organizations that I work with, Amy works with, are trying to do that. In terms of the health sector specifically I think there's a lot of effort to be done within the unions and the rank and file of the unions because there is support so it's not just about the political parties it's also in our spaces where we have power and there are very particular asks from Palestinian medical sector unions about making sure that the borders are open for for patients to come in and out the border is still closed for patients making sure medication comes in, every single hospital has been decimated to the ground so there is real work to be built from our medical sector unions here to support the medical sector this is tangible real work doctors actually going and volunteering fighting to be allowed to enter, there's an urgent need right now there have been many doctors, medics that have been murdered and already prior to this the medical sector was suffocated no concrete so they're not allowed to build new sections there's entire equipment that is not allowed in by the Israeli siege we also need to educate people about what has been happening with the medical sector in Palestine both in the West Bank and in Gaza in Gaza it's in much worse condition but even in the West Bank there's high shortages of specific specific types of doctors that are needed, shortages of beds all of this information about the Palestinian medical sector needs to come out and I think there's a lot for medical unions to do so I think we need to put that out there the statement will come out by the end of this week and with it we're going to provide information about the medical sector so there's rank and file and education work that needs to happen all of that of course these unions are one sector where we do have power to also lobby lobbying is just not a one on one relationship with the MPs it's also ensuring that our organizations are strong and are pushing in a specific direction but for me it's about building that knowledge and that power and trying to get rank and file organizing happening in the medical sector there's very good pockets of support but they're very disorganized and disjointed some of the union leadership is very afraid to take action and we need to push them from the rank and file and that will only happen if the rank and file actually organizes, pushes motions makes sure these things happen so I'll leave the discussions about lobbying and MPs I don't think it's as simple as we change the MPs and foreign policy will change but I think that's a much longer discussion that we don't have time for tonight Emma, do you want to have comments because I think it's good if we have comments from everyone I just want to follow on first of all from the medical side because I used to be chief executive of medical aid for Palestinians and the importance of really understanding what's happening in terms of the constant attacks on hospitals both in Gaza and the West Bank but also stopping patients from being able to access the six main hospitals in East Jerusalem as well is really essential to understanding this long term effort to ethnically cleanse Palestinians because if you don't have a developed healthcare system people can't stay on the land so I think it's very very important to connect those things and see it in terms of the deep set structural violence that goes on not just during these escalations of violence in Gaza and when we see it happening in the West Bank but it happens on a regular basis it's routine and it's been happening for decades and then just on the issue of the mobilisation and the impact on politicians we've seen how little impact so far and how devastating it is to see that but it's still so important that everybody continues to go out on the streets and to show that actually there's this enormous gap between what politicians across the political spectrum are saying and the feeling of people in the country so there are many organisations also who are working in the British Palestinian committee is an advocacy organisation which is Palestinians who are from all sorts of different spheres lawyers, academics health practitioners who are trying to ensure that Palestinian voices are also central to policy discussions nobody at present politically are in address for us to go to given the kinds of statements they have been putting out but I think it's still very important that we're mobilising and that we are clear that there needs to be recognition of Palestinians and Palestinian civil society and we also have to work very hard to ensure that the boycott divestment and sanctions legislation the anti boycott legislation that is going through is something that we are lobbying very hard on so there are key issues that we need to address it's exceptionally hostile at the moment it's been hostile ever since Balfour let's face it but essentially we still have to work on many different tracks and that won't happen unless there's grassroots mobilisation that really shows the strength of feeling across the country Alison have I got time to answer this one and we're not going to get thrown out for a film or something are we I think we'll be okay we have time okay yes sorry with regard to the issue about the medical cover the two NHSGPs who wrote this briefing for us Rana and I know that we got nothing back nobody wrote back to us and said yes this is horrendous but this often happens to us what we feel sure of is that Rana measures this we get about a 35% click rate so that means that a third of the people in this really insane bubble inside Westminster they are picking up they are looking at what we're sending them it's a part of what we're doing is information I tend to read the Guardian very few people in Parliament I think read the Guardian they might read the Telegraph maybe they read the Daily Mail I don't know what they read but they don't know what we know and so part of this is information giving but as I said earlier on it's also a very long haul since we issued that briefing the health situation the crisis has become unimaginably worse so I think probably we should run a panel of experts in the House of Commons and we're talking to people who have been instructed by the Whips to vote against a ceasefire they have been instructed by the Whips not to show a predisposition towards a peaceful solution at this point they are committed theoretically to a two state solution that's not what they are practicing but I don't care the fact is they don't know much about stuff and we can actually we've got evidence we've forced a vote on me actually I'll talk about that later when I respond to your question sorry I'll switch now Thank you Des perhaps you could bring in the media element I think I've said enough about that I wanted to echo the points made by previous panellists to continue protesting and demonstrating because I'm a bit more positive I don't think we should underestimate the impact of these giant mobilisations across the world I think they have started to change behaviour they have forced the Welsh Government to adopt a ceasefire policy they have forced the Scottish Government to adopt a ceasefire policy they have ravaged the Labour Party they have been mass resignations I think Starmer who has been horrendous on this is not sitting comfortably as a result of what we have done they have forced trade union leaders and I completely agree it's going to have to come from the rank and file all change all pressure for change comes from the rank and file from the grassroots and it has had that impact inside the trade unions the first demonstration I think there were there was one Labour MP sorry Labour MP there wasn't there was one MP who spoke at that first demonstration who was Jeremy Corbyn not a Labour MP there were I think two trade union leaders and as a result of growing and consistent mobilising some of those trade union leaders and more Labour MPs have shown their faces on these and that's as a result of our pressure that makes it easier to get the motions heard to make real for example inside UCU the BDS policy which at the moment is rhetorical it was passed at Congress we have to make that actual and just in terms of continuing with my crazy optimism here I don't get the same feelings what you were saying at the end I don't feel like we just disperse so I may teach at Goldsmiths but I live in south Essex it is not a hotbed of pro-Palestinian militancy and I tell you that everyone who goes to the London protests they still have a home outside London and they go back and we are taking action all the time as a result of coming together and being inspired by the mobilisations so every other week when there is not a national mobilisation there is a local mobilisation in south Enlonsee you are all more than welcome to come down this Saturday and in between those local demonstrations and believe me 300 people marching down south Enhigh Street is quite big news and remember the mobilisations nationally have put local pro-Palestinian organising on the map in hundreds of cities in the UK so there are as we speak now at south Invictoria station there is a die in leafleting the people the commuters coming out there are regular lobbies of the MPs the two Tory MPs in the area we are not going to change their minds but it is crucial to give confidence to people that we are demanding that they be accountable so I would just be encouraging all of us to make sure that we keep going that these national mobilisations are the backbone of everything else that is happening we need the school students' walkouts we need the direct action we absolutely desperately need rank and file activity and we need to work together I have no idea what that has to do with the media I suspect that they are not going to be that helpful in publicising them but it is always the other way around it is our actions making it impossible for them to ignore it the first three demonstrations the BBC, even I was stunned that the BBC never on their stories on the national demonstrations they never spoke to anyone who attended the demonstrations they have changed their behaviour now the last couple you hear grassroots voices the only way that the media is ever going to change is through what we collectively do not as a result of some kind of spontaneous editorial shift thank you so much Des maybe just one minute and one minute because we are running out of time I don't have to speak I am just going to say about the medical community the medical community holds a lot of power in the UK and I think nursing is one of the most trusted professions so there is a lot of stuff that you could be organising within your GP practice or within your surgery and you could be making these connections with what is happening in Gaza at the moment with the hostile environment in the UK NHS charging the treatment of asylum seekers migrants so there is a lot of things that you could be doing in your own particular GP practice or hospital that's all I have to say I don't want to waste more time thank you well very quickly we are demanding now a ceasefire putting pressure on politicians for the demand of a ceasefire and we can hope that the outcry at the scale of the genocide is such that this will be progressing however indeed and as Rafif said I mean or beyond what even Rafif said a ceasefire would mean just stopping the situation as it is now it's a very very minimal demand it's just a kind of stop gap what you do after that well we have to think of the slogans for now for the coming period first I would say the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of the Israeli army from Gaza that's the very first point here and secondly the right of the people there to determine their fate not something that is decided in Qatar by the chief of Mossad discussing with the chief of the Egyptian security and the chief of CIA discussing what kind of scenario a lot of talks find about scenarios for Gaza in which the Palestinian population as a whole let alone the Palestinian population as a whole but even the Gaza population are not part of the picture so I think we have to be aware of these problems and these will be very much on the agenda for the coming months and probably beyond that thank you thank you all and I think that this is the theme is that you know to think beyond now to the next step which is you know kind of preparing and getting ready with effective language that will help shift maybe public opinion I'm a little bit skeptical about the term public opinion and so on but also you know to have events like this and I think that it matters for people in Gaza that we go on these protests that we demonstrate that we show our support that we are thinking of them and that we do believe that they are humans and that we believe that the Israeli Zionist narrative of dehumanizing the Palestinians will have to fail thank you