Only justice can bring lasting peace

In 2024, we can all agree that there is no place in society for colonialism so why is Israel getting a free pass?

The history of the Israel-palestine “conflict” reveals a text-book case of ethnic-cleansing in which Britain promised away the land of Palestine for the creation of a Jewish Homeland as aspired by the Zionist movement - a promise which was both legally and morally illegitimate to make.

After the end of 40 years of repressive British occupation, the state of Israel was created upon the graves of 15,000 Palestinians massacred

during the ‘Nakba,’ within empty houses once home to 750,00 people forced to flee in fear and amongst some 530 villages and cities ethnically cleansed and destroyed by the Zionist forces to be replaced with new cities, new villages and new people.

By the end of the Nakba in 1948, Israel had captured 78% of historic Palestine and in 1967, it occupied its small remainder where 700,000 illegal Israeli settlers now reside in violation of international law.

Under occupation, Palestinians living in the West Bank and East Jerusalem face settler violence, military raids, unlawful attacks and killings, segregation, road-blocks, house demolitions and arbitrary detention and while the Israeli military

claims to have ended its occupation of Gaza in 2005, it has imposed a suffocating blockade trapping Gazans within the borders of concrete walls and electric fences where they are isolated from the rest of the world within an ‘open air prison’ with everything from its airspace to its territorial waters controlled by Israeli forces.

Today, we see the extent of this blockade reach new levels of horror – where Israel’s siege and constant bombardment of Gaza has left 2.2 million people facing crisis levels of food insecurity or worse - the highest share to ever have been classified for any given area by the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) in the world.

In 2024, we can no longer turn a