Palestinian women remain defiantly strong

They are a symbol of bravery on this day

association. My keffiyeh – which gave me a deep sense of connection and identity as a Palestinian – was only worn at home. My voice was silenced and attempts to present the facts were met with perplexity and disbelief.

Our task of cutting through the propaganda was huge.

It’s now 2024 and the Israeli occupiers are still able to paint Palestinians as animals and savages. At the start of the recent bombardment of Gaza, Israel’s minister of defence Yoav Gallant, declared it was imposing a “complete siege on the Gaza Strip. “There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed,” he said. “We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.”

This was reported far and wide with little or no challenge from politicians and the media in the global north who continue to work tirelessly to provide cover for Israel as it ploughs on with its task of forcibly displacing, killing, maiming, and starving the people it has brutally occupied for decades.

What has been allowed to happen to Palestinians remains one of the most gross injustices against a people on our planet today. An Orwellian rewriting in which the victim is perpetually portrayed as the oppressor and the oppressor as the victim. Gaza alone has endured massacre after massacre, only for our government’s support of Israel’s colonisation of Palestine, its land theft and its brutality to increase.

In Scotland, and in all four corners of the world, ordinary people continue to watch in horror at the reality of our upside-down world.

Just as the recent conflict did not start on October 7, neither did the Palestinian struggle. The ethnic cleansing of Palestinians has always been a deliberate Zionist strategy. Its limits were never the military occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.