London march marks 77 years since Nakba
It’s loud, it’s emotional. Central London is a sea of flags, keffiyehs and banners once again, in solidarity with Palestinians on the 77th anniversary of the Nakba.
Palestine is not unique in having been colonized and its people having been oppressed, but it means that we still have a particular duty in this country, to sort out the problems that the British created in 1948 when they allowed 85% of the Palestinian population to be ethnically cleansed onto the sand dunes of Gaza, where they remain to this day.
William Dalrymple, Historian
And that’s the message here.
The Nakba, Arabic for catastrophe, never really stopped.
In 19 months of an Israeli genocidal war on Gaza, over 2 million Palestinians, many of them descendants of those who fled in 1948, are being bombed, starved, and, uprooted all over again.
If we don’t stand up and be counted and say we actually care, then we’re just leaving them on their own to die, and that’s just not okay.
Demonstrator 01
Among the forest of placards and flags, the keys stand out, symbolic of the homes the Palestinians were forced to flee nearly eight decades ago, never to return.
The injustice that the Palestinian people have had to suffer for the last 77 years is indescribable, unfathomable, and, you know, painful for people like me and all of the people here today watching,… watching that nation be destroyed at the moment in this genocide.
Demonstrator 02
As they make their way to Whitehall, where the prime minister’s office is located, the protesters say the march is not just about remembering the 1948 Nakba.
It’s about demanding, demanding that the UK and other Western allies of Israel stop arming it, and for Palestinians to be seen as human.
The UK is [sic] always been in any misadventure that the US has done at [sic] West Asia, the UK, has always been complicit in it. So that’s why I consider it a tripartite genocide.
Of course, Israel is the main perpetrator, but the buck stops at the United States, because we are the Empire, and Israel could not continue to act with impunity throughout the entire region for more than four weeks without our constant stimulus packages injected into their economy, without our political support, and, without the military industrial base of the United States.
Greg Stoker, US Activist
The mood here is a mix of grief and grit, grief for what’s lost and grit to keep fighting for what’s left until Palestine is free and the Nakba is ended.
