Yesterday, once again, hundreds of thousands of us marched in London

To conclude our rally, Charlotte Church led the crowd in an emotional chant of ‘Yma O Hyd’, the defiant Welsh slogan of national resistance – ‘We are still here’. She sang it in solidarity and tribute to the Palestinian people’s spirit of sumud – steadfastness – echoing the words of Munther Isaac, the Palestinian priest who said about Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza, “We will rise. We will stand up again from the midst of destruction as we have always done as Palestinians”.

She also sang it as a note of defiance those here in the UK who have tried to demonise the solidarity movement, tried to confine PSC to the margins and who have tried to suppress our protests and all of our campaigning.

We will not allow the voices of the Palestinian people, and our voices in support of their struggle for liberation, to be silenced.

In the week since I last wrote to you, we have had calls from Lord Walney, the government’s advisor on political violence, for political parties to ban their MPs and councillors from working with PSC and for trade unions to break their links with us.

Yesterday we were joined once more on our platform by MPs and trade union leaders making clear they would not be deterred from active solidarity. Lord Walney is a politician with an egregious track record of unbridled support for Israel’s oppression of the Palestinian people. We know that his calls and those of government minsters for us to stop marching, stop protesting, stop boycotting, are rooted in a desire to shield Israel from accountability, and shield themselves from the public opinion we have mobilised which stands strongly in support of our call for a ceasefire.

The attacks on the movement are a mark of our success. The government knows the numbers we can mobilise onto the streets, knows that we have 15 trade unions affiliated to PSC who represent millions of British workers, and sees the work of PSC branches in towns and cities across the country.

Since October, our branches, who take PSC’s campaigns into town centres week in, week out, have grown from 75 to close to 100. Our subscriber base has grown from 75,000 to over 300,000. But we can’t stop here.

With your help we are building the mass movement for change needed to end all UK complicity with Israel’s oppression of the Palestinian people. Israel and its allies in the UK are determined to silence us. We must not and will not allow this to happen. We will continue to fight on all fronts – but need your help to do this.

We have to invest huge resources to protect our right to protest. But we also know that the best way to address the attempts to shrink our space is to continue to enlarge it by making our campaigns even more visible and more powerful.

On March 16th we will be bringing our branches together to cement our plans for 2024. On March 23rd we will be mobilising again across the country in our next Day of Action. All of this requires funds.

The Palestinian people need our solidarity more than ever in this darkest moment in their struggle for liberation. With your help, we will make our voice of solidarity even louder and stronger. Yma O Hyd! From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.

In solidarity,

Ben Jamal
Director, Palestine Solidarity Campaign