Aimee Shalan speaks at the 34th National Demonstration for Palestine

This week, amidst the ongoing genocide, ethnic cleansing, and collective punishment of the Palestinian people, British mainstream media has been filled with news that Israel can finally “breathe again”, now that the remains of the last Israeli held in Gaza have been retrieved.

Yet today, as Israel continues to slaughter Palestinians and pursues an ever-escalating pattern of repression across historic Palestine, there is barely any mention of the well over 9,000 Palestinians who continue to languish in Israel’s jails, including 350 children.

The mass imprisonment of Palestinians, and the brutal system of violence that surrounds it, has been a central tool of the Israeli state ever since its establishment.

Israel’s carceral system is rooted in tactics of surveillance, punishment, and colonial control adopted from the British Mandate in Palestine. These include the creation of identity cards, the erection of physical barriers, curfews and closures, mass confinement, collective fines, house demolitions, deportations, and torture.

Today, several prisons built by the British are still in use by Israel. Physical and psychological torture are not only widespread, they have been officially sanctioned for decades.

And for decades, protests by Palestinian prisoners against their conditions, through hunger strikes, legal challenges, and other forms of collective action, have been met with scant concern from British institutions.

But we refuse to get used to the lack of media outrage over Israel’s use of violence and imprisonment to wear down and break the Palestinian people once and for all.

This unabashed indifference is the symptom of a colonial mindset. One that may not always be consciously expressed, but which still holds the dehumanising belief that when Palestinians are arrested, tortured, or even sexually abused, it is somehow because they deserve it.

This belief, almost a century after Britain’s ruthless response to the Palestinian intifada against the Mandate in 1936, lies at the core of the British government’s efforts today to once again criminalise calls for Palestinian freedom. All while continuing to provide diplomatic cover and military support for genocide and ethnic cleansing, and lending credence to Trump’s blatantly colonial “Board of Peace”.

But today, we are still holding fast to our right to shake off injustice.

Even if they cannot comprehend that our calls for Palestine to be free, from the river to the sea, free from the fear of being bombed or arrested, free from occupation, apartheid, and colonial control, are not born out of hatred, but out of love.

A love that refuses to be defined by domination, extraction, and manipulation.
A love that knows its power and will never allow the ongoing annihilation of our people to go unanswered, or accept that the structures of oppression are everlasting.
A love that longs for liberation, and allows us to travel far beyond the carceral and racist borders imperialist powers want to chain us to.

No one is free until everyone is free.
Free Palestine.