SOME 150,000 people took to the streets of London last week in protest against Israel’s brutal bombardment of the Gaza Strip, its ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in Jerusalem from their ancestral homes and its violent, repressive treatment of Palestinians inside Israel exercising their right to protest. 

Yesterday a ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas came into effect and many think this will be the end of it, calling on all parties to now restore “calm.”

And while there is no doubt that life for the Jewish-Israeli population will indeed go back to normal, with the beaches and clubs of Tel Aviv heaving, calm is not a concept Palestinians get to enjoy along with them. 

The political leaders who have been calling for the violence in Gaza to end are the same ones who block any UN security council resolutions to hold Israel accountable for its long and growing list of war crimes.

They are also the same nations that sell Israel the arms it has been using to bombard the young population trapped in the open-air prison that is the Gaza Strip.

And these are the very same leaders who will now brush the Palestinians’ plight under the table, and have us believe that we can avert our gaze because the bombing has ended.

But we are not marching because of the bombs. We are marching because today, after the bombs stopped dropping, Palestinians still wake up living under a system of injustice that even Israel’s biggest human rights organisation B’TSelem and separately Human Rights Watch in a 212-page report define as meeting the definition of apartheid. 

A temporary ceasefire does not change the reality on the ground for Palestinians.

It does not bring back the 232 Palestinians who were killed by Israel in its most recent assault on the Gaza Strip.

It does not bring back the 65 of those who were young children with their whole lives ahead of them, nor does it heal the wounds of the 1,900 Palestinians who were injured by Israel’s weapons, many of which are manufactured in Britain.

It does not heal the collective trauma, nor does it rebuild the thousands of homes that have been destroyed.

It does not restore the livelihoods lost, the beloved bookshops and cafes that will never open their doors again.

It does not lessen Israel’s inhumane siege on Gaza that entraps its population, denies them the right to live free lives, to move and build and develop.

A temporary ceasefire does not remove the constant threat of forced displacement faced by Palestinians living in Sheikh Jarrar and many other neighbourhoods, whose family homes are still in danger of being taken away from them at any moment. 

A temporary ceasefire does not change the brutal military occupation that is enforced on Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem by soldiers who deny them their freedom of movement, access to their own lands, demolish their homes and take their children into military custody.

A temporary ceasefire does not remove the barrage of laws that Palestinian citizens of Israel are faced with, that privilege the rights of Jewish citizens above theirs, rendering them second-class citizens in their own homes and subjecting them to violent attacks which they are unprotected from.

And finally, a temporary ceasefire does not grant the Palestinians who were forcibly ethnically cleansed from their homes in 1948, nor their descendants, including all of my extended family, their right — as enshrined in international law — to return home. 

So for all of these reasons we will march again in our hundreds of thousands today. But the protest and the campaigning do not end there.

Israel’s system of apartheid can only be sustained with the complicit support of our government, our political leaders, our public bodies and our companies and corporations, including those manufacturing weapons in towns across Britain.

The thousands who have joined the protests in the past few weeks now need to join our ongoing campaigns. 

Our message today to the people of Palestine and to all complicity bodies in Britain must be loud and clear.

We will never stop our protests, we will never stop our lobbying, we will never stop our boycotts, until the Palestinian people enjoy what is their inalienable right; freedom, justice and equality in their historic homeland.  

Ben Jamal is director of Palestine Solidarity Campaign (www.palestinecampaign.org).