TODAY hundreds of members of PSC will gather for our annual general meeting to make our plans for 2025. 

We gather two weeks into a ceasefire in Gaza, a ceasefire that has been a central demand of our movement for 16 months. 

We gather in awe at the courage and endurance of our Palestinian brothers and sisters as in their hundreds of thousands they walk, unbowed, back towards what is left of their homes. 

Fulfilling the promise made by Father Munther Isaac from his pulpit in Bethlehem at Christmas 2023, they have risen again from the midst of destruction as they have always done.  

We gather to also share their trepidation that this ceasefire will not hold as Benjamin Netanyahu and cabinet colleagues openly boast about this being a temporary pause to allow Israel to rearm with 2,000lbs bombs newly shipped from the US, which they will drop at the time of their choosing upon the people of Gaza. 

And as the mayor of London tells us there is no longer a reason to protest, we gather to reassert two truths we have proclaimed from every public platform in the past 16 months. 

That this genocide is built on the foundations of 76 years of colonisation, occupation and apartheid which right now is being reinforced with brutal intensity across the West Bank. And that this system of oppression is sustained by the complicit support of our government, public bodies, companies and corporations. 

Keir Starmer and David Lammy have not uttered a word of condemnation as Israeli forces have killed 18 Palestinian in the West Bank in the past two weeks, and settlers have burned homes and a nursery in Palestinian villages. Not a word of response to the president of the US proposing a crime of historic proportion — the ethnic cleansing of millions of Palestinians into exile in Jordan and Egypt.  

Instead Lammy jets off on a secret trip to Israel, Stramer discusses whether now is the moment to revoke the suspension of arms licences, and the government greenlights and endorses the Met Police’s suppression of protest. 

PSC will not be silenced, and we will vigorously defend the right to protest. But as we do so we know that what is at the heart of this repression is a deeper effort to silence and isolate the Palestinian people, to delegitimise and end their struggle for freedom so that Israel is allowed, with impunity, to continue its regime of racist oppression. So we will not be distracted from the task that informs all of the plans we make today — to end all aspects of British complicity. 

PSC’s strategy mapped out over many years has been to build a broad and mass movement of solidarity that combines the grassroots power of our branch network with our ability to build institutional support at a national level with progressive bodies. We have seen the results of this played out over the last 16 months as we have led the opposition to Israel’s genocide. 

The grassroots power has been manifested in the unprecedented numbers coming to the streets on the national marches but also the local and regional days of action. 

And in the aftermath of the Met Police’s attempts to repress the demonstration on January 18, we have been able to draw upon support from across civil society — bodies like Amnesty, Liberty and Human Rights Watch have condemned the police’s actions, leading lawyers and legal scholars, MPs and trade union leaders have called for an independent inquiry into the police’s conduct.

This is not the moment to demobilise. This is the moment to escalate all of our actions. We will be back on the streets on February 15 when we march from Whitehall to the US embassy. This will be the anniversary of the mammoth Iraq war demonstration. We make a call for every person of conscience to join us, to stand with the Palestinian people and to reassert that we will not let this movement be silenced. 

Today we make plans to drive forward Boycott and Divestment campaigns. We do so inspired by important victories. Earlier this month, Bristol City Council voted, by an overwhelming majority, to support the divestment of Avon Pension Fund from arms companies, and companies conducting activity in Israel’s illegal settlements — after a campaign led by Bristol PSC. 

Tower Hamlets Council voted to divest its pension fund from arms companies supplying Israel with weapons — after a joint campaign by TH PSC, TH Unison and TH Trades Council. 

It becomes the fourth London council to make at least a partial commitment to divest from complicit companies — following Waltham Forest, Islington and Lewisham.

PSC enters 2025 with more branches, more members, more trade union affiliates than at any point in its history, and with over 300,000 people now signed up to receive information about how to join our campaigns. We do not stop — we never stop — until the walls of apartheid that imprison and oppress the Palestinian people are demolished and crumble into the dust, across every inch of their historic homeland, when they are finally free.