AS I stand here today looking out at the world, I ask myself, how can this be real? How can this be the world we are living in?
 
All of you here are beacons of hope in this darkness. Here you stand embodied, with the fullness of your voice, in a world that demands that we are always in motion, numb to the reality that enters our lives through our phones and the images that come to us day after day of this genocide in Gaza.
 
If you’re anything like me, you’ll have gone through stages of looking and then looking away, churning through feelings of helplessness, and breaking down when there’s nothing else.
 
Somehow, over 14 months, these images have become genres, possible to categorise, as the reality repeats itself.

More lifeless babies pulled out from the rubble. More children waking up to a world in which they have been orphaned, recognising no-one. More children running after their bleeding parents, or hugging their graves. More mothers and fathers wailing over the bodies of their children.

More aid trucks joyously held back. More hospitals evacuated or bombed. More schools used as shelters turned into the sites of massacres. More bodies burning alive. More body parts thrown into black bags and then weighed to approximate a human being.
 
How can it be that after 14 months, we are still here?
 
As I stand here, I am reminded of the words of my friend Alaa Abdel Fattah, who many of you will know is unjustly held in prison in Egypt. A British Egyptian citizen, his mother now on 62 days of hunger strike. Yet again being failed by our government. These words are from his book, You Have Not Yet Been Defeated:
 
“They will not eject you from history as long as you can still speak; they will not banish you to the past as long as you can still listen. But which present do you inhabit?
 
“Haunt the dreams of your comrades, and the nightmares of your enemies, live in a future that never came — be a spectre, a memory, and a herald. Remind them that the current state was not inevitable until it came to be.

“Do not occupy yourself with the question of why this very possible future failed, leave the victorious to grope for answers. Be the question, and do not heed your impotence. A ghost has no need for material presence or action, you just need to shimmer.”
 
And so as I look out at you all, shimmering amidst these nightmares and this upside-down world where the heralds of a better world are in prison, and the greatest war criminal on Earth, Benjamin Netanyahu, is applauded in congress, still being sent weapons by governments around the world, including our own, where do you go?
 
You go to the future that you know will come, and you live for it in the present. You insist on justice in the knowledge that it is the only path for peace. You find the people who will walk that path with you. You work together.
 
And each day, you ask yourself, where does this genocide in Gaza live in me? Where does the occupation in Palestine live in me? If I am silent, how can I call myself free?
 
Because after 14 months, what words are left? The reality has been laid threadbare. There is no number, there is no statistic left for someone to say — “Oh really? If only I’d known that, I would have responded differently.”
 
The world knows, and so this is the world we have to change. And what can we say to it? Because, yes, I believe we do have to listen to those who are still scared to speak up, but who know what this is, and find out what it is that is holding them back, for in it is the key to all our futures. They are still welcome.
 
And so I will end with a poem that I wrote as I tried to find my way to these words I have spoken today.
 
Last night I had a dream I saw the children of this genocide,
they appeared not to me, but to everyone
they were neither above us, nor below us,
and all they wanted was to hold our hand.
 
There were those of us, who let our hands be held
and there were those of us who wouldn’t.
 
Somehow they all had dared to hope
that anyone would take that hand,
as any child would, yearning for safety,
but orphaned in death, they had been
abandoned once again, by the living,
 
The living who haunt this world,
some part of them already dead, or deadened.
 
And the surprise in those children’s eyes
was searing, a look that contained legacies.
 
For they had spoken
to the children of the Nama and Herero of Namibia,
to the children of the Armenians,
they had spoken to the children
of Srebrenica, Rwanda and Cambodia,
and they had spoken
to the children of the Holocaust,
all of who had told them
that Never Again is now and always,
even when it fails the living, which is why
 
with each genocide and this one in Palestine
they held out their hand to each other
in the hope that some day
they would reach the living
who had chosen to die a different death.
 
For in that hand that is always reaching out,
the hand of the children of genocide,
is life, is freedom, is justice,
surely you see that …  shimmering.
 
Free free Palestine.