PALESTINE solidarity champions were honoured with special awards by the Muslim Association of Britain at a Ramadan iftar on Sunday evening.

The In Faith and Solidarity: Honouring our Movement iftar brought together an audience of multiple faiths and none to hear speeches and prayers for Palestine before breaking the Ramadan fast together.

Among those honoured was Jewish Holocaust survivor Stephen Kapos, who said his regular presence among the Jewish bloc on Palestine demos was an important way of demonstrating that they are not the “hate marches” depicted in Establishment media and were a welcoming space for Jews.

Mr Kapos is one of eight leading peace campaigners asked — over six weeks later — to present himself for a police interview for trying to lay flowers in memory of slain Palestinian children at a Gaza demo on January 15. But the audience cheered as he told them that, just as he had been too young at seven years old to be afraid in 1945, at 87 he was now too old to be frightened.

Muslim Association of Britain president Anas Altikriti said the huge size of the Palestine demonstrations and their refusal to be cowed by political repression or police brutality showed “the cause of Palestine will never be silenced.”

Not only was “each demonstration testimony to our refusal to look away,” the movement had shown its political reach with the election of five independent MPs on a platform of justice for Palestine, he said.

Next up was Gaza-raised journalist Yara Eid, a survivor of 2014’s “Black Friday” massacre in Gaza when Israeli forces killed over 100 Palestinian civilians, more than half of them children.

Ms Eid spoke of the trauma of violence and displacement that affects almost all Palestinians, and the pain of having to carry “your home in your backpack” as you are displaced repeatedly by Israeli military action.

She urged everyone to maintain the pressure on Israel to end the occupation, including through support for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement and through volunteering with Palestinian charities.

An organisation honoured was the Palestinian Youth Movement, an international network whose campaign Mask Off Maersk — aimed at disrupting the shipping giant’s delivery of weapons cargoes to Israel — succeeded in delaying a weapons shipment by two months, as it was turned away from a Spanish port and blocked from unloading at a Moroccan one.

Both Stop the War Coalition vice-chair Chris Nineham, who as chief steward was shoved to the ground and arrested by police on the January 18 Palestine demonstration, and Palestine Solidarity Campaign director Ben Jamal, who has likewise been charged with public order offences for his role that day, received awards.

Mr Nineham praised the resilience of the marchers and said: “We’re going to need a lot more of that spirit in the weeks and months ahead. We’ve got to keep building this movement.

“It’s a huge and unprecedented movement, but there is still a gap between the hundreds of thousands of activists and the millions of people in Britain who support the Palestinian cause.”

Mr Jamal recalled that the ceasefire was just being announced as the January 18 march, at which police arrested over 70 peaceful protesters, was under way.

“Many people across the Establishment, including the mayor of London, said ‘now there is going to be a ceasefire it’s time for you to go back to your homes, there is no reason for you to be on the streets’.”

But not only is the fragility of the ceasefire obvious every day — he pointed to Israel’s decision over the weekend to cut all electricity from Gaza, with inevitably lethal consequences — but the ceasefire alone is not justice for Palestine.

“We will continue to demonstrate and to mobilise because of two profound truths: this genocide is built on the foundations of 76 years of colonisation and ethnic cleansing and apartheid.

“And that system of oppression could not be sustained without the ongoing complicity of our government, our public bodies, and every company and corporation that continues to provide the infrastructure of that system.

“We won’t be going anywhere until the walls of oppression that have imprisoned the Palestinian people for 76 years are finally demolished, crumbled to dust, and confined to the dustbin of history.”