Editor’s note: Following a longstanding custom within parts of the Palestinian liberation movement, this piece uses the terms “Israel” and “the Zionist entity” interchangeably.

Just over a year since 7 October, the Zionist entity’s appetite for death and destruction has expanded beyond Gaza to include most of our region. In the last fortnight alone, Israel has carried out airstrikes in Gaza, the south of Lebanon, Beirut, Syria, Yemen and the West Bank in an attempt to force the Arab world into submission. In this, Israel has full US and UK backing.

In response to Israel expanding the war, Keir Starmer has said nothing. He did not call on Israel to cease its bombardment and invasion of Lebanon, nor assert Lebanon’s right to defend itself as a sovereign state. He did, however, call for a press conference on 2 October after Iran retaliated to the assassinations of Ismail Hanieh and Hassan Nasrallah – following months, even years, of Israel goading Iran into expanding the war – by sending missiles targeting Israeli military infrastructure.

Starmer obfuscated these facts by framing Iran’s response as unprovoked, parroting Kamala Harris’s position that Iran is the sole agent endangering the region. Starmer even went so far as claiming that Iran was targeting civilian areas, a claim that appeared less credible after reports emerged that a large number of Iranian missiles had landed near Israeli military bases while only a single school was reported damaged (no civilian injuries or deaths have been recorded as a result of the Iranian strike). Starmer’s position remains the same as it was a year ago – prior to the 186,000 lives The Lancet estimated Israel may have claimed in Gaza, the more than 2,000 lives it has claimed in Lebanon, not to mention the hundreds of deaths in the West Bank. It is that “Israel has a right to protect herself” – a right Starmer assigns to Israel but not to the countless countries it has aggressed since last October, proving what the world is starting to see quite clearly: that Arab lives do not matter to the British establishment. What the past year has proven is that they do matter – a great deal – to the British people.

This year clarified the gulf between the public and the ruling class, around the world but in few places as starkly as Britain. After a year of mobilising and organising in the streets all over the country, hundreds of thousands marched week in, week out; the largest demonstration, in November, brought almost one million protestors to the streets of London to demand an end to the bloodshed. People gathered outside of parliament during the Scottish National party-led ceasefire motion demanding that their politicians vote in favour of ending the war, and outside of the offices of their local MPs demanding that they answer their demands for a ceasefire.

Several independent candidates won seats in by-elections and the general election by running on the platform of support for Gaza. Young British Palestinian Leanne Mohamed was a few votes short of unseating health secretary Wes Streeting, a major embarrassment for him and his party. In Holborn and St Pancras, Jewish anti-Zionist Andrew Feinstein slashed Keir Starmer’s support by 17% in his own local constituency. Palestine flags adorned homes and lampposts around the country, infuriating the rightwing press and Zionist organisations like UK Lawyers for Israel, which attacked the London borough of Tower Hamlets for permitting the flags until it acquiesced (perhaps not incidentally, shortly after Michael Gove called a government inspection into spending at the council).

84% of the British public think Netanyahu should be arrested if he comes to the UK, 67% that Israel has committed war crimes. 56% support blocking all arms sales to Israel. Both Labour and Tory governments have proven themselves determined to deny the will of the people on Palestine – and the people have defied them.

The people, united.

For a year the pro-Palestine movement has brought in thousands of new recruits, people of conscience from across all walks of life. Workers for a Free Palestine, a group of British workers who refuse to be complicit in Britain’s role in aiding Israel’s oppression of our people, picketed arms factories and protested in front of the Departments of Business and Trade and the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO). We found out that most Britons do not want to live next to arms factories, especially ones that are complicit in war crimes. We found out that British civil servants do not want to be forced to work on trade deals that could be in contravention of international law, that is facilitating arms sales to Israel while it is committing war crimes in Palestine and Lebanon.

In early September, David Lammy agreed to what was, in effect, a symbolic gesture, suspending 30 out of 350 arms export licenses to Israel, affecting equipment such as parts for fighter jets, helicopters and drones. While that number is nowhere near enough to stop the carnage, it still signifies the amount of pressure that was put by the Palestine movement in conjunction of course with the International Court of Justice case against Israel and helped by Israel’s brutish actions.

Sector-based formations across the country have formed to apply pressure in their respective areas, such as Healthcare Workers for a Free Palestine and Culture Workers Against the Genocide. Unions such as the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers (RMT) have come to the demonstrations and spoken out publicly. We have also seen the efforts by local union branches to pressure their unions through motions to support the Palestinian movement. Students across the country disrupted their studies and formed encampments as part of a global movement known as the student intifada. Students have insisted that life cannot go normally during a genocide, let alone one in which their institutions are complicit. In so doing, they have reminded us that the campus is and has historically been a critical site of leftwing struggle.

As we move into the second year of this genocide, we the Palestinian Youth Movement believe we have two critical roles to play from within the imperial core. The first is disrupting the weapons supply chain. We know that the genocide of our people in Palestine and now in Lebanon would be impossible without weapons that are manufactured in Britain. That’s why in May we launched the Mask Off Maersk campaign against the eponymous logistics giant, which is involved both in transporting weapons components from around the world to the United States for assembly and, through its partnership with the US Department of Defence, transports completed weapons from the US to the Zionist entity. The campaign is inspired and builds on existing arms embargo campaigns and is rooted in the understanding that the political class will never act in the interest of the masses and so we must enforce an arms embargo from below: a people’s arms embargo.

The second important role we have to play from the diaspora is to support our people’s steadfastness or sumud. For decades, Israel has been slowly ethnically cleansing Palestinians in Gaza by destroying essential civil infrastructure and maintaining a brutal siege on the entirety of the Strip. The goal has always been to make Gaza unlivable in order to cleanse Palestinians from their homeland. This is why we launched an international fundraiser, aiming to raise $1m to tangibly support our people’s steadfastness. Financial support is a political act that ensures our people’s needs are met so that they are able to remain on the land, steadfast and resilient, in the face of this genocide and displacement.

Palestine has caused and continues to be a crisis for the political establishment over the past year. Our goal is to make support for Israel and its aggression in our region untenable politically, socially and economically. Our role from within the Palestinian diaspora is best summarised by one PYM member who spoke at the People’s Conference for Palestine in Detroit earlier this year:

There’s a bit of … nihilism. This idea that everything we’ve done has been for nought. That we haven’t achieved anything, that the war is raging on. There’s a mistake in th[is] logic.

We are one front. We are not the sole front. … This genocide will come to an end, in part, because of all of the work that we’ve done. But that’s the key word here: in part. Not because of us.

There’s other actors involved. Chief among them are the people in Gaza. The actors in the region, the state actors, like South Africa and the ICJ and the ICC. We don’t put our faith in these institutions or in these strategies necessarily on their own, but understand them as a part of a broader struggle that needs every front mobilised … to bring this genocide to an end.