This week marks two years since 7 October 2023, two years of apocalyptic devastation, during which the people of Gaza have endured unimaginable suffering. Over these two years, Palestine has become a dividing line in fraying social democracies, and a catalyst for a global solidarity movement.

Yesterday I awoke to the news that a ceasefire deal had been tentatively reached. We saw scenes of people in Gaza taking to the streets in jubilation. Still, there’s the gnawing potential that it will be breached, as the others before.

The details remain vague, but Trump’s proposed 20-Point Peace Plan includes provisions that Gaza will be governed by a “technocratic, apolitical Palestinian committee”, which will be headed by the UK’s former Prime Minister Tony Blair. The sun never set on the British empire.

Last week, mass mobilizations took place at embassies and foreign ministries around the world following Israel’s illegal interception and capture of those aboard the Global Sumud Flotilla. On 7 October people took to the streets again, demanding an end to the genocide. Confronted by protests on a scale and frequency they hadn’t anticipated, governments respond with zero-tolerance. In Britain, as the government aims to increase its powers to ban protest, the Prime Minister slandered demonstrators as “un-British”. After a summer of fascist agitation on the streets and far-right posturing in conference halls, the phrase is grotesque. In Greece, meanwhile, police responded with tear gas and batons, and a Palestinian among 18 people arrested had his leg broken in custody.

At 4am on 8 October, in the dead of night, Israel intercepted the next wave of boats on its way to break the siege of Gaza. Among those taken captive is Mskwaasin Agnew – a Cree and Dene woman from Salt River First Nation, and a friend of CPT’s Turtle Island Solidarity Network. She sought to bring solidarity from one settler colony to another, speaking of a “joined liberation struggle as Indigenous people.” We have heard no news since she was captured. Still, we are heartened that hundreds turned out in Toronto to shut down a major intersection outside the Office of Global Affairs.

Whatever is to come, the world after Gaza is a different place. Western governments openly describe Palestine solidarity as a threat to their interests and values. But no draconian power – no protest ban, no club to the leg – can convince those in the streets that the people of Palestine are not worth their solidarity. It is this conviction, which we hold dear and they can’t understand, that such powers aim to break. The only effect of their overreach is to lay bare their absence of moral authority.

In its place, we have built “a solidarity that does not limit itself to watching suffering from afar,” as my colleagues in Colombia put it, “but chooses to act, to unsettle, and to challenge structures of power – showing that Palestine is not alone, that its resistance echoes across all latitudes, and that it is a shared struggle.”