For anyone who cares about Palestine, there is little to feel triumphant about as we reach the end of 2024. The official death toll stands at 45,000, but this is almost certainly a dramatic undercount. A report by medical journal The Lancet, published in July, estimated that the overall figure could reach more than 186,000. Because Israel has destroyed the infrastructure which would make keeping these records possible, it’s impossible to know the true extent of its crimes and is likely to remain so for some time.

Almost 2 million people have been displaced, representing 90 per cent of the total population; at least 22,500 have suffered ‘life-changing injuries’ (according to the World Health Organisation); large swathes of the region have been rendered uninhabitable and over 70,000 housing units have been destroyed, along with hospitals, schools, universities and historical sites. A recent study by War Child Alliance found that 96 per cent of children in Gaza believe their death is imminent, and almost half are so traumatised that they wish they were dead. According to multiple reports, Palestinian prisoners, many of whom are being held without charge, have been subject to appalling acts of torture and sexual violence. 

People all over the world have worked tirelessly throughout the past year to bring these horrors to an end, many of them putting their own safety, freedom and livelihoods at risk, yet in North America and Europe their demands have for the most part fallen on deaf ears. With a handful of exceptions, the governments of the West have not only refused to impose an arms embargo on Israel but have continued to provide it with unconditional support.

But while justice seems a long way off, there have also been meaningful signs of progress. For a start, there is a growing consensus that what’s happening is a genocide, with the term now being used (with variations in phrasing) by UN officials, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and countless legal and historical experts. The international boycott movement, led by BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) and PACBI (Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel) has made phenomenal strides this year, successfully applying pressure on major corporations like Intel, McDonalds and Disney, and getting unprecedented numbers of artists, writers, academics and musicians to endorse its demands. 

In contrast to BDS’s more gradualist approach, activist groups like Palestine Action and Palestine Youth Movement have succeeded in causing immediate disruption to the weapons supply chain and imposing a cost on the companies profiting from the genocide. Several nation-states have either cut diplomatic ties or imposed arms embargoes on Israel, which has at the same time faced significant legal challenges from the world’s highest criminal courts. The Palestine solidarity movement has never been stronger, mobilising millions of people, and to a significant extent it has been young people leading the charge: it’s clear that there is a new generation of people who are deeply committed to the cause of Palestinian liberation.

None of this has been enough to stop the genocide, nor does it change the fact that the people of Gaza desperately needed a ceasefire well over a year ago. But if you take a long-term view, the future of Israel as an apartheid state looks less assured than ever. Focusing on the UK and the US, we spoke with activists and organisers involved in the Palestine solidarity movement about what they have learned in 2024, what needs to happen next and why the progress we have seen matters.

DYLAN SABA, PALESTINE LEGAL

Dylan Saba is a writer and an attorney at Palestine Legal – a US-based advocacy group which defends people who support Palestinian rights. “We’ve learned a lot this year about the potential and limits of rapid response organising to political crises,” he says. “Almost immediately after October 7, an axis formed between the UK, the US, Germany and, to a lesser extent, Italy to allow Israel to carry out a genocide. Watching that happen over the past year has been profoundly radicalising for many people to witness: I don’t think anyone really expected the level of brutality or just how far the US would let the mask slip in supporting it.”

As for the solidarity movement in the US, Saba believes it has been both a success and a failure. “Thanks to decades of organising, we were able to activate a movement which saw widespread participation across different sectors of society, especially among young people,” he says. “This was also galvanised by the outrage feedback loop: particularly on campuses, you had scenarios where students engaged in relatively mild acts of protests and were met with overwhelming repressive force, which is a very radicalising experience.”

The Palestine movement did a lot of things right: it staged both direct actions and mass demonstrations, where hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets; it engaged with the electoral process through the Uncommitted Movement (a campaign, orchestrated by Democratic insiders, which aimed to pressure the party to change course on Gaza), and it consolidated around the specific demand of an arms embargo – a demand which, far for being unrealistic, is consistent with both international law and the United States’s own policies.

“The key demand which everyone is mobilising around is to stop committing a genocide. This is not radical by any stretch because the ask is simply: ‘don’t commit the crime which society has agreed is the worst crime possible” – Dylan Saba

“This is not like Occupy Wall Street, where you had mass participation but no clear demand. It’s also not like Black Lives Matter, where the movement was galvanised around a specific, concrete issue but the demand was ‘abolish the police’, which is a very lofty horizon,” says Saba. “Now, the key demand which everyone is mobilising around is to stop committing a genocide. This is not radical, because the ask is simply: ‘don’t commit the crime which society has agreed is the worst crime possible’. So we did everything that you’re supposed to do as a movement, but it wasn’t enough: the ruling class said, ‘that’s nice. Go fuck yourself.’”

What this tells us, Saba says, is that the movement is not going to achieve its goals through persuasion alone. “We need to raise the political, economic and social costs,” he says. While it has not been enough to stop the genocide, there have been signs of progress on that front: not only has the international solidarity movement grown exponentially, but Israel’s legitimacy has been severely damaged by a series of high-profile legal rulings (in July, the International Court of Justice declared that it is violating the international prohibition against racial segregation and apartheid; in November, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for both Benjamin Netanyahu and Defence Minister Yoav Gallant for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity.) No one is enforcing these rulings, and they have yet to have any discernible impact on the ground, but their significance should not be understated. 

“It seems to me that Israel’s pariah status is now irreversible,” says Saba. “A lot of states, especially those closest to the centre of the world system, will ultimately have to conform their behaviour to the mandates of international law, even if they are dragged kicking and screaming. Israel is nakedly committing a genocide in front of the world: you can either say this is bad and it can’t allowed, or you say that the rules don’t apply anymore or make it explicit that they don’t apply to the West. The contradiction is too sharp to smooth over.”

YASMINE ASHRAF, PALESTINE YOUTH MOVEMENT 

Palestine Youth Movement (PYM) is an international grassroots movement formed mainly of Arab young people, which is active in dozens of cities across North America and Europe. Since the onslaught against Gaza began, PYM has mobilised thousands of mobilisations through the Shut It Down Coalition, as well as being one of 15 organisations to convene the People’s Conference for Palestine in Detroit. “The most important thing we’ve learned this year is that this is going to be a long-term struggle,” Yasmine Ashraf, a PYM member, tells Dazed. “This is going to take work, every single day, for a long time. It is going to take every tool in the toolbox for us to build the political power necessary to bring the genocide to an end and work towards a liberated Palestine.”

In May, PYM launched the “Mask Off Maersk” campaign, targeting a Danish logistics and shipping company – Maersk – which has contracts with most of the world’s largest arms manufacturers and forms an integral part of the weapons supply chain to Israel. “From September 2023 to September 2024, Maersk shipped millions of pounds of military goods across 2,000 shipments from the US to the Israeli military, which included specialised parts for armoured personnel carriers, tactical vehicles, and aircraft and projectile systems,” Ashraf says.

So far, the campaign has achieved some major successes. After PYM identified that two Maersk ships bound for Israel had docked at a port in Spain, a public pressure campaign forced the Spanish government to respond: it turned away two further Maersk ships containing military cargo, including armoured vehicles (the ship had to then dock in Morocco, where 10 port workers refused to handle the goods.) A week later, Spanish officials announced they would be filing legal proceedings against Maersk for violating Spain’s arms embargo against Israel. Now that the US Federal Maritime Reserve is threatening to sanction Spain in retaliation, PYM has succeeded in heightening diplomatic tensions even further. 

Looking forward to next year, Yasmine believes that continuing to disrupt the supply of weapons – and effectively enforcing a people’s arms embargo – should be a priority for the international solidarity movement.  “I also think there’s sometimes a tension presented between direct action and mass mobilisation, but we need both,” she says. “We need more people to be willing to take direct action, but also need the mass movement to demonstrate that the majority of the people on this planet want the genocide to end.” 

KENDALL GARDNER, OXFORD ACTION FOR PALESTINE

Throughout 2024, students all over the world staged protests in solidarity with Gaza, using a range of tactics which included walk-outs, sit-ins occupying university buildings and encampments (of which there were 34 in the UK alone.) Kendall Gardner – a PhD student at Oxford University and a member of Oxford Action – believes that the student movement had two different goals: the first was about material impact and the second was about narrative. “The encampments have played an important role in bringing BDS and Palestinian liberation into a more culturally acceptable realm, especially for young people,” she says. But when it comes to the material goals, Gardner is less convinced that the student movement has been effective. “While some of the smaller campuses have achieved success, none of the major encampments have achieved their demands, which is a full divestment from the arms industry and a boycott of Israeli academia from their institutions,” she says. “At Oxford, for example, we’ve won an investment review, which is great, but it’s not tied to Israel and there’s no commitment at the end of it.”

Looking forward, she believes the student movement should aim to be as focused as possible in its targets. “From an Oxford perspective, that means lasering in on these specific partnerships that Oxford has with the weapons manufacturing industry – Rolls Royce operates two university training centre groups here and that’s a very clear target for us,” she says. 

As the genocide continues unabated, Gardner understands why people might feel as though their efforts aren’t making any difference, but thinks it’s important to realise that liberation has never come quickly or easily. “We always say ‘liberation in our lifetime’, and I fully believe that it will come soon,” she says. “At the same time, there are so many other people who have thought that in the past and it turned out not to be the case. We owe it to them and to ourselves to continue the fight. I don’t want to glamorise that, because in fact it’s very depressing that liberation takes so long. But I do think it requires a level of humility – to understand that you’re a part of something bigger than yourself and that the timeline stretches beyond what you could imagine.”

STELLA SWAIN, PALESTINE SOLIDARITY CAMPAIGN 

Throughout 2024, hundreds of thousands of people across the world took to the streets in solidarity with the people of Gaza. However, the last year has also highlighted the effectiveness of local organising, which has played a crucial role in whatever progress the movement has made. “One example of this is our ongoing campaign against government pension schemes being invested in companies which are complicit in Israeli occupation and genocide,” says Stella Swain, Youth and Students Officer at Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC), a Palestinian rights organisation based in the UK. “Thanks to people taking action in their own communities, we’ve seen some real wins, mostly in London Boroughs: Islington, Lewisham and Waltham Forest have all pledged to divest from Israel completely.” 

Along with a broad coalition of organisations and civil society groups, PSC managed to defeat a proposed bill which would have made it illegal for UK public bodies to divest funds from foreign countries (specifically, Israel.) “Together we managed to lobby the Conservative government until it got kicked into the grass, and then ensured that Labour didn’t pick it up. That was a big win this year, and I think it generated a lot of energy for campaigns around divestment.” PSC’s campaign against Barclays, while stopping short of achieving its horizon goal of getting it to divest funds from Israel, has also seen some success: almost 5000 people have closed their accounts in solidarity, and a student-led campaign forced Swansea University to divest £5 million from the bank.

“I don’t think Keir Starmer’s government would have suspended any arms licences to Israel without the level of mass public pressure we have seen” – Stella Swan

Elsewhere, corporations are beginning to respond to the demands of the movement. Pret A Manger abandoned a planned expansion in Israel after PSC proposed a boycott campaign against it, and Puma finally bowed to years of international grassroots pressure and dropped its sponsorship of the Israel Football Association, which includes teams in illegal settlements in Palestinian territory. 

Swain believes that the enormous demonstrations of this year – among them some of the largest protests in British history – have had a tangible impact on government policy. “It’s the bare minimum and doesn’t even scratch the surface of what they should be doing, but I don’t think Keir Starmer’s government would have suspended any arms licences to Israel without the level of mass public pressure we have seen.” 

Looking ahead to 2025, Swain stresses the importance of taking a longer view, as difficult as this may be while we continue to witness atrocities day after day. “For anyone who feels like their actions haven’t achieved enough, the crucial thing is to look around,” she says. “Finding a community in the struggle is so important, and if there’s a way that people can sustain this, it’s through the idea that we're doing this for each other. We’re doing this in solidarity with Palestine, but also we’re doing it because we know that one day we’re going to win. There’s no other option.” To get there, Swain thinks that the solidarity movement needs to continue combining mass mobilisations, local organising and direct action. To illustrate the need for a variety of tactics, she brings up a quote by the American poet Diane de Prima: “No one way works: it will take all of us shoving at the thing from all sides to bring it down.”