London: Actor Khalid Abdalla speaks at Nakba march

Khalid Abdalla - screenshot

British actor Khalid Abdalla, who played Dodi Fayed in the Crown TV series and Amir in the Kite Runner, gave this heartfelt address to huge crowds gathered in Whitehall at the end of the march on Saturday, commemorating the 77th anniversary of the 'Nakba' - the 'catastrophe' during which more than 750,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homes during the creation of the modern state of Israel in 1948.

More than 500 villages and towns were destroyed and the remaining population was forced to live under a regime of apartheid, military occupation, and siege that continues to this day.

Khalid Abdalla said:

When we face the truth, there is always hope. It might be hard to find, but it is always there.

People of Gaza, people of Palestine, this current world has failed you.

The child that looks up to the sky, who has lost their entire family, or the child whose mother can no longer breastfeed her baby because she is being starved by this blockade, hold each others hands and look up to the sky to see a drone, or an F-35, and the message they receive is that this world does not value their life as equal to others.

This week I saw a woman scream 'it would take me two lifetimes to forget what I have seen', after a missile took her children and the ground beneath them.

Last week we celebrated the 80th anniversary of the end of the second world war. This year we commemorated the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. And today we look at this world, that was built on the devastation of that time, and we see once again the rise of fascism and racist rhetoric in the centres of power.

Most of us here, are beneficiaries of what has been better about these last 80 years.

But for 77 years, an entire lifetime. The scenes we are seeing in Gaza and the West Bank today, have been repeated in one form or another generation after generation, childhood after childhood. And that is why we say the Nakba is not just an event in the past, but an ongoing catastrophe that has reached this moment of truth, this precipice.

That child who looks up at the sky now, who does not know when they will be bombed next, is worth no less than the child who looked up at the sky during the Blitz in this country. That child who has lost their entire family, is worth no less than the children of the Holocaust who lost theirs.

And yet here we are, on the edge of a famine, during a genocide that our government has the gall now to deny in court. Gaza will be your Iraq, Keir Starmer. It already is.

The world that is failing Palestine, is failing all of us, and that is why now, we are seeing it rise up further as the edifice of silence finally cracks open to reveal this same sky that belongs to every child's freedom.

People of Gaza and Palestine, the signs are everywhere rising. You are not alone.

This Nakba marks a turning point, not just of consciousness but of people's actions, their souls walking in the world. We are witnessing the end of the fear of talking about Palestine.

That is the story told by millions across the globe giving their lives to acts of solidarity.

A new generation is learning to say the words Free Palestine with the same moral clarity they learnt to say Never Again, because they are entwined in our journey together to build a world of institutions and democracies that will never again allow a genocide to happen. A world in which this occupation ends, in which apartheid becomes as obsolete as slavery. The struggle to Free Palestine is the civil rights movement of our time.

The world has come to see this, and that is why we are seeing another wave of unprecedented statements coming from all walks of life, people and organisations who in their own words have said, they were wrong, the silence needs to end, and Israel is not their ally. And much as it pains me that it has taken so many this long, I want to welcome them, and recognise how hard it is for anyone to change. This is not a game of righteousness, it is a struggle with real life consequences.

Whoever you are and wherever you are, you need to ask yourself this. Are you going to live for the corrosive destruction of Trump, Netanyahu and their Starmer-like supplicants, or will you start living for the world that will be here when they're gone, now. Because yes they are in the ascendant, but we know the story of authoritarians and fascists. When their time ends, and it will, we all know it will, they are relegated to the dust heap of history.

Gaza, Palestine, you have laid the world bare. The writing is on the wall, and our path forwards is with you.

May a Palestinian child born now live a life of liberty and dignity, safety and play, held in their parents arms, that equals that of any child born anywhere.

And may we look up to the sky with them today and say 'Enough!'