In the words of Palestinian poet Samih Al Qasim:

“You will not break our depths,
You will not defeat our longings,
We are the final verdict.”

We are the final verdict.

To the 680,000 Palestinians martyred in genocidal violence, to the millions of martyrs of indigenous and oppressed communities worldwide, and to all who continue the struggle, to all of you here today: you are the lifeforce of our battle.

I begin by locating myself as a Palestinian uprooted from Nablus – nickname: the mountain of fire, from a lineage of resistance, and from 25 years of confronting the occupation’s weaponisation of food and the environment through our green resistance. We have planted wherever they uprooted, carrying the spirit of our people and land to the imperial core. When we first exposed the occupation’s deliberate destruction of agriculture and ecosystems, we thought their silence was ignorance. But they knew. So we asked: where are the legal mechanisms to hold perpetrators accountable? They existed. The problem was never absence. It was design.

International law is not “failing.” It is functioning exactly as the self-declared imperial victors of WWII intended: stabilising colonial power and sanitising its crimes. Otherwise, how could a settler-colonial entity join the UN one year after ethnically cleansing 750,000 Palestinians and demolishing 530 villages? How could self-determination be denied on the basis of Western existential anxiety? How could an occupying power be framed as a custodian of the human rights laws it was born violating? How else could the U.S. cast 51 vetoes shielding the occupation from even symbolic accountability? This is not malfunction.

Understanding this terrain reveals Palestine as a site of ecocide: the deliberate destruction of ecosystems and the lives it sustains. In Gaza, the aim is not only to kill in the present – through bombardment equivalent to thirteen Hiroshimas – but to kill the future: to sterilise soil, poison water, and prohibit even a single seed from entering Gaza because a seed carries the potential of life beyond the occupation’s dominion.

This colonial anxiety saturates the latest Gaza peace plans: genocide is repackaged on, “values of tolerance and coexistence.” Point 18 promises to “transform mindsets” through “interfaith dialogue,” as though Palestinian minds, not occupation, was the cause of genocide, ecocide and man-made famine.

This is the most insidious form of colonisation, the colonisation of our hearts, when its violence appears natural, permanent, even sacred. This is when we forget who we are. So we must return to root causes.

In our region, the architect is settler colonisation: erasure and replacement incubated by imperial greed. In 1907, a conference among then British prime minister Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman and fellow imperial powers concluded that a united Arab world endangered European supremacy and therefore had to be kept in strategic conflict and fragmentation. Many of those same powers carved our lands in the 1916 Sykes–Picot agreement. The 1917 Balfour Declaration invigorated the Zionist myth of A land without people for A people without a land.

The imperial core mirrors this by keeping its own populations in a protracted state of ignorance, because they know the danger of waking up. We see it here today –  the hope of resistance.

And so too, we channel hope from a hundred years of continuous resistance. From the Arab uprisings against the British mandate, from Palestinian freedom fighters who fought Zionist deathsquads during the Nakba and our Intifadas, and have now brought one of the world’s most heavily funded armies to its knees. Hope lives in those who fight alongside us: from Lebanon, Yemen, Iran, Columbia and all other nations whose conscience is rising to Palestine, like South Africa, Venezuela, Ireland, and Spain – who is  hosting us today, to the student encampments, the Flotilla, the port workers, and solidarity protests that have brought entire nations to a halt. It lives in Gaza’s farmers and fields that have yielded over 7 million kilograms of vegetables in defiance of genocidal siege, by which our organization, APN, have stood steadfast.

The International People’s Tribunal for Palestine is our documentation against colonizers waging war on memory. It is a refusal to wait until genocide and ecocide is legally acknowledged only after its perpetrators have safely re-written themselves out of crime. This tribunal is the active forging of another path: the path of justice by the people.

Here, among doctors, lawyers, teachers, workers, and above all, people of conscience who can trace the pattern of colonial violence, we shift the narrative. This work begins with honesty: confronting the colonial knots hardened in our own hearts and mobilising within our domains. Every soul, every discipline, every institution, every community is a frontline. And today is an opportunity to sharpen our strategy further: How do we strengthen alliances? Intensify BDS? Equip people to resist and break the siege from within the imperial core?

And we must stand ready to mobilise for Sudan, Yemen, Congo, Lebanon, Haiti, everywhere the empire reinvents its grip. And always, always let us remember, “We are the final verdict.”