The ceasefire is obviously a useful step — it is better than shooting, people dying, and the destruction that goes with it. But it is no more than a brief cessation of hostilities — there is no peace agreement. The fundamental issue still has to be addressed. I think a lot of people don’t appreciate what it’s like to be living under occupation in the West Bank. There, you’re under constant surveillance, with military checkpoints constantly disrupting your lives, your economic circumstances are poor and likely to get worse, and the future of your children is pretty grim.

So long as the United States and other countries tell Israel, “We support any action you choose to take,” there is no incentive for any Israeli government to reach any longer-term settlement, and so we head into a new conflict. My proposal — and it’s not unique to me — is that the huge outpouring of support for Palestine over the last two weeks, which we haven’t seen since Operation Cast Lead in 2008–9, needs to go toward pushing for recognition of the state of Palestine, ending the settlements, ending the occupation, and ending the siege of Gaza.

And there has to be justice for the refugees. There are tens of thousands of refugees who know nothing other than life in camps in Jordan and Lebanon and beyond. We’re now into the fourth generation of refugees — they’ve been in the camps as long as I’ve been alive, and the occupation of the West Bank has gone on since the year I left school. So it’s got to change, and it won’t change unless the rest of the world is strong toward Israel.

As leader of the Labour Party for the last five years, I wasn’t able to go, but I have been to Gaza quite a few times. What I sense there is the vibrancy of the young people who want something different. A very high proportion have degrees and postgraduate studies, and many are very bored because there isn’t very much to do, unemployment rates are very high, and it’s a very crowded place. The electricity constantly goes off, there is a foul stench because the sewage works can’t operate for want of parts or power, there’s a shortage of fresh water because the aquifer is polluted, and so on.

In schools, the teachers tell me, it’s a question of managing the levels of tension. I visited a primary school in the northern part of the Gaza Strip and spent some time speaking to the students as well as the teachers. You could look out and see the fence between Gaza and Israel and the no-man’s-land between two parts of the fence. In that space, there are mounted machine guns that automatically fire if anybody touches or goes over that fence. That’s what children are being brought up with.

When the power goes out, you can look up toward Ashkelon and other places and see all the lights blazing. It’s like a constant reminder that you’re under siege. In the hospitals, there’s the same tension, with the constant shortages of medicine and what would be seen as basic supplies in hospitals around the world. If somebody needs a serious emergency operation or has cancers that can’t be treated at hospitals in Gaza, they have to go through the rigmarole of going to Israel, often with long delays. The occupation isn’t troops patrolling the streets but constant flights and drones overhead.

I was also in Gaza as an election observer in Rafah. When we were visiting a polling station, gunfire opened up, and we all had to go inside. After half an hour or so, we were allowed to go out again. We asked what happened, and it seemed Israeli soldiers near the Rafah crossing had opened fire — without necessarily aiming at anyone, just to show they were there, knowing it would disrupt the election. That’s the kind of atmosphere people are living under all the time. Dr Mona El-Farra of the Middle East Children’s Alliance reckons that 70 percent of the population have medically certifiable stress symptoms. It’s just awful to try and live there.

I was talking to my friend Mustafa Barghouti about this last week. Obviously, elections ought to be held; there’s no question. It’s hard to see how they possibly can be, with the current military situation. Despite the ceasefire, there’s still harassment of people at Al-Aqsa, there’s still people being driven out of their homes in Sheikh Jarrah, and settlements go on. But holding elections would be a way of bringing people together, and it’d be a very diverse assembly.

I’m not in favor of anyone firing weapons at anyone. Barghouti pointed out to me that, whereas in Gaza there has been military resistance with rockets against Israel — most of which haven’t arrived — on the West Bank, there’s been a lot of nonviolent resistance and demonstrations. The thing is, they’ve been treated in exactly the same way, with the difference that, there, they have Israeli tanks coming in and destroying their homes, not jet planes coming from above and destroying their homes.

I find President Biden’s response very disappointing indeed. He has a huge opportunity as a newly elected president, and the mood music and the language that Kamala Harris used after the election and the inauguration suggested a different approach, and the possibility of the recognition of the Palestinian state. Joe Biden has now said he’ll replenish all the arms that Israel has used and that he’ll continue to support it militarily.

I think that what’s different is the degree of opposition to that policy — and support for the Palestinian people all over the United States. I was struck by the level of mobilization across the Midwest, in places like Detroit, and by the numbers of Democratic politicians speaking up strongly for Palestine, like Bernie Sanders. Under previous presidents, such support was absent among the whole Democratic Party and across large swaths of US society. I just hope that the House Democrats who have made their voice so clear will keep up the pressure on the Biden administration, to stop arms sales and to recognize the Palestinian people’s right to live — for that’s what it’s about.

I raised the question of arms sales in the British Parliament, as I have been doing for the last decade. I asked for the minister’s assurance that British weapons haven’t been used to bomb Gaza. He could not give me that assurance, because he’s unable and doesn’t want to tell me what they’re being used for — so the suspicion is that British weapons are part of the bombing of Gaza. Britain also imports weapons from Israel and has a close relationship also in terms of military training. In 2019, I was attacked for my concerns about this relationship, and the Daily Telegraph — a right-wing newspaper — even said that not wanting to continue this relationship was the reason why I shouldn’t be allowed to become prime minister.

Benjamin Netanyahu has been effective in moving the issue on to Iran as well — and with the Abraham Accords, some of the Gulf states are no longer willing to put any priority on support for the Palestinian people. But public opinion across the region, particularly young people — who are in the great majority — sees things very differently. I detect a much greater unity among the Palestinians themselves and preparedness to work together in the future. Trump’s annexation plan hasn’t completely disappeared, but it’s been dropped for a while because of its absurdity and illegality. It would have taken more of the West Bank settlements as annexed territory, destroying any principle of a Palestinian state.

The numbers in London were the biggest for some time, probably since the Iraq War. There was a time when Palestine demonstrations were a combination of the politically committed and the Palestinian community — but it didn’t necessarily reach other communities. Black Lives Matter has changed a lot of perceptions surrounding it. Our demonstration on Saturday was huge. I couldn’t help but notice the great diversity of the crowd.

The person who spoke before me was Barnaby Raine, a young Jewish activist, and he gave a very strong and correct denunciation of all forms of antisemitism, pointing out how divisive it is. He was cheered to the rafters by the huge crowd, and I totally endorsed what he’d said. Support for Palestine transcends communities, and a lot of Jewish people attended both this march and the one the week before to the Israeli embassy.

Yes, well, I was delighted to meet lots of wonderful people at the Palestine demonstration, fighting for justice all around the world. When I led into my point about Palestinian refugees by talking about refugees the world over and the appalling way that the current home secretary, Priti Patel, is treating refugees — threatening to send the Navy into the Channel to stop them coming — I think people completely understood that you have to have solidarity with all peoples. Nobody complained at all that I wasn’t just talking about Palestine. The current state of the Rohingya, with 1 million now in Bangladesh, has horrible similarities with what happened to the Palestinian people in 1948.

I was involved in anti-apartheid activities from the late 1960s onward. A lot of people on the center and Left have this misty-eyed view that anti-apartheid was a brilliantly successful movement that united everyone. But that isn’t how it was. Many only joined right at the end. In the late 1960s and 1970s, protesting apartheid in the streets, at shopping centers, at meetings around the country, was not an easy experience. Opposing South African sports teams coming to Britain, we would get incredible abuse.

When the African National Congress (ANC) made the decision to focus on Nelson Mandela as the figurehead for the movement, that was effective and gave people someone to relate to. But Mandela was denounced by Margaret Thatcher in Parliament as a terrorist — and I was there when she did it! Again, the Tories eventually accepted the change that happened in South Africa, and they, like right-wing governments around the world, did their best to envelop the ANC and make sure that market economics remained in operation.

The idea that anti-apartheid in Britain was a huge popular movement from the very beginning is not true. It required incredibly dedicated and committed people, who incrementally gained support in communities and trade unions. I was a trustee of the British Defence and Aid Fund for victims of apartheid, which helped fund black South African students to come to universities in Britain and elsewhere.  There were lots of initiatives like that — and what I see now over Palestine is the way that trade unions have successively come to a position of recognizing Palestine and working with Palestinian unions and building up relationships.

There could be a sense of complacency, seeing the ceasefire as a step forward. The ceasefire only happened because of the demonstrations, because of the pressure from Palestinians within Israel and also the — not massive, but significant — number of Israelis concerned at the direction the country’s going. But this isn’t enough. We have to mobilize further and faster. I have suggested that we have an international day for Palestine: we did so against the Iraq War, in over 600 cities. Today, I’m sure we can do even more.