“As they prepare for war, we must prepare for resistance.”

It is a warning that was issued by Colombian President Gustavo Petro back in October of last year — the warning that the genocide in Gaza is not simply a question of human rights, a question of peace, or even a question of Palestinian liberation. 

The ongoing genocide in Gaza — and the cover provided to it by Israel’s enablers here in Europe — is a warning to all those who would dare challenge the West — its obscene levels of consumption, its addiction to exploitation, its unending violence on the poor and oppressed peoples of the world.

This is true in a very direct sense: For the entirety of this genocide and long before it, the Palestinian people have been treated as test subjects in a cruel experiment, where the latest technologies of war are rehearsed before being deployed to other sites of conflict or repression. 

On the other side, an agenda of justice is taking shape. Progressive forces around the world are organizing to stop the genocide and build a world of cooperation and sovereign equality. For the world’s oppressed, the stakes of this conflict are absolutely existential. 

That is why our movements cannot be limited to opposing war or making abstract calls for peace.

We’ve heard countless statements invoking that word — a word that, as a Palestinian, has unfortunately become stained when used to justify injustice, and used synonymously with the loss of rights, the theft of land, and the silencing of resistance movements.

Donald Trump speaks of “peace” while bombing Iran — to applause from the leaders of NATO states who purport to be champions of democracy and human rights. 

So our gathering here must challenge that distorted definition. 

Peace is not the absence of conflict, as you all know. And it is absolutely not a temporary ceasefire that allows the oppressor to take a break while the oppressed bury their dead in preparation for the next round of atrocities. 

Peace requires justice and justice requires confronting the systems and alliances that produce, fund, protect, and profit from violence.  

And that is exactly what we are seeing happen across the world today.

In West Asia, anticolonial resistance movements are targeting the supply chains and infrastructures that deliver destruction to the region. 

In the Mediterranean, dockworkers and activists are mobilizing to stop ships carrying weapons to Israel, including through initiatives like the Palestinian Youth Movement’s Mask Off Maersk campaign, which seeks to challenge the role of one of the world’s major logistics companies in the genocide. 

In the United States and the United Kingdom, movements and people are rising up against their countries’ active participation in the genocide. These include groups like Palestine Action, which has been actively sabotaging the machinery of war, and which now faces the prospect of a terrorist designation — another weapon imperialism deploys to delegitimize movements of resistance, terrorizing the world in the name of fighting terrorism, another one of the US’s many bombs on logic. 

And, from South Africa to Colombia, nations have come together to reconfigure international institutions — originally designed to serve empires and oppressors — to serve the oppressed. 

This is a moment of clarity. Billions of people and states across the world recognize that the international system we live under was built to protect the powerful, and that while many of its actors pretend that all states can present themselves on equal footing on the international law level, it is clear today that is simply untrue. If that was the case, if all states were equally treated and held accountable before international law, the hague group would not have had a reason to be created as a coalition whose main goal is to simply uphold international law. 

I repeat, what’s at stake is existential. This system has produced a world where unimaginable crimes are streamed into our daily consciousness, unimaginable tragedies are normalized in our mainstream media, and imperial exceptionalism has sought to destroy the possibility of any legal or diplomatic response. What is truly at stake is humanity itself.

When this genocide began, I was a human rights student in Paris, learning about the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. The professor’s slides rolled in front of me as notifications of the death toll in Gaza streamed across my phone. In the classroom, there was no mention of what was happening — no recognition of the unfolding crime.

I couldn’t help but think, were any of those bullet points ever meant for me? Were they meant for my parents, who lived through the Sabra and Shatila massacre in Lebanon, where they fought in the resistance against the Israeli invasion, and who despite their everlasting support for me, couldn’t help but chuckle a bit when I expressed my interest in studying human rights?  

Were they meant for my grandmother, who was expelled from Haifa in 1948, and who lived through the Naksa, the 1982 invasion, the intifadas, and nearly every assault on Gaza — except the ongoing one, as she passed in 2021? She was forced to flee to Sweden after the 1982 massacre, and despite a fading memory, she never stopped saying, “Haifa is more beautiful.” 

I carry pride in the history of resistance in my family, and with that pride, a larger sense of responsibility to claim my place in this struggle. 

I won’t deny the frustration and discouragement I’ve felt — first as a Palestinian, then as a human rights graduate — searching for the right place to pour my energy into something meaningful, something I could be proud of. 

I’ve learned not to fear moments of hopelessness. They come often, and they will come again. But I never feared them, because I was taught since childhood that action must not depend on hope. It must depend on duty. Our movements endure because of people who act not only when they feel optimistic, but because they believe it is their responsibility to act. That is how we know we will win, and that is where i do find hope. 

Because the causes of anti-imperialism, anti-colonialism, and anti-occupation have been sustained by generations of free people whose commitment to justice has never wavered.

That is the spirit in which The Hague Group was born, and I would like to say a few words about this project. 

Earlier this year, the Progressive International convened eight Global South states with a mission to pursue “collective action through coordinated legal and diplomatic measures at both national and international levels” in pursuit of accountability for Israel’s grave violations of international law against the Palestinian people. I speak to you now as a coordinator of this initiative. 

The Hague Group seeks to challenge impunity — not just for the sake of Palestine, because impunity threatens the very foundation of international law wherever it is allowed to fester. And we are calling on people everywhere to join us in encouraging their governments to join the initiative, to expand this challenge. 

Here is another warning, If we allow genocide to be normalized, if we allow settler colonialism to be rebranded as “security,” then we are allowing the very mechanisms of global governance to be dismantled — and not just in Gaza, but everywhere international law was allowed to be so blatantly undermined in the first place. 

That is why, in The Hague Group and other initiatives, we have aspired not only to raise our voices, but to build systems of resistance. 

We track weapons shipments and expose the chains of complicity from European ports to occupied Palestine. 

We document the governments, corporations, and financial institutions that continue to fuel the machinery of death. 

We support activists and dockworker unions who refuse to load or unload weapons, and we build solidarity with their acts of courage. 

We work with lawyers who seek to hold individuals and institutions to account for their crimes. 

We are coordinating parliamentary interventions, pressuring for arms embargoes, supporting calls for sanctions, and intervening at international forums to build accountability — real accountability. Not just statements, but coordinated actions to stop the crimes and dismantle the structures that enable them.

And we do this while remembering that the fight for peace cannot be separated from the fight against imperialism. Because the violence we are witnessing is not accidental. It is the result of a system that rewards domination and punishes resistance. And that is the system that we must dismantle.

To my European comrades and friends here today: this is not someone else’s fight. It is yours, too. Those of you in Europe who believe in freedom and equality cannot simply cheer on resistance movements abroad. You must recognize your own responsibility to co-resist and co-organize — right here, from where you are.

Too often — and deliberately — what happens in the rest of the world is presented to you as distant, abstract, unrelated. But this is a lie. There is no such thing as a “conflict” far from Europe, when European powers — governments, arms dealers, financial institutions — are the ones who fuel it and profit from it.

With that realization comes responsibility. And that responsibility must go beyond words. It must live in your actions, in your organizing, in your resistance to the structures of violence upheld in your name.

While we meet here today, NATO is preparing to gather for its annual Summit.

That meeting will not bring answers to humanity’s most pressing challenges. It will deepen them. That is why it needs to be guarded by the largest security operation in Dutch history.

NATO is meeting to arm and to escalate, pledging ever-more military spending and funneling even more public wealth into war while cities are reduced to rubble and international law is mocked in broad daylight. 

With President Trump in attendance and European leaders uniting around this new militarism, the Summit promises to reaffirm what NATO has been from the very start: a tool of imperialism, designed to prevent our liberation and deny us a future. This is their vision for humanity. 

That is why, as they prepare for war,
We must prepare for decolonization.
We must prepare for resistance.