Khalid Dalal

Between Che Guevara, the revolutionary whose dreams leapt beyond the borders of his homeland and whose passing on 9 October 1967 we have just marked, and Mahmoud Darwish, Palestine's foremost poet, who passed away on 9 August 2008, lie more than forty years. Distance separates them. Death separates them. And still they meet, every time we honour the revolutionary who made freedom a cause, and the poet who made Palestine the cause of freedom.

The one became the emblem of revolution, of resistance in the teeth of injustice, and of solidarity with peoples. The other became the undying voice of Palestine's rightful cause, inscribed upon the conscience of the world.

Their instruments diverged: the first took up the path of revolution, the second the power of the word. Yet both posed humanity's deepest question anew, and posed it without flinching: by what means shall human dignity be preserved, and the right of peoples to freedom and self-determination be held sacred?

But how are we to explain it to the children of Gaza, struggling for safety among the rubble? How are we to explain it to the mother in the West Bank who has buried her children? To the elderly man who has spent the greater part of a lifetime a stranger to the soil of his homeland? How are we to tell them all that the world professes belief in human dignity and in the right to freedom, while the Palestinian people's most basic rights are denied, while the most basic right of all, the right to live, is imperilled because the international community is powerless to come to their aid?

And how, at the end of it, are we to explain it to ourselves?

Guevara's ringing slogans and Darwish's eternal words will not halt the tragedy of the Palestinian people. But they are the defiant answer of free people who refuse to let Palestine's tragedy, and its victims, be reduced to numbers in a passing news item, or to a vote in the Security Council that avails nothing and averts no famine, feeds no starving child and consoles no bereaved mother.

Solidarity with Palestine and its people must not remain mere admiration for symbols of liberation, or recitation of lines of poetry. It must become a resolute global stance and a seismic act, in defiance of the Zionists and all who close ranks behind them: shielding civilians from Israeli abuses, ensuring the delivery of humanitarian and medical aid, respecting international law, and upholding the Palestinians' right to freedom, independence and the establishment of their fully-fledged state. For principles not translated into action are little more than eloquent excuses for inaction.

Palestine will remain, from Guevara to Darwish and the many who came after them, the scales of justice on earth and the compass of the human conscience that does not die; and it will lay bare the chasm between the justice humanity proclaims and the justice humanity is prepared to deliver.

There comes a point when silence ceases to be neutrality and inaction hardens into complicity. Either the world rises to the occasion, or it shall be written upon its brow for ever that it stood cravenly by and watched a people crushed: children, women and the elderly buried unjustly beneath the rubble, and a right butchered in broad daylight, before the eyes of all humanity. History keeps its own ledger, and it forgets no one. Let it not record that, when Gaza cried out beneath the dust, and the West Bank faced the growing threat of further dispossession under a brutal Zionist scheme, the world heard, and turned away.