The long-threatened, unprovoked, illegal and, it was said, precision-targeted US-Israeli air war on Iran which began on 28 February was appropriately inaugurated with a war crime. The US chose the defenceless Shajareh Tayyebeh primary school in the southern town of Minab for an air attack, killing 168 people, mostly schoolgirls. There were at least two strikes, some eye-witnesses said three, deliberately targeting those coming to help earlier casualties. It sounded familiar because attacks on emergency workers, and how Western media framed the narrative - belatedly, blaming first the ‘enemy’ then AI, then letting fresh news bury the outrage – are straight out of the Gaza genocide playbook.

Israeli weapon systems and tactics applied elsewhere are often touted and priced as “battle-tested” on Palestinians, but the way the aggressors are conducting their current war on Iran and Lebanon indicates that a strategy aimed at destroying the resistance and its social and material basis, trialled during the genocide and practically synonymous with it, is now being applied beyond Gaza.

The key lesson here, however, is not military but political. Israel’s periodic, shockingly disproportionate and mainly airborne slaughter of Gazans from 2008 (Operation Cast Lead) to 2019 (Gaza’s Great March of Return), cynically termed “mowing the lawn”, failed to intimidate the population while the solidarity movement across the world developed unevenly in numbers but steadily in influence and experience. The political cost of controlling a captive population by violent repression - “slow” genocide - was unsustainable. Operation Al-Aqsa Flood - the killing, wounding and abducting of Israeli civilians and security personnel by Hamas-led fighters on 7 October 2023 - triggered Israel’s switch to fast-track genocide; the “lawn” would no longer be mowed from time to time, but ploughed up once and for all.

The failure of Western allies and world opinion to enforce international law against the construction and expansion of illegal Jewish-only settlements in the West Bank or East Jerusalem allowed Israel to evade international law as an empty threat compared to the reality of settlements as “facts on the ground.” This, added to the world’s failure to impose Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) measures against Israel for its repressive practices that amounted to “slow” genocide, meant it could gamble on getting away with fast-track genocide instead, although whether that gamble will pay off is another matter.

All these wars and repressions and their still-unfolding consequences have their origin in Israel’s nearly eighty-year-old occupation of Palestine under its brutal system of settler colonialism and apartheid, currently defended militarily and diplomatically by its US patron. But weakening and eventually dismantling that system will open to question all that has been meant to disguise or shore it up.

At time of writing (2 April 2026), the war was a few days into its second month and the current “fog of war” leaves much unclear, but if Iran survives intact, it will matter little whether the US started the war on its own account or was tricked into it by Israel, or whether either aggressor guessed how it would end.

Palestine’s regional allies in the “Axis of Resistance” are Iran itself, Hezbollah in Lebanon and Ansarallah (“Houthis”) in Yemen. Whichever of them survives current firepower and future subversion from Israel and/or the US, their military could take years to recover to the point where they can deter further attacks, leaving them vulnerable in the meantime and in no position to threaten Israeli targets in defence of Palestinian ones.

Gazans who survived the genocide are now confined within less than half the space they were in before, and more closely monitored by Israeli occupiers than ever. Israel continues to deny foreign media access to Gaza. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) reported on 31 March 2026 (more than 24 weeks after the “ceasefire” of 10 October 2025) that most Gazans were living in displacement sites in “dire” conditions, made worse by overcrowding, sewage accumulation, inadequate access to drinking water, and “continued airstrikes, shelling, and gunfire”.

During the Gaza genocide, enemy assault and forced relocations meant many families fleeing for their lives lost, or left behind, any deeds not already destroyed that could prove ownership of their homes or properties, now leaving them permanently homeless. Most Gazan families trace connections to Palestinian villages in 1948 Israel from which parents or grandparents earlier fled Zionist terror; some families thus find themselves homeless twice-over. Also in Gaza, Israel sponsors criminal gangs to sow division and attack the almost certainly weakened armed resistance.

In the occupied West Bank, Israel is re-introducing former land-registration methods to disenfranchise yet more Palestinians and accelerate Jewish-only settlements, pending the territory’s intended, wholesale annexation. At the same time, increased military support is given to already-armed settlers who attack their largely unarmed Palestinian neighbours.

Applied to the whole of occupied Palestine, and 1948 Israel too, a blatantly racist law recently passed in Israel’s parliament creates a default death penalty for those convicted of broadly defined acts of “terrorism” but only if they are Palestinians; Israelis convicted of murdering Palestinians face no such sentence.

Whatever the outcome of the war on Iran and Hezbollah, and however Israel’s apartheid system intensifies, the liberation of Palestine remains essential to a progressive agenda anywhere. As Nelson Mandela famously said of South Africa in 1997, “We know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians”.

Under African National Congress (ANC) leadership, armed resistance to the apartheid regime was combined with a global boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign, in which the British people played an outstanding role. The call issued by the Palestinian Boycott National Committee (BNC) in 2005, adapting ANC experience to its own conditions, remains a beacon for liberation, whatever other means the Palestinians themselves consider appropriate.1 The call for boycott, divestment and sanctions against apartheid Israel addressed civil society, governments and corporations across the world to help dismantle apartheid in line with international law defined and reiterated by the United Nations. BDS campaigning has grown enormously in the past two decades but realising its full potential, at all levels and with mass participation, could prove critically important, perhaps even essential, to the future of Palestine and regional stability.

The interdependence of the Middle East and the wider world, which the war on Iran underlines, and which the US tries to exploit in its longer-term designs on Russia and (especially) China, means that a campaign for Palestine is also, in effect, a campaign for the UN, international law, and a safer, multipolar world, and there is scope for scaling-up solidarity with Palestine based on that understanding. One Palestinian writer, Ramzy Baroud, has recently made broadly similar claims for the centrality of Palestine in emerging regional and global politics, and its relevance to the solidarity movement. Another, Ayman Odeh, a member of the Israeli Knesset (parliament), with a similar view on Palestine as key to wider outcomes, adds that the enormous cost of waging wars against its neighbours may constrain Israel’s future policies.

Given the scale and pace of current geopolitical change, discussions of these kinds are most helpful when they point to practical action as an answer to threats, setbacks and confusion. The rest of this article therefore argues why prospects for resurgent solidarity and BDS campaigning are more promising than might be assumed from the dire situation currently facing Palestinians.

There may well be others, and it’s hard to predict which will end up most important, but the following opportunities favour intensified BDS campaigning for Palestine and for wider progressive aims:

• The breadth and depth of the present oil crisis (which is not only about oil) into which the Trump and Netanyahu cabals, apologists in tow, have plunged the world, including the “man or woman at the petrol pump”. People are already being encouraged to blame the crisis on Iran but many will be interested in more convincing arguments

• The two years from 7 October 2023 to 10 October 2025 were the deadliest phase of Israel’s continuing occupation of Palestine. Those responsible have yet to be held to account, but opinion against them is strong and growing.2 Thanks to TV and social media, never before in history has a global audience witnessed a genocide in real time. For millions of witnesses, including many new to campaigning for Palestine, prolonged recognition of Palestinians as ordinary people facing an inhuman ordeal has prompted serious conversations, deeper understanding of the issues and an unprecedented readiness to take action around BDS.

• A reminder to keep up the pressure is the exemplary ṣumūd (steadfastness/resilience) of generations of Palestinians, old and young, injured, uninjured, and almost all bereaved by the loss of someone they knew. BDS includes small acts of solidarity anyone can make.

• Israel’s “own goal” failure to win world support for its ethno-nationalist (racist) policy and practice, and its failure to retain support of former friends it could once count on. Already a toxic brand from decades of apartheid repression, and even before its unprovoked attacks on Iran and Lebanon, Israel’s reputation has hit a new low from which it might never recover. An opinion poll of American Jews – historically Israel’s biggest fan-base - on 2-9 September 2025 found that among those aged 18-34, as many as 50% considered Israel was committing genocide and as few as 34% felt “emotionally attached” to Israel. These findings that show not just that pro-Israeli propaganda has no answer to public knowledge of live-streamed genocide but also that the younger of those who object to apartheid being practised in their name will have more time historically to denounce it than its older apologists will have to defend it. BDS is a practical alternative to apartheid and all forms of racism.

• Finally, but on a global scale, the irony that, in seeking to “make great again” his own genocide-enabling country, President Trump reveals to the world its true imperialist character. If non-nuclear-armed adversaries are its targets today or tomorrow, then future confrontations could trigger World War Three. At a time when the need for negotiated solutions to such problems has never been greater, the US sanctions its perceived enemies at will. With Israeli help, it attacks or defunds United Nations agencies and personnel, and the International Court of Justice. Trump has also withdrawn the US from treaties and agreements managing nuclear weapons and climate change. The so-called Board of Peace, which Trump and Netanyahu seem to hope will give them funds and diplomatic cover for their illegal, profit-driven and geostrategic plans to “reconstruct” Gaza and turn its shattered seafront into an exclusive money-spinning resort, is another attempt to diminish the United Nations. Not only by cancelling its long-established safeguarding role in the Occupied Palestinian Territories but also by extending the Board of Peace’s remit to post-conflict zones elsewhere. The case for BDS is also a case for the UN, peace and a sustainable future.

It is up to the solidarity movement to find the ways to turn these or other opportunities to advantage in organised, coherent BDS activity. But the ultimate objectives of BDS are set by the Palestinians themselves. In short, there can be no solution to the present instability of the Middle East, or worldwide, unless it meets the three demands of Palestinians for:

Freedom from Israel’s occupation and colonisation of all Arab lands occupied in 1967, and seized from southern Lebanon in the current war against Hezbollah. And by dismantling the Apartheid Wall

Equality of legal rights for Palestinian citizens of Israel