On September 21st, the UN International Day of Peace, Londoners gathered at Victoria Park for a Palestine rally and vigil. The crowd was filled with human rights posters, Palestinian flags, and keffiyehs that reeled honks of solidarity from passing cars.
End genocide, end apartheid, free Palestine, read the posters. In Gaza, a bag of flour costs a life. Against killing kids?: Palestine is your cause. Invest in justice, stop arming Israel. You can’t say I didn’t know, you can only say I didn’t care.
Speeches from community members redefined “peace” with imagery of resistance and a rage that grieves.
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“Our peace is angry protests like this. Our peace is disturbance. Our peace is military arms embargos. Our peace is a sumud flotilla,” said Rawan, a member of the Canadian Palestinian Social Association (CPSA). “We do not make peace with colonizers who terrorize our ancestors out of our motherlands. We do not make peace with the colonizers who sell promises and carry their promises to kill our babies in their wombs – and we’ve witnessed that with our bare eyes. Resisting this fascist regime becomes our duty and we do not stop until every Palestinian is free, until every inch of Palestine is free. If peace does not recognize Palestinians, Indigenous peoples, Sudanese, and the list goes on, as humans who deserve peace, we can show them how we can take our peace back.”
The UN established the International Day of Peace in 1981 as a day for “commemorating and strengthening the ideals of peace both within and among all nations and peoples.” In 2001, it decreed that the day be one of “global ceasefire and non-violence”, inviting a cessation of all hostilities in the world for 24 hours. In 2014, UN officials agreed that “peace means dignity, well-being for all, not just absence of war.”
Since October 2023, the UN Security Council – comprised of fifteen nations – has drafted six resolutions demanding a permanent ceasefire in Gaza. All six times, the United States – which has provided Israel with over $21 billion in military alliance since October 2023 – vetoed the ceasefire resolution. The most recent vote in September 2025 saw all other fourteen Security Council members vote in favour.
“The UN has successfully proven that their ‘peace’ is double standard,” said Rawan of the failed UN structure. “When peace is stripped away by ceasefire vetoes and unconditional weapons and military support for Israel, it is lost in the starved stomachs of babies and Palestinians.” (more...)
“We do not make peace with colonizers”: Palestine rally, vigil on UN International Day of Peace
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