In mid-October 2023, after the first major march against Israel’s attacks on Gaza, the director of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign UK, Ben Jamal, said to his staff: “We are probably going to need to be responding to this through marches until potentially Christmas”. He was wrong. The protests did not abate. As Israel’s offensive in Gaza continued, the number of actions across the world multiplied rapidly, eventually blossoming into one of the largest and most sustained antiwar movements in generations. From the world’s largest cities to the smallest hamlets, millions of voices rose in the same chant, with the same cadence: “Free, free Palestine!”
The numbers tell part of the story. The Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED), an international monitor, estimated that, in the three weeks after 7 October, some 3,700 demonstrations calling for a ceasefire and showing solidarity with Palestine took place in almost 100 countries and territories. In the first months of the genocide, most were in the Middle East and North Africa and were especially frequent in Yemen, Iran, Turkey and Morocco. In several of these countries, major government or religious institutions backed the demonstrations.
In the West, however, governments were overwhelmingly hostile. In France, for instance, pro-Israel demonstrations were legal and encouraged. But the Macron government banned all Palestine solidarity demonstrations on 12 October, Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin determining that they were “likely to generate public disorder”. Nevertheless, on 22 October, 15,000 people took to the streets chanting “Gaza, Paris is with you!”
Two years after 7 October, ACLED provided data to SBS Australia showing 50,122 Gaza-related protests, the overwhelming majority in support of Palestinians—more than 40,000 Palestine solidarity events took place between 7 October 2023 and 5 September 2025. In contrast, just 3,120 pro-Israel demonstrations took place, more than two-thirds of them (2,159) held in Israel.
What was striking about these actions was not simply their geographic breadth but their regularity. While the movement against the Iraq war in 2003 organised the largest single set of coordinated antiwar demonstrations in history, attracting an estimated 12 to 14 million people on 14 and 15 February, it did not sustain such mass mobilisations. The Palestine solidarity movement, by contrast, mobilised consistently over three years. London, for example, hosted the largest demonstrations in the UK, with 100,000 on 21 October, 70,000 on 28 October, 30,000 on 4 November, and 300,000 on 11 November 2003. Then, in 2024, 400,000 attended a demonstration on 9 March, followed by 200,000 again in March, April and October.
Israel is a major participant in US-dominated imperial capitalist networks, and governments across the world (of all political colours) have been reluctant to break economically, politically or even symbolically from the Israeli-US coalition. Mass mobilisations, regardless of how mass and how determined they are, are unlikely on their own to force a government to break these relationships, especially in this new era of intensifying imperial competition. The stakes are simply too high.
Nevertheless, the Palestine demonstrations were important for several reasons. They aimed not just to express moral outrage at Israel’s brutality but also to push their own governments for a change of policy. The demonstrations first demanded (with many local specificities) a ceasefire, and then, the longer the genocide continued, that their own governments break militarily, economically and diplomatically from Israel itself.
Furthermore, the size and consistency of the demonstrations forced the issue of Gaza into the public debate. Governments responded differently to these protest movements, but most Western countries (with the notable exception of the USA) eventually backed the call for a ceasefire. (Of course, it was too late to stop the murder of tens of thousands of Gazans.). Some European governments, such as Spain and Ireland, moved more significantly in the direction of breaking ties with Israel, while others enacted more symbolic changes such as the recognition of Palestine and increased measures against Israeli settlements in the West Bank. None of these stances was anywhere near enough, but they likely would not have happened without the protest movement.
While protest movements’ impact on governments matters, the mobilisations were important for several other reasons: they helped build collective sensibilities and broke down the atomisation and sense of powerlessness that capitalism engenders. Of course, it is impossible to measure the exact impact of the mass demonstrations on each individual, but it doesn’t take much imagination to understand how transformative participation can be.
From the Palestinian refugee discovering a sense of solidarity, to the young person attending a demonstration for the first time, to the older activists who had shouldered years of isolation, to the Muslims vilified by racist societies, the rallies offered a space to express collective social grievance. The demonstrations also helped, for a time, to politicise a section of society. People’s involvement in mass action inevitably raises political questions. Namely, why and how Israel could do what it did and get away with it. There were many answers offered to these questions, but the fact that they were asked at all was important and gave some space to socialists to offer answers and attempt to build a stronger and more radical anticapitalist movement.
The forcing of Gaza into the centre of political life in many countries via mass demonstrations also compelled those not at the rallies to take a position on what was happening. The rallies made a visible, public and embodied argument about what attitudes should be taken. In this instance, the realities of the genocide and the mass demonstrations, and their flow-on effects, had an effect on broader attitudes toward Israel and Palestine.
A YouGov poll in 2025 found that public support and sympathy for Israel in Western Europe had hit a record low, “with fewer than a fifth of respondents in six countries holding a favourable opinion of the country”. Similar attitudinal changes were recorded in many other countries.
Changes in thinking were especially dramatic among Jewish populations in the US, the UK and Europe, particularly among the young. The shifts predated the genocide but accelerated during it. In 2020, 48 percent of Jewish Americans aged 18-29 said they were emotionally attached to Israel; by 2025, the figure had fallen to 36 percent of Jewish Americans aged 18-34. In 2024, 52 percent of Jews under 35 considered Israel’s military conduct acceptable; by 2025, half of Jewish Americans in this age group said Israel had committed genocide in Gaza. Similar developments occurred in many Western countries.
Jewish criticism of Israeli conduct in Gaza was expressed in the form of visible and often defiant campaigning. In the United States, Jewish Voice for Peace organised a range of public direct actions. For example, on 19 October 2023, 5,000 people attended a Jews Against Genocide rally in Washington, D.C. Organisers claimed this was the biggest ever mobilisation of Jews in support of Palestine in the US. The protest was followed by two dozen rabbis leading a sit-down of around 500 people in the Capitol rotunda. These defiant interventions in the political debate mattered. Jewish people protesting, and sometimes getting arrested, to oppose the genocide played a role in undermining the lie that to oppose Israel means hating Jews.
The Australian movement simultaneously reflected global patterns and stood out for its size and consistency. On 8 October 2023, the New South Wales state Labor government lit up the Sydney Opera House in the colours of the Israeli flag. Just one day later, the Palestine Action Group (PAG), a coalition of left-wing Palestinians and socialists, organised a rally to march on the Opera House. In what would become a pattern, the demonstration provoked an almost universally hostile response from Australia’s political class. Labor Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said the demonstration should not go ahead; opposition leader Peter Dutton described the protest as “despicable” and “unimaginable in modern Australia”.
Despite the establishment ideological offensive, demonstrations in support of Palestine spread. By the next weekend, protests had spread to all the capital cities. In most cities, there had been preexisting Palestine solidarity groups, coalitions of socialists, Palestinians and Muslims, many of whom had been organising for years together. In Melbourne and Sydney, the protests against the Gaza genocide became weekly and ran for approximately 71 weeks before shifting to a monthly schedule in February 2025. Organisers in Victoria claimed Melbourne was the only city in the world to hold weekly rallies for so long.
ACLED found that between October 2023 and September 2025, almost 906 pro-Palestinian protests took place in Australia. Thirty-four pro-Israel protests and another 31 protests that were either neutral or supported both sides also occurred during this time. Australia ranked ninth globally for pro-Palestinian protests and was fourth among non-Muslim majority countries. “When it comes to large-scale protests—those attracting more than 10,000 people—Australia is second only to Yemen in terms of the number of pro-Palestinian protests held”, SBS reported.
Of course, the global movement for Palestine comprised much more than mass rallies. For more than two-and-a-half years, in country after country, local organising hubs, reading groups, film screenings, speaking tours, direct action groups, union fractions and school and university groups proliferated.
To briefly detail a few of the many hundreds of such initiatives in Australia. Families for Palestine organised a 24/7 camp of hundreds outside the prime minister’s office in Marrickville, Sydney, in response to the government’s failure to break ties with Israel. “We have done everything that we could—we have sent emails, we did phone calls, we have sat outside weekly for four months, and we haven’t seen attention from Anthony to our demands”, one of the organisers told SBS. These families spent weeks sleeping, eating and educating people about Palestine.
In Victoria, a movement of local groups emerged to force local councils to take a stand against the genocide and, in some cases, divest from Israel. An article in Red Flag reported that seven councils, representing more than one-fifth of Melbourne’s population, passed motions calling for an end to the Israeli onslaught. Socialist councillors played a key role in putting and then fighting for these motions.
In the NSW city of Wollongong, hundreds of people regularly picketed Bisalloy, a steel company that manufactures steel plating used in tank armour used by the Israeli military. The longest of these pickets lasted 72 hours and was backed by the local teachers’ union. Similar pickets of docks and other Israeli-linked weapons manufacturers also occurred regularly.
Some in the cultural industries also joined the fight. In November 2023, cast members working for the Sydney Theatre Company wore keffiyeh scarves while taking their bows for their performances in Chekhov’s play The Seagull. Board members claimed such actions were offensive, and the play was cancelled the next night. Similarly, in August 2024, during a recital with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, classical pianist Jason Gilham introduced a piece called “Witness” by dedicating it to Palestinian journalists killed in Gaza. He said killing journalists to prevent them from reporting war crimes was a war crime itself. Following complaints, the MSO cancelled his next performance.
Many Australians also attempted to go to Gaza. Doctors, nurses, anaesthetists and others quit their jobs and joined convoys to help treat people in the Strip. They would spend weeks without much sleep in the living nightmare of broken and bloodied bodies to try and help. Others participated in the Global Sumud Flotillas, boats filled with activists determined to break the siege on Gaza.
Students led some of the most defiant actions. At 4am on 17 April 2024, under a Spring moon, hundreds of students at Columbia University in New York unrolled tents, pushed pegs into damp lawns and established the first encampment for Palestine. The demand of the students was simple: their university should divest from the genocidal state of Israel. In the long tradition of student protests having an outsized influence, the spark lit at Columbia spread in the weeks that followed across the United States and then the world. Around 133 encampments were set up across the United States and over 100 more across Europe, Australia, the UK, Asia and Latin America.
The Australian student encampments, inspired by the movement in the US, began at Sydney University five days after the students at Columbia pitched their tents. The initial and main organising force at Sydney University was students from Socialist Alternative. Our national spread allowed camps to rapidly spring up at many universities. The encampments became hubs of protest, education and debate. Students faced down university administrations, technocratic opposition and, in some instances, open Zionist aggression. Hundreds of students devoted over a month of their lives to the encampments.
Student and youth mobilising, particularly those on the flotillas, had a particular impact in Italy. There, they helped to inspire an important section of the working class to initiate the blocchiamo tutto (“let’s block everything”) movement. On 22 September 2025, around half a million workers, students and activists mobilised across more than 80 cities, with dockworkers blocking ports, railway workers disrupting transport, students occupying universities and protesters shutting roads and highways. The action was initiated by grassroots unions and built around the demand to end Italy’s military and commercial cooperation with Israel. It was the first and most significant industrial action workers took against the genocide, and Italian unions were joined by other port workers across the Mediterranean.
The movement against the genocide in Gaza has not won. The Israeli armed forces still occupy the territory. The ceasefire in Gaza has not brought liberation and the Strip remains rubble and dust. The Israeli state marches on in the West Bank.
The genocide in Gaza and the war in Ukraine are the most visible expressions of a broader drive to militarisation and war, and this drive will not be stopped easily. Nevertheless, the Palestine solidarity movement should be remembered. More, it should be treasured. Millions of people across the world—students, workers, migrants, activists old and new—saw what our rulers find acceptable and said “no”. Millions saw the bodies wrapped in white, the children’s faces tattooed with tears and found it in themselves to stand against media slander, police aggression, legal restrictions and the weight of everyday life, to protest and campaign.
