Hum jeetenge,haqqa hum ek din jeetenge,bil-aakhir ek din jeetenge.(We will win, we will win one day, but we will win one day.)Jadavpur University Professor Abdul Kafi closed his inaugural address at the Palestine Solidarity Festival with these defiant words, invoking a poem written for Palestinian fighters more than four decades ago, yet painfully contemporary in its resonance.The lines are drawn from the 1983 poem ‘Ek Tarana Mujahidin-e-Filistin Ke Liye’, written by the legendary Urdu poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz. A close friend of Yasser Arafat, Faiz penned this anthem as a testament to endurance, and its recitation decades later in Kolkata served to bridge the historical legacy of South Asian solidarity with Palestine.Palestine Solidarity Festival at Jadavpur University. Photo: Aparna Bhattacharya.By the time the festival opened at Jadavpur University campus on Tuesday morning, the sadness over the destruction in Gaza had already set in. The first session marked the beginning of the two-day festival organised by the Palestine Coalition. There was no ceremonial flourish, no performance of neutrality. This was not an event meant to observe Gaza’s devastation from a safe distance, but to name it, remember it and respond to it.At a time when images of bombed hospitals, mass graves and displaced families circulate daily, often stripped of context and compassion, the festival insists that art, music, poetry and conversation must function as acts of witness. The accompanying exhibition, of posters, photographs, newspaper clippings and journal material, documents Palestine’s history of dispossession and resistance alongside the present devastation in Gaza. Palestine Solidarity Festival at Jadavpur University. Photo: Aparna Bhattacharya.Running from January 10-11, the festival has brought together journalists, academics, artists, and activists for seminars on the ongoing genocide in Gaza, alongside performances, film screenings, music, poetry readings and street theatre. The festival has also drawn messages of solidarity from across the world, from Latin American members of the Global Sumud Flotilla, activists and artists from Europe, South Asia, the United States, and Southeast Asia, and from Gaza itself. In an emotional video message from the Gaza Strip, Palestinian artist Ilham Al-Asal thanked the people of Kolkata for standing with Palestine.Palestine Solidarity Festival at Jadavpur University. Photo: Aparna Bhattacharya.Organisers stressed that the Palestine Solidarity Festival is not intended as a one-off event, but as part of a growing international movement to reclaim public spaces for conscience, dialogue and resistance, and to insist that silence, in the face of mass suffering, is not an option.This is why a Palestine Solidarity Festival exists, and why there must be many more like it.