Pete Gregson writes:

The Campaign Against Bogus Antisemitism has changed its name to One Democratic Palestine. The change springs from a desire to do more for the Palestinian people than campaign purely against the misinformation and slander at which the Zionists excel. We want to focus on supporting a single-state solution for Palestine that reflects the reality that the two-state option is dead.

There is no other UK organisation that we know of that is committed to seeing the end of [Zionist] Israel – but surveys show that this is what the majority of Palestinians want. Palestinian support groups in the UK such as the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) are aligned with the Palestine Authority (PA), which has chosen to recognise Israel and therefore de facto they support a two-state solution.

Furthermore, all major UK political parties favour the two-state option; even Israel has said, until recently, that it works towards this. But since the Oslo Accords of the mid-90s, when the Palestine Liberation Organisation moved to recognise Israel in return for the promise of a state for the Palestinians, Israel has worked to prevent such a thing.

One Democratic Palestine favours the peaceful dissolution of the settler colony that is Israel, leading to new single-state of Palestine where all citizens are equal – Jews, Arabs and Christians – where all have equal voting rights, and where UN Resolution 194 on the right to return is honoured.

We are clear that we are not calling for a ‘fatwa’ on Jews, even if they are Zionist Jews. We need to get our MPs in Westminster to start reflecting the view that there is little support for Israel in the UK; our government must recognise a single-state solution as the only realistic one. Many MPs privately realise that the two-state solution is dead; Israel has killed it.

For decades the UK and the US have pushed for – and failed to broker – a two-state solution where Israel and Palestine exist as separate countries. Now the only solution is Israel’s dissolution, as that illegal state will never willingly give up an inch of the land it has stolen. Israel has made any other kind of peace impossible. Palestinians numerically equal Zionists in the land that Israel governs, yet most of them have no vote. Israel falsely calls itself a democracy while excluding so many non-Jews from power.

Survey results in May 2022 show that 33 per cent of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank wanted a single state. However, when the views of the wider diaspora of Palestinians are included, there is a clear majority in favour of a single state: a democratic secular state of Palestine, from the river to the sea.

We at One Democratic Palestine will support Palestinians in this campaign. The UK, as the mother of Israel, bears the greatest responsibility for righting the wrongs of the past 100 years in Palestine.

We must do that by now calling for the dissolution of Israel, which is born from our anti-Semitism and our imperial desire for a colonial outpost in the heart of Arabia. Israel pays the greatest heed to what the UK thinks; we must now exploit that respect by telling our racist colony that its time is over.

We align ourselves to the One Democratic State Campaign, whose manifesto (see www.onestatecampaign.org/all/en-manifesto ) contends:

that the only way to achieve justice and permanent peace is dismantling the colonial apartheid regime in historic Palestine and the establishment of a new political system based on full civil equality, and on full implementation of the Palestinian refugees’ Right of Return, and the building of the required mechanisms to correct the historical grievances of the Palestinian people as a result of the Zionist colonialist project.

The new website for One Democratic Palestine is at www.onepalestine.land The current pages relating to all aspects of the campaign against bogus anti-Semitism will remain: our Policies; Israel & Palestine Explained; Our UK Politicians – Where They Stand; the IHRA [International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance Definition of Antisemitism and Labour, and so on.

The “Muslim & Jew on Tour: Beyond Israel”, scheduled to visit all UK cities from late April, will help promote our new focus and encourage more UK citizens to recognise the way forward for Palestine.

For more information, please contact:

• Pete Gregson (chairperson) at +44 7584722191
• One Democratic Palestine www.onepalestine.land Contact: info@onepalestine.land
• Facebook www.facebook.com/OneDemocraticPalestine