At our March General Membership Meeting, the Chicago chapter of the DSA voted to declare our support of one democratic state in Palestine. At our last national convention, our membership affirmed the Palestinian right to self-determination. 

Although a permanent ceasefire in Gaza is necessary, it would not redress the cyclical slaughter, starvation, displacement and torture of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians over the past 75 years. The ethnostate that oppresses them will never give Palestinians equal rights. And we know well as Americans that separate is not equal. 

These rights can never be granted in the apartheid state of Israel, under a regime whose legal foundation is ethno-nationalism.

Nor will it happen under a two state solution. The conditions in Israeli-controlled Palestinian settlements already illustrate the lengths Israel will go to in order to maintain control of the entire region. In addition to our moral and ideological opposition to ethnocracy, the material power imbalance between these two imagined states will make it impossible for the “Palestinian half” of historic Palestine to have true self determination.

For this reason we also call on the national DSA to also state its support of one democratic state in Palestine: a one-person-one vote state in which everyone is represented equally, regardless of ethnicity, religion, origin, etc. As socialists it is our responsibility to imagine what a just world would look like and share that vision with the world. 

Without democracy, self-determination is impossible, and without full equal rights under a secular state, there can be no democracy for the Palestinian people.