Members of the Ely Palestine Solidarity Group don’t realize that there has never been a country named Palestine. For centuries preceding World War I, the entire Middle East was under the control of the Ottoman Empire. Following World War I, the colonial powers of England and France carved up the Middle East and drew lines on maps and called them nations and installed rulers. Under traditional Islamic law, there is no such thing as a nation state under Islam. All of Islam is considered part of the Islamic Caliphate. There is also the tradition that any land once under Islamic control should always remain under Islamic control.  All this set the stage for the current conflicts.
As part of the partition of the Middle East, Great Britain became in charge of an area called the Palestinian Mandate, which included all of historic Israel, plus all of what is now Jordan and parts of Syria. Individuals living in that mandate, both Jews and Muslims were sometimes referred to as “Palestinians.” Prior to the creation of the modern state of Israel in 1948, Muslims living in the former mandate had no national identity as tribal affiliation was their primary identity. However, beginning in the 1970s, they began to develop a political movement aimed at establishing a Palestinian state for the first time. Those Muslim Arabs who did not become citizens of Israel (as many did) felt stateless in a region that was now filled with nation states, none of which were willing to accept them as immigrants. Those Muslim Arabs gradually realized that if they could be seen as somehow different from all the other Muslim Arabs in the region and self-identified as a “Palestinian people” they could garner sympathy and support for “deserving” their own independent state. Over the years, supported by these fictions, a successful propaganda campaign, and the fertile ground of antisemitism in the Muslim world, in the UN, and increasingly in Europe, their cause has attracted widespread support, including groups in the United States, such as the one here in Ely. 
Ely Palestine Solidarity Group clearly is supportive of those Muslim Arabs who identify as “Palestinian.” Palestinians are taught to believe that all of what is now the state of Israel rightly belongs to them. Their chant, now echoed by many college students and progressives, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free, “is a call for genocidal removal of all Jews from Israel. Is this what the Ely Palestine Solidarity Group supports? Do they also believe that Israel is a “colonial state”, an “apartheid state,” and that it is committing genocide in Gaza? These are all parts of the Palestinian narrative which have no basis in fact.
A group such as the Ely Palestine Solidarity Group that spreads misinformation about the complicated conflict between Israel and Palestinians (eg. “For almost a century Palestinian people have been forcibly displaced, tortured, abused, dehumanized and murdered by the state of Israel…”), ends up contributing to the demonization of Israel and the spread of Jew hatred.  If that seems too strong a statement, look at the huge increase in antisemitic incidents and violence against Jews in the U.S.  Don’t become a part of that.
Charles Marsden
Ely