Dr. Mazin Qumsiyeh wrote the first of the four books in the 2000s arguing for the One Democratic State solution, in 2004: Sharing the Land of Canaan. He was Professor of Zoology and Biology for many years at the Universities of Tennessee, Duke and Yale and returned to Palestine as an activist in 2008 where he and his wife Jessie founded and now run the Palestine Institute for Biodiversity and Sustainability at Bethlehem University. He was a co-author of the Munich Declaration in 2012. His website is http://qumsiyeh.org/

 

Dina Raewel is a Palestinian hailing from the Naqab just east of the Gaza Strip and is a practicing attorney in Zürich, where she lives with her daughter and husband, and has long liked the idea of ODS.

 

Romana Rubeo is a journalist and translator living near Rome. She has published a lot in Al-Jazeera and is co-editor and author for The Palestine Chronicle.

 

Dr. Ibrahim Saad now lives in Manchester but has lived many other places: born in Beit Daras in 1947; childhood, with his beloved elder brother Ahmed Qishta, in Nuseirat refugee camp in the Gaza Strip; scholarship to study English language and literature at Cairo University; in Kuwait as a young teacher; upon expulsion of the Palestinians from Kuwait, a masters degree in the UK, then a teaching post in Southeast Asia; then a PhD in the UK in literary and translation studies followed by university teaching in Amman and the United Arab Emirates.

 

Samaa Abu Sharar, Beirut, is an independent journalist and researcher. Her articles, in Arabic, English and French, cover Palestinian refugees in Lebanon and broader Near East issues. She also does work for the UN and the EU and heads the Majed Abu Sharar Media Foundation, an NHO that works towards media empowerment of the youth in Palestinian refugee camps. www.majedabushararmediafoundation.org She moreover supervises a media-training website for youth named ‘Shababeek’. She and her thoughts are portrayed in Ramzy Baroud’s Al-Jazeera project, Palestine in Motion.

 

Dr. Asad Abu Sharkh was born in 1952 in Rafah Refugee Camp in the Gaza Strip and worked most of his life as a professor in Gaza before moving to Dublin in 2018. He started supporting ODS, with other Gazans, 15 or 20 years ago, and has most recently been the spokesperson in Europe for the Great March of Return.

 

Dr. Suleiman Abu Sharkh was born in the Shati’ (beach) refugee camp in Gaza in 1965 where his family lived after they were expelled by Israeli terrorist forces from their city, Majdal Asqalan (now called Ashkelon by Israel) in 1948. He is now Professor of Power Electronics, Machines and Drives at the University of Southampton, UK, and Chair of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign in Southampton.

 

Andy Simons is a retired British Library curator of 20th-century UK publications who lives in the Waltham Forest borough of London. He works with several Palestinian rights groups, including the PSC, the Palestinian Return Centre, the Balfour Project, and CADFA (Camden-Abu Dis Friendship Association). He now curates historical documents, many of them obscure, concerning the British Mandate in Palestine.

 

Dr. Stephen Sizer is a retired Anglican clergyman. His doctorate in 2004 was on Christian Zionism, which became the focus of his published works: Christian Zionism - Road Map to Armageddon and Zion’s Christian Soldiers. He has visited the West Bank many times, particularly Bethlehem. His writings and public support for Palestinian rights have attracted criticism from people such as Melanie Phillips and the Board of Deputies of British Jews. He is also the founder and Director of a Christian charity called Peacemakers.

 

Gemma Spencer lives in Trumpington near Cambridge, and is a retired town planner and former Parish Councillor.

 

Heather Stroud, author of the novel Abraham’s Children, travelled from England to Gaza on the 2010 ‘Ambulance Flotilla’ and lives in North Yorkshire.

 

Tom Suárez is the author of three books and numerous articles on Palestine (see list here), and is best known for his 2016 book, State of Terror, which has been praised by Ilan Pappe and translated into French and Arabic. A professional violinist, he is a former faculty member of Palestine's National Conservatory of Music. He lives in London.