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SOLIDAR Palestine and Israel mission - Day 3

Our last day in Israel and Palestine was divided between Ramallah and Jerusalem. We were very lucky to have the opportunity to meet Marwan Abdelkamid, an advisor to President Abbas on Reconstruction and Development. The setting itself was historic, the meeting taking place inside the Muqtada in Ramallah where for almost three years, surrounded by Israeli tanks and constantly under fire, Yasser Arafat lived until his death in a Paris hospital in 2004.

Marwan candidly explained the obstacles to progress in the peace process, highlighting divisions within the Palestinian side, the internal political situation within Israel and the fact that the international community’s attention had been diverted by Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran, as contributing factors for the pessimism. He underlined however that the job of the international NGO community is to keep the work in the field going to support the Palestinian people, and on a political level to build support within Europe for the two state solution.

Our last meeting was with the European Commission delegation in Jerusalem. They informed us of the new funding mechanism being used by the European Union for funding the Palestinian Authority called PEGASUS, which channels money directly to pay for public service worker’s salaries and pensions amongst other things. We raised with them the question of complimenting EU funding with a more political approach from the European Union towards resolving the conflict, which is sorely lacking and which many members and partners raised as a question of concern.

Whilst the meetings we had were incredibly useful, and will enable us to chart a course for a SOLIDAR strategy for engagement in the Middle East, it is what we saw with our own eyes that will stay with us forever. The sight of the wall dividing families and making it impossible for people to work or access services, the encroachment of the settlements onto Palestinian land, the young soldiers at check points arbitrarily questioning those wishing to cross, the sense of being under siege in Nablus surrounded as it is by 106 checkpoints…But despite this, or perhaps precisely because of it, all the organisations we met, Palestinian AND Israeli, expressed their desire and willingness to work together in order to change the mindset that leads to this. They cited work on education, health and fundamental rights such as the right to decent work as a necessary and urgent focus. In particular they implored SOLIDAR, with its history of building alliances between civil society and the labour movement as well as its involvement in a range of other European networks and platforms, to engage our members in the difficult but important work of supporting Israeli and Palestinian progressive forces towards building the necessary pre-conditions for peace and justice in the region.