I will always take a moment to celebrate good news in relation to the Middle East, and last week was no exception.
Foreign secretary Yvette Cooper’s announcement that Britain is joining with Canada and Australia to launch an International Fund for Peace, focused on Israel-Palestine, is an unequivocally positive development.
The fund will support the kind of grassroots peacebuilding initiatives, from environmental to youth leadership and women’s economic empowerment projects, which bring together Israelis and Palestinians and help lay the civic society foundations for a future political process.
Together with our friends at the Alliance for Middle East Peace, LFI has been campaigning for a fund to be established for the past decade. My predecessors as chair of LFI, in particular Joan Ryan, who launched our campaign, introduced a parliamentary bill to promote the fund, and travelled to Washington DC to help garner support on Capitol Hill, and a large number of Labour parliamentarians worked tirelessly advocating for and advancing this important and imaginative project.
To its credit, the last Conservative government backed the concept of a fund in 2018, but it took this Government, in large part thanks to the Prime Minister’s consistent support from both before and after he entered Downing Street, to bring it to fruition.
The initial pledge of £3 million to support the fund promised by the UK, Canada and Australia is a sound investment. We know from the experience of Northern Ireland that civil society is essential in building and maintaining peace. The International Fund for Ireland (IFI), launched during the darkest days of the Troubles in the mid-1980s, was, to quote Jonathan Powell, Britain’s chief negotiator, the great “unsung hero” of the Good Friday agreement.
We also know that existing peacebuilding projects in Israel-Palestine, like the inspiring Middle East Entrepreneurs of Tomorrow, which I was fortunate enough to visit in Jerusalem last year, work. Rigorous academic research shows these initiatives are highly effective at fostering empathy, building trust, and countering extremism. Survey data repeatedly underline the transformative effects on participants’ attitudes and behaviour.
Sadly, up to now, these projects have lacked the resources to reach and sustain engagement and impact across both societies. They have also never been meaningfully connected to political and economic efforts to bring about peace. This marks a sharp contrast to the experience of Northern Ireland, where the IFI reached a transformative and unprecedented $1.5 billion in direct funding, and $2.4 billion overall. This translated into over 6,000 grassroots projects and more than $44 spent per person per year (compared with around $3 in Israel-Palestine). As John Lyndon, the executive director of ALLMEP, has argued, the IFI “transformed the civic landscape, and changed the political boundaries within which politicians operated, as well as the incentives to which they responded. Before long, participation in these programmes became a right, and eventually a rite of passage, for young Catholics and Protestants, rather than a privilege enjoyed by a tiny minority”.
In an era of tight budgets, the establishment of an International Fund in Israel-Palestine is timely. Research by ALLMEP, published by LFI last year, shows that by pooling their limited resources into a dedicated multilateral fund, states can scale up peacebuilding efforts tenfold without spending more. And there is scope for much more to be done. Support for peacebuilding is one of those rare things in Washington: a bipartisan cause. Both Democrats and Republicans came together in 2020 to secure passage of the groundbreaking Nita Lowey Middle East Partnership for Peace Act to invest in peacebuilding projects.
The establishment of the international fund also stands in contrast to the divisive and destructive tactics of the BDS movement.
The international fund works to lay the grassroots groundwork for a future two-state solution, promoting people-to-people work, and empowering moderates and peace builders on both sides. Those of us who support it measure success by the number of Israelis and Palestinians brought together and the new constituencies for peace that are created. We recognise the political oxygen on which any successful political process ultimately depends and which this work generates.
By contrast, the BDS movement is, at its heart, a fundamentally immoral exercise. Its goal isn’t a two-state solution, which most of its leaders oppose, but the demonisation and delegitimisation of the world’s sole Jewish state.
The BDS movement doesn’t seek to bring Israelis and Palestinians together, but to drive them apart through the pernicious concept of “anti-normalisation” which holds that Palestinians should refrain from contact and dialogue with Israelis. This serves simply to deepen distrust, fear and hatred on both sides.
Rather than promoting moderation and compromise, which is the essence of all successful and enduring peace settlements, it encourages and enables extremists and cultivates a siege mentality on both sides.
Peacebuilding, encapsulated by the new international fund, is both the antidote to, and antithesis of, this approach.
Last week, Britain, Canada and Australia helped launch an initiative which offers hope and the prospect of future progress. They have taken a united stand against the enemies of peace by watering the seeds of trust and coexistence. Good news should always be celebrated.
Mark Sewards MP is the Honorary Parliamentary Chair of Labour Friends of Israel
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