The UK government’s decision to play the lead role in an international initiative ploughing significant finance into supporting Israeli-Palestinian peacebuilding and economic development has been hailed as a welcome shift in foreign policy direction.
John Lyndon, executive director of the Alliance for Middle East Peace (ALLMEP), told Jewish News that the significance of Keir Starmer’s announcement earlier this month that the UK would stage an inaugural meeting of the International Fund for Israeli-Palestinian Peace should not be underestimated at a critical time to salvage attempts to forge peace initiatives in the region.
The Fund, first endorsed by the UK back in 2018, had received several endorsements from the previous Conservative government, including from former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, and from ex-foreign secretary James Cleverly.
But there had “not been enough action”, said Lyndon, in relation to turning positive endorsements into concrete action.
John Lyndon
“We had endorsements from Rishi Sunak and James Cleverly when they were in government, but not enough action,” reasoned Lyndon.
“It felt like the previous government was waiting for another international partner to lead, and they would then join, which is kind of a testament to a lot of how the previous government did foreign policy.
“There was a sense that Britain had sort of retreated a little bit from a leadership position with more of a domestic and inward focus.
“I think what’s encouraging with Keir Starmer’s statement is it’s coming early in the term of a government that has a healthy majority that has endorsed this idea from the very start.
“The first person to support it was Joe Ryan as a Labour Party MP seven years ago now. It has strong support from a real wide range of MPs… sensible, pro-Israeli and pro Palestinian MPs who can agree on it.
“Then critically, what Starmer said to those who attended the Labour Friends of Israel lunch, it wasn’t just rhetorical support, it was a commitment to an inaugural meeting.
“The first time any country has committed to actually doing something that would catalyze the creation of the fund, and implicitly that the UK is going to lead”.
Sir Keir Starmer speaking at LFI. (Credit: Blake Ezra Photography)
The PM’s commitment was made after Ibrahim Abu Ahmed and Barak Talmor – two ipeacebuilders from the ALLMEP network – alongside Lyndon and Rachael Liss, ALLMEP’s Policy Coordinator, met privately with him to discuss the initiative.
In his December 2nd speech to LFI supporters, Starmer confirmed the Foreign Secretary was to convene an “inaugural meeting in London to support civil society in the region, as part of that work to negotiate a two-state solution.”
The Fund, also key camapaign push for LFI, draws on lessons from the Northern Ireland Good Friday Agreement and aims to provide the robust, long-term funding that the peacebuilding field will need to achieve genuine societal change.
ALLMEP has over 160 organisations inside its network that are cross border, working with the Palestinians and Israelis. With an office in Ramallah in the West Bank, and an office in Tel Aviv, the aim is to build trust along with creative ideas that are rooted in Israeli Palestinian partnership. International policy team members are working inside the West Bank, and for obvious reasons to a lesser extent in Gaza.
“Some of them are working on economic development with which this fund could also be able to scale joint projects, Palestinian economic initiatives,” explains Lyndon.
“I’ll give you a quick example. One of our members is doing 3D printing in Ramallah for prosthetic limbs, based on Israeli-Palestinian cooperation.
“They can be printed immediately with these sophisticated 3D printers. They received a grant from MEPPA, which is the US Fund, which we helped to set up, and which we’d like to be coordinated with this international fund. That fund is putting in $50 million a year over five years”.
Remarkably, the October 7 Hamas atrocity has failed to significantly dent the aspirations of most ALLMEP members – Palestinian and Israeli – to retain links and support one another.
“The US fund that we created has continued to operate,” reveals Lyndon. “We had a board meeting for the US fund three weeks ago where new projects were being announced, including members of ALLMEP.
“We’ve seen a quarter of them, 25% step up and increase their activities – only 5% have stopped or drastically reduced. Civil society is very resilient.
“We’ve been busier than ever since because there’s so much trauma within both societies, there’s such a need, I think, for providing basic services to people.
“One of the tragedies of October 7 is that the state went missing for quite a while on the day itself, and in the days and weeks afterwards. Many of our members were in the kibbutz’s in the south, providing basic services to evacuated families.
“The Bedouin community in the Negev were really neglected in this period too, and suffered huge economic strife, and many of our members were supporting them.
“One of our members in the north, opened up their entire campus for evacuated Israelis from both the northern border and the southern border. This is all based on Arab, Jewish or Israeli Palestinian cooperation. So it’s beautiful. It’s people coming together at this moment of trauma”.
David Lammy and French counterpart with Israel’s Yisrael Katz during August visit
Starmer confirmed to attendees at the LFI lunch that he was serious enough about the Fund that he was asking foreign secretary David Lammy to host the inaugural meeting in London early next year.
While the agenda and timetable for the meeting is yet to be finalised, talks have already taken place with the foreign office and Middle East minister Hamish Falconer about ensuring there is momentum after the PM’s announcement.
“Our suggestion, to be clear, it’s our ask, is that the UK hosts the meeting early in 2025 and that they invite their G7 partners,” says Lyndon. “So we have this new policy statement from the G7 around coordinating and institutionalising support for Israeli Palestinian peace building.
“That’s what the Fund does, the rhetorical commitment of the most important developed democracies in the world.
“And what we’d love the UK to do is then bring in its peerless relations with Arab states, particularly in the Gulf, a kind of G7 plus Arab 7 coalition around this. Then we’re also working, simultaneously with the Trudeau Government in Canada to ensure they make this a priority over their entire G7 presidential year next year”.
In June, ALLMEP achieved a significant milestone in promoting civil society peacebuilding and building multilateral government interest toward the creation of an International Fund.
Following a sustained, global campaign the leaders of the G7 states made an unprecedented commitment in their communiqué, adopting ALLMEP’s proposed text verbatim, to prioritise civil society peacebuilding as a critical component of any diplomatic resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and to coordinate and institutionalize support for it.
a letter-signing campaign which got signatures from 350 civil society organisations from around the world urging G7 leaders to make this historic change, and got a key endorsement by Pope Francis before a live audience of 12,000 people.
The G7 commitment was subsequently reaffirmed at the G7 Foreign Ministers’ meeting during the UN General Assembly in September and again at their final G7 meeting in November, solidifying their support of civil society peacebuilding as a cornerstone of their multilateral approach to the conflict.
Lyndon also points to the success, 25 years ago, of a fund set up to support AIDS research. It had been Italy and Japan who had taken the lead in the establishment of the Global Fund for AIDS, which has now put $12 billion into AIDS research in the time since.
“So we want that to be the inspiration, and the UK could be the kind of catalyst for bringing everybody together and for everyone to understand that it was British leadership that led to this,” he adds.
He also stresses that support for the Israeli-Palestinian fund is coming from an unusually wide cross section of political institutions. In America, left-leaning institutions such as J Street and the New Israel Fund have offered support, alongside leading figures in the Republican Party. In Israel President Isaac Herzog has expressed admiration for the way civil society projects in Northern Ireland took hold and remained strong, despite skepticism from traditional political parties ahead of the Good Friday Agreement.
There is optimism too that civil society projects involving Israelis and Palestinians can develop such strength and resilience that they are also able to resist inevitable attempts to derail them from political extremists on both sides.
President Isaac Herzog
“This is taking a very different approach,” argues Lyndon. “Of saying we need to do rather than say we can’t do anything because we don’t have leaders who are willing or able to deliver a two state solution.
“Instead, again, taking a model from Northern Ireland, we invest at the grassroots level in civil society, to build the ideas and the trust. And then that gradually transforms the politics over time.
“The great thing about doing that, because it has very deep roots, because you’re working deep within civil society, it’s much more resilient.
” We know extremists will attack any diplomatic initiative – that’s happened before in Israel, it happened in Northern Ireland too.
“And if you have these really deep, long term civil society foundations, they can push back and protect an agreement. Hamas, with a suicide bombing, were able to overturn Oslo in a matter of weeks.
“In Northern Ireland, the worst single terrorist atrocity of the entire troubles happened after the Good Friday Agreement – (the Omagh bomb) – and people’s support for Good Friday increased rather than decreased”.
