Author Archives: Alan Juriansz

Every day we hear of more attacks by settlers on Palestinian villagers, driving them off their farms and out of their homes. We’ve seen in the Israeli election campaign, a continued hardening of support for annexation of all the occupied territories, with the E1 settlement policy leading to further condemnation in parliament by Callum Miller as our foreign policy lead who recognises its impact on the viability of a Palestinian State.

Our parliamentary party of 72 MPs have led the way in parliament on this issue calling for equal rights, freedom and security for Palestinian people. Many of our MPs have been on fact finding visits to the West Bank, returning with harrowing accounts of the treatment of Palestinians by the settlers and security forces.

Recognition of Palestine, and the recent government interest in a ban on trade with the settlements, could be seen as a success of our longstanding policy positions. However, so many of our demands have made little impact on this government, not least the willingness to apply international law to Israeli Government ministers charged with war crimes.

What more can we do?

In local government, we lead 76 councils and have outright majorities in 40 of them. In some of these we are in the process of developing ethical, responsible investment policies for pension and or other council funds. However, this is proving to be slow and difficult. In my own council, the process needed to show it will not have a detrimental financial effect on the fund and that the stakeholders support ethical investment, has significantly slowed progress. It is essential to make sure the process is transparent, robust and has the support of stakeholders to ensure against potential challenges from groups opposed to ethical investing.

What else can we do?

In Oxford, we have seen city council twin with Ramallah with Lib Dem support. What if all our councils did that or something similar? Twinning is costly, but the first step towards it, developing a friendship agreement is relatively simple.

76 Lib Dem controlled councils forming official friendships with 76 different Palestinian towns and villages in the West Bank. It would send a clear signal that we believe the West Bank is Palestine and still believe the two-state solution is possible.