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This organisation is called OneVoice. It has separate offices in Israel and Palestine based in Tel Aviv, Ramallah and Gaza City and run by Israeli and Palestinian teams respectively. We now have international offices in New York and London responsible for promoting education and outreach about the work going on in the Middle East. Here in the UK we have been in the fortunate position of being able to fund the organisation’s Gaza office and recently invite our Executive Director from Gaza, together with one of his Israeli colleagues to address high profile audiences including representatives of 7 Arab States, and Israeli and Palestinian Embassy officials at the House of Lords.
On this recent tour, Liran, one of our Israeli volunteers from Haifa commented, “The highlight of this week for me has not been Number 10 Downing Street, the House of Lords or any of the ‘movers and shakers’ we met- it has been meeting our OneVoice Gazan Executive and realising I do have a partner on the other side who wants and will push their leaders towards resolution”.
Liran’s comment underpins the need for OneVoice- that there is no trust in the political process for resolution and no faith that there is still a partner for peace on the other side in either Palestine or Israel.
It is one of the many facts of the situation, though, that our Palestinian and Israeli volunteers are only able to meet in London. Even more difficult to building trust between Israelis and Palestinians that there are those on the other side that desire a two state solution is the fact that the majority of Israelis and Palestinians do not have the luxury of meeting one another in London, instead only at checkpoints with Israelis as soldiers. In the face of these realities OneVoice has adopted an extremely pragmatic approach, working within Israeli society and within Palestinian society on separate tracks and engaging nationalists on both sides.
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