A rally to formally launch a six-day campaign to see Edinburgh twinned with Gaza will take place from 10am to 11:30am outside the City Chambers on Edinburgh’s High Street on Wednesday 23 March. It will feature short speeches from Council Petitioner Pete Gregson and Palestinian Mohammed Alshorafa, who hails from Gaza City. There will also be Dabkah dancing with Samer.

Edinburgh is pondering whether to twin with Gaza. On 29 March the Council’s Policy Committee will debate a petition that had been due to be put before them in June 2020 but was delayed due to COVID. Full details of the bid can be found on the petitioner’s twinning website.

The Council, governed by a Scottish National Party/Labour coalition, is sympathetic, and the bid is fully backed by the Greens, but the petitioner knows he must secure many letters of support – and letters from citizens to their ward councillors – in order to secure “sister” city status for Gaza City. The twinning would be between Edinburgh City (population 450,000) and Gaza City (population 550,000).

To this end, a major publicity drive is planned across the city with 13,000 flyers distributed by volunteers to shops and eateries, backed up by adverts in the Edinburgh Evening News.

The petitioner, Pete Gregson, has for four years now been working with others to secure the twinning. Work began with the lodging of a petition on the Council website in early 2019 which finally closed some seven months later with 362 signatures on the Council’s portal. (Edinburgh’s unique petitions system, launched in 2011, encourages residents to have their say on matters which concern them. Once the threshold of 200 signatures has been passed, the Council commits to debating the proposal.)

The petitioner said: “This is a great opportunity. If successful, it will mark a significant step forward in ending the international isolation of Gaza.” 

At a committee meeting on 29 March, to help him in his pitch, he’ll be assisted by Wesam Wadi from Gaza, who will tell the Edinburgh councillors what life is like in Gaza. The petitioner is also in discussions with Mohamed al-Shaqra, International Cooperation Coordinator at the Municipality of Gaza, to learn more about how this initiative can be promoted and the ways in which the two cities might work together.

The bid is supported by:

•Jewish-American political scientist Norman G Finkelstein and Israeli historian Ilan Pappe

•Politicians Tommy Shepherd MP, Dr Philippa Whitford MP, Councillor Padraig Pearse McShane (Causeway Coast and Glens Council)

•Community groups Scotland Against Criminalising Communities (SACC), the Muslim Women’s Association of Edinburgh, Interfaith for Palestine UK, Derby and Derbyshire Friends of Hebron

•Palestinian Authority envoy to the UK Husam Zomlot

•Gaza IT incubators Gaza Sky Geeks, GGateway,

•Dr Yahya Sarraj, Mayor of Gaza City.

The bid is also supported by 115 people in Gaza who have signed a sister petition addressed to Edinburgh City Council Leader Councillor Adam McVey and Lord Provost Councillor Frank Ross. The Gazan petition, which attracts more signatures on a daily basis, can be found here.

A key political supporter is Councillor Padraig McShane, who was with Moyle Council in Northern Ireland when he led its twinning with Gaza in 2012. He helped promote linkage in football, health care, women’s issues, libraries, parks, sewage processing and education. Due to reorganisation, Moyle Council no longer exists. But, the petitioner says: “If Moyle can do this with a population of 17,000, what could Edinburgh offer, with a population of half a million? Cost is no issue; twinning did not cost Moyle Council a single penny.”

Another body that has helped refine the bid is the Dundee-Nablus Twinning Association (DNTA). The DNTA works around the oldest twinning in Scotland and has been running since the two cities were twinned in 1980. The petitioner hopes Edinburgh Council will base its agreement with Gaza City on the pioneering work that the Dundee group has done. If Edinburgh Council agrees to twinning, the petitioner will establish the Edina-Gaza Twinning Association, which will take twinning activities forward on behalf of Edinburgh Council, in the same way that DNTA does for Dundee Council. In this manner he hopes to avoid Edinburgh Council incurring any new expenditure. See here.

The agreement from Edinburgh Council to twin will be, therefore, largely symbolic. In any event, the petitioner observes that any councillor seeking to fly to Gaza would be unable to because the airport there was destroyed by Israel in 2001 and access by land and sea is very complex. He notes, though, that COVID has shown us new ways to communicate, wherever we are. Zoom and Microsoft Teams allow people living in each city to work together and learn about one another.

The petitioner notes that Arthur Balfour, who declared in 1917 that a national home for the Jewish people be established in Palestine (which was at that time part of the Ottoman empire), came from Edinburgh, so he believes his city is an appropriate choice for beginning to address historical wrongs to the Palestinians.

He says: “Twinning Edinburgh with Gaza offers an opportunity for our citizens to acknowledge colonial history through understanding the role Balfour and British foreign policy played in creating the state of Israel and the consequent division of the Gaza Strip from the rest of Palestine.”

He notes that Dundee is twinned with Nablus and Glasgow with Bethlehem; now Edinburgh can play its part in supporting Palestine. Also, Amnesty International has just declared Israel an apartheid state.

The petitioner observes that the ongoing siege of Gaza is illegal. Two million people live in the Gaza Strip, which ex-Prime Minister David Cameron noted is an open-air prison. They have been trapped in this prison for over 15 years now, crammed together behind barbed wire in one of the most densely populated regions on Earth. This particular prison constitutes a form of collective punishment on a civilian population, which is completely illegal under international law. The blockade began in 2007 and has been condemned by former UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) and other major human rights organisations.

Scotland’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon condemned the siege in May 2017, when she told the Israeli envoy to the UK that the situation in the Palestinian enclave must end.

The papers for the Policy Committee meeting on 29 March will be published on the 22nd, at which point the agenda will note that the petition to twin the cities will be considered. The 23rd has been chosen, therefore, for the rally and to mark the run-up to the meeting on the 29th.

COVID dictates that all Council meetings are now held remotely, with councillors working from home; the Policy Committee meeting will take place virtually. The petitioner and deputations will, likewise, be speaking from home. The rally on 23 March will therefore be the only public manifestation of the campaign where the media can get easy access to the bid’s supporters and it is hoped that the press will attend for the unique opportunity to meet in person the twinning supporters and appreciate the level of public support for the bid.

Ends

Editor’s notes

All information on the rally and the Council policy meeting can be found here.

Campaign suffers cyber attack

On Wednesday 16 March the bid’s steering group noticed that the tinyurl links on the old campaign flyer were not linking to the intended destination’s web pages. On investigation it was found that one tinyurl in particular was, rather than taking users to the Amnesty International video declaring Israel to be practising apartheid, was instead taking users to a site declaring the exact opposite. The problem was not universal, as some users were taken to the correct destination. Screen grabs of the bogus Amnesty websites can be found here. The petitioner has had to pulp the 8,000 flyers he was about to distribute across the capital and replace them with new ones, to be distributed across the city from 18 March.

Journalists can download a copy of the new flyer here

Videos

Jewish political scientist Norman Finkelstein “It’s not about Hamas” (four minutes)

The petitioner says in eight minutes “Why we should twin:”

Amnesty International’s 15-minute film sums it up: “The Israel Palestine Apartheid Explainer:”

Opposition and smearing

An attempt was made to twin Edinburgh with Ramallah some years ago but the Zionists, in the shape of the Confederation of Friends of Israel in Scotland).

Knowing that by promoting this scheme Gregson will be tarred as an anti-Semite for his previous activities, he can only point the smearers to the facts about him as they appear in the Rogues Gallery on the website of the newly-formed Campaign Against Bogus Antisemitism.

A further press release will follow with rally photos on Wednesday 23 March.

For more details, contact the Petitioner Pete Gregson in Edinburgh on + (44) 758 472 2191