Videos on Why to Twin
The petitioner, Pete Gregson, talks at the 2022 Al-Awda Rising to Return conference in New York . View his illustrated presentation “Poking the Snake” at www.tiny.one/paltalk (30 mins)
See the petitioner’s illustrated 8-min speech on why Edinburgh should twin with Gaza, filmed at the Gig for Gaza at Edinburgh’s Princes St Gardens in July 2019 at https://youtu.be/z6C6K0Twakw
See the petitioner explaining the petition to twin Edinburgh with Gaza, along with Mohammed Alshorafa outlining life in Gaza at the Rally for Gaza on 23/3/22 (36 mins) at https://youtu.be/MIkY8ad_9qs
See the petitioner at the Al-Awda Rising to Return Conference in New York explaining how twinning and trading on the net with Gaza and Palestine is the way forward in this 28-minute illustrated talk at https://youtu.be/lIo7FrPM8KM
See Gaza Municipality’s 1 minute film, showing how their politicians are elected at Council level https://youtu.be/lu0e5jEH1dc
A powerful Facebook film on Gaza from Telesur, just 2 minutes long, showing why we should twin with Gaza https://fb.watch/bYyhJU9gl0/
See Norman Finkelstien explaining why twinning with Gaza has nothing to do with Hamas in 4 mins at youtu.be/UmeraZ3SGh0
See Amnesty’s 15 minute video “Israel Apartheid Explainer” at youtu.be/AUGICfaULXA and the US- Jewish Voice for Peace short animated film [6 mins] on the history of the area at https://youtu.be/Y58njT2oXfE. Also some famous people’s pithy statements on Israel in 3 mins https://youtu.be/j5-nXajYgFk
Iqbal Mohammed of Dynamiq Films in Huddersfield made Three Minute Warning in 2018. It’s about “roof-knocking” – what Israeli bombs mean to a Gaza family- 11 mins at Three Minute Warning on Vimeo
The GIG FOR GAZA is now available to view at https://youtu.be/21cd0efDXds
The video is introduced by Mohammed Almadhoun of the Take my Hand Educational Centre in Gaza.
The gig kicked off with Frankie Gallacher introducing SUFFRAJITSU (at 5 min), followed by PETE GREGSON (at 24.5 min), TOMMY SHEPPARD MP (at 27 min), then JUNKMAN’S CHOIR (at 30.5 min), then JURGEN WOLF of RESIST (at 53.5 min), then the STONED HOLY ROLLERS (at 56.5 min) and finally the JENNIFER EWAN BAND (at 1hr 23 min).
See Resist TV of 1st June 2022- Pete Gregson speaks to Sian Bloor, 1 hr https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FEgD3XjEgGU
More films about Palestine at https://bogusantisemitism.org/israel-palestine-explained/#films-about-israel-palestine
Edinburgh: an appropriate choice
Former UK Prime Minister Arthur Balfour was a key historical figure in creating the current reality in Palestine; he hailed from East Lothian and studied in our capital. Edinburgh is therefore an appropriate choice of UK city to officially offer a helping hand- to people for whom that help is vital. 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 Gaza Strip from the rest of Palestine.
Go to “This Siege is Illegal” page to understand more about why Edinburgh should twin with Gaza City.
Gaza’s isolation is the strongest reason for our city to reach out and offer support. The Gaza Strip contains almost two million people and is physically smaller than Arran; it has been described by David Cameron as an ‘open air prison’, due to the blockade by sea and land borders by Israel. As a result, over half are unemployed and 95% of the water is undrinkable. It is also packed with one of the youngest populations on the planet; 51 per cent of whom are under 18 years of age. Note we propose twinning with Gaza City itself, whose population is around 50% greater than Edinburgh’s.
Other twinning experiences- Scots and Irish working to twin with Nablus and Gaza
We have been getting advice from the Dundee-Nablus Twinning Association (DNTA); Dundee has been twinned with Nablus in the West Bank, Palestine, since 1980; see the story of their twinning on their website here. DNTA are made up of activist members who actively seek out opportunities to link with Nablus. They have been helpful in suggesting what we could do. We hope to model Edinburgh’s agreement on the one arranged between Nablus and Dundee; it reads:
“Proud of the contribution their respective cities have made to international friendship and understanding, the Lord Provost of the City of Dundee and the Acting Mayor of Nablus wish to reaffirm the twinning treaty. By the reaffirmation of this treaty the cities of both Dundee and Nablus pledge that together,
- They will actively co-operate to ensure the continuing development of close relationships between the citizens.
- They promise to facilitate the creation of direct links between institutions and organisations wishing to partake in twinning activity.
- They will encourage exchanges between young people to ensure succeeding generations learn the history of the relationship between the cities and the role that each has played in its own national history.
- They will take every opportunity to share skills and knowledge to the benefit of their respective citizens.
- They undertake to convene regular meetings between representatives in order to evaluate co-operation programmes.”
We have also been getting advice from Cllr Padraig Pearse McShane (of Causeway Coast & Glens Council in Northern Ireland) – who was, in 2012, instrumental in getting his small town, Moyle, twinned with Gaza. Moyle Council’s twinning ceased when it was absorbed into Causeway Cost & Glens Council. But in the few years the town was twinned with Gaza, the two cities worked together on tourism, sport, football, health care, women’s issues, library management, parks improvement and maintenance, sewage processing and education. If this is what Moyle did with Gaza with a population of 17,000 citizens, what could Edinburgh do, with half a million? Cllr McShane has guided us in our early relations with Gaza Municipality and he supports our bid.
Twinning is not to give money, but to engender linkages
Twinning with Gaza City would give us opportunities for education and awareness and for our city to benefit from a wider internationalist outlook. If successful, we would seek to secure an agreement between our Lord Provost and the Mayor of Gaza City along the lines of the current one that Dundee-Nablus have, that can be read above.
Our two cities could benefit from sharing knowledge and trade in medicine, engineering and the arts at community levels. Twinning would encourage our Edinburgh institutions and businesses to reach out to their counterparts in Gaza, helping end decades of enforced isolation and collective punishment.
Most Palestinians speak excellent English and are highly educated and numerate. Let us not forget that the Arabs basically invented Algebra in the 9th century; the very word is derived from the Arabic Al-Jabr.
So what exactly does twinning mean? It means Gaza would become Edinburgh’s Sister City. According to the Sister City website, a sister city is a broad-based, long-term partnership between two communities in two countries. A relationship is officially recognized after the highest elected or appointed official from both communities sign off on an agreement to become sister cities.
A city may have any number of sister cities, with community involvement ranging from a half dozen to hundreds of volunteers. In addition to volunteers, sister city organizations can include representatives from nonprofits, municipal governments, the private sector, and other civic organizations.
Each sister city organization is independent and pursues the activities and thematic areas that are important to them and their community including municipal, business, trade, educational, and cultural exchanges and projects with their sister city.
Using the net to beat the blockade
We particularly want to use the internet to help break the Gazans’ isolation and build up electronic trade. Mercy Corps in Edinburgh have set up Gaza Sky Geeks to help build coding skills and software development. (See them on Facebook here). This is just one of the opportunities seized by Gazans, who are – we must repeat- overwhelmingly young (over half of the population are under 18), highly educated, fluent in English – and where they can earn money unrestricted by Israel. And Facebook means any Edinburgher can befriend any Gazan (the petitioner now has over 400 friends in Gaza).
Thanks to cloud computing, we can help Gazans deliver any internet service that can earn them money, e.g. primarily with any software engineering task, such as website building, coding solutions for new e-challenges, database design and manipulation, data processing and analytics, technical helplines (using chat) and service centres. Beyond that: book-keeping and accountancy services, language translation from Arabic to English- and vice versa, online surveys and result processing – and even graphic art and music production. Zoom and Teams allows people living in each city to work together and learn about one another.
Presently Edinburgh’s finance houses (Standard Life, Tesco Bank, Scottish Widows, etc) outsource their Information Technology (IT) work to India, spending billions of pounds there. If just a fraction was diverted to Gaza, what a difference that could make!
But even more likely to support trading on the net are the many small businesses in Edinburgh that needs accountancy/ book-keeping services- there are 15,000 Muslims in Edinburgh; the Bangla Deshi immigrants are very strong for Palestine – as are the 8,000 Turks in Scotland- maybe 3,000 of whom are in Edinburgh- who run many of our cafes and restaurants. All care for Palestine and know the history of how the British took Palestine from the Ottoman empire in 1917. They might be prepared to get their accounting and book-keeping done from Gaza, if it was cheaper than paying for such services in Edinburgh (which it probably would be!).
At present Gaza’s economy is 90% dependent on Government aid from a few sympathetic Arab countries- helping IT businesses there to grow will help Gaza become more self-sufficient. If our cities are twinned, our Edinburgh Council can encourage our major players in IT and finance to take a good look at trading with Gaza, too.
CURRENT IT SUCCESS
Through our Edina-Gaza Twinning Association (EGTA), in June 2022 we completed our first commission – of a website built in Gaza for a business here in Scotland. It cost £500 and Saleem Summour, a graduate of Gaza Sky Geeks who lives in Gaza, built the site. It is to help Mike get work teaching English as a foreign language; view the website at www.nellenglish.com We hope this site will be the first of many; we already have interest from Edinburgh businesses for more sites. We shall promote trade using a new site that we are still working on www.linkpal.uk
TEACHING ENGLISH SUCCESS
To boost the IT trade, encouraging UK businesses to buy Gazan web skills, depends on the web designer having good English skills. We have therefore moved into on-line teaching to build skills in this area, using volunteers- so it costs Gazans nothing.
Some of our EGTA volunteers are teaching English, usually in a conversational setting, using Zoom, with Gazans. In return we learn Arabic. We are presently engaged with the Take my Hand charity in Gaza, that works with poor and orphaned children; it is entirely run by volunteers with no state funding. (The children come from the Jabalia Refugee camp, which is about 10 minutes by car from Gaza City.) Four EGTA volunteers work with their 96 children using Zoom, once a week, for 1 hour; we teach the children English; they teach us Arabic.
Read these articles to learn more: IT in Gaza – Independent 27/8/19 Cracking the code: Young Palestinians take hold of their futures at Gaza’s tech hub
Help give Palestinians IT mentoring- in Gaza and the West Bank Palestine Tech
A Microsoft genius (Waseem Awwad), and a digital Palestine offer hope for the future- Oct 2019, Middle East Monitor
The UN and E.U. have recognised or sent funding to Gaza in order to alleviate suffering there, acknowledging that it is not a ‘terrorist state’ – as falsely ascribed by some.
Dundee is twinned with Nablus (their fire service donated a fire engine in one of many acts of kindness) and Glasgow is twinned with Bethlehem; now Edinburgh can play its part. Dundee- Nablus Twinning Association are helping us consider what the city can do for Gaza. There is a UK-wide group Twinning with Palestine who have a 22-minute video with examples of twinning work
.
Palestine Trauma Centre and Brent Friends of Palestine
The Palestine Trauma Centre ( PTC) was established by Dr Mohamed Altawil. He was born in Gaza and as a teenager joined in throwing stones at Israeli forces. But a few years later he had a different vision, to help Gazans cope better with the trauma of living in Gaza. He escaped, went to Cairo and took a first degree. He then came to England and studied for a PhD in clinical psychology. He then set up the Trauma Centre in Gaza with people he knew there. They do a wide range of work, supporting women families and young people. With youngsters, who are so vulnerable to psychological scarring, they do imaginative work with play, drama and fun. (See Days of Joy). This sounded very positive and inspired Brent Friends of Palestine to support it and raise funds for it. To date, since 2015, they have raised some £45,000. The Palestine Trauma Centre website is at www.palestinetraumacentre.uk
On Sunday 27th February 2022, the petitioner held the first 90-minute Zoom conversation with Mohammed AlShaqra, the International Cooperation coordinator at the Municipality of Gaza. Over the next few weeks, Mohammed has committed to fleshing out with Pete how twinning would work, what we could share, and how we can move forward as two great cities together. This page will be regularly updated as this conversation develops.
About Gaza and its Municipal Council
Gaza City is the largest city in the state of Palestine and can trace its history back to 1500 BC. (See Wikipedia for more info). To view images of what the Gaza Strip looks like from the inside, go to Gaza – Hidden Palestine
The 11 members of the municipal council are selected by the community members, not elected, due to the separation which occurred between Gaza and West Bank after 2007. The municipal council is formed every 4 years. (The community members are the Gaza strip’s decision makers, public figures, local council leaders, advocates, organizations representatives, etc.).
If you want to see more about how the Mayor and the other Councillors are appointed, go to our post Gaza Council explains how Mayor was appointed- no Hamas involvement – Twin Edinburgh with Gaza (twingaza.com)
[And if you want to learn more about the politics of the Gaza strip, please visit this section of our “This Siege is Illegal” page.]
Gaza Municipal Council is much smaller than Edinburgh’s City Council. Even though it caters for 30% more people, Gaza Municipality is, in terms of staffing, less than a tenth of the size of Edinburgh Council.
Much can be gleaned from the Municipal Council’s excellent website
For info about the current municipal council members, click here: https://gaza-city.org/currentCouncil Once you have clicked on this link, look below the group portrait; each Council member is displayed, one at a time, indicating his or her background and role in the city, beginning with the mayor. There is also a profile of the Mayor of Gaza here. (The Mayor, Dr Yahya Sarraj, holds a doctorate in civil engineering from a British university). If you are using Microsoft Edge as a browser, it will automatically translate the text from Arabic into English.
[ you can also visit the Municipality Facebook page at (20+) Municipality of Gaza | Facebook ]
Looking at the other pages on the Gaza Municipality website, much of it is in Arabic as pdfs and jpgs, so the browser translation software won’t work; but pages where it does – and will be of interest- are the following:
Home Page
The Council home page at gaza municipality (gaza-city.org) provides a comprehensive introduction to the many activities the Municipality undertakes with citizens, with a streaming-type arrangement of press releases, which explain policies or actions undertaken.
Council Centres
The page on cultural centers (gaza-city.org) lists six of the Council’s centres such as the Prosthetics Centre (for citizens who may have lost limbs due to shootings and bombings by the IDF), the Library, the Rashad Shawa Cultural Centre, the Holst Cultural Centre, the Centre for Childhood Happiness and the Arts and Crafts Village. Clicking into the pictures allows you to build a picture of what takes place at each of these centres.
The Prosthetics centre deserves special mention. It has been around since 1975, but 2014 was their busiest ever. [The 2014 Gaza War, also known as Operation Protective Edge by the Israelis lasted just 6 weeks, in which time they killed 2,310 Gazans and wounded 10,700 (including 3,374 children, of whom over 1,000 were left permanently disabled]. It was the busiest year ever for the centre, with 2,039 patients treated. The 2-minute film on their work can be seen by clicking on this link.
Citizen’s Transaction Guide/Services Page
The Services page or the citizens transaction guide (gaza-city.org) explains how the city’s 590,000 residents can apply for services such as water, gas, electricity, planning permission, etc.
By experimenting and visiting the many tabs where the browser translator software works, you will achieve a good understanding of the wide range of services and centres the Municipality supports.
Gaza wants to Twin with Edinburgh
The people of Gaza support our bid. Many have signed our Change.Org petition to Edinburgh Council’s Leader and Lord Provost- see it here
Letters of Support for Twinning Edinburgh With Gaza
Letters of support for twinning have come from the following:
• Dr. Yahya Sarraj, Mayor of Gaza City
• Gaza Sky Geeks
• Take My Hand children’s education centre– Mohammed Al-Madhoun
• The Dalia Association– Samar Awaad, Executive Director
• Palestine Childrens’ Relief Fund– Steve Sosebeem , President & Founder
• Sulala Animal Rescue – Saeed Al Err, Communications leader
• Neturei Karta International – Rabbi Ysroel Dovid Weiss
• Dundee Nablus Twinning Association– Mike Whitehead, Secretary
• Tommy Sheppard MP (Member for Edinburgh East, SNP Spokesperson on Constitutional Affairs)
• Dr Philippa Whitford MP (Member for Central Ayrshire, SNP Spokesperson on Europe)
• Cllr Padraig Pearse McShane (Causeway Coast & Glens Council),
• Britain Palestine Friendship and Twinning Network– Tony Pearce, Chair
• Derby & Derbyshire Friends of Hebron, Geoffrey Marshall- Convenor
• Brent Friends of Palestine, Andrew Papworth- Secretary
• Interfaith for Palestine UK, Dr Joseph O’Neill- Founder
• SE London & Lewisham Friends of Palestine (SELFOP)
• Leeds PSC (Palestine Solidarity Campaign)– Professor James Dickins
• Northampton Al-Bireh (Palestine) Friendship Association (NABPFA), Kate Scott -Secretary
• Muslim Women’s Association of Edinburgh, Zareen Taj- MWAE Trustees
• Scotland Against Criminalising Communities (SACC), Richard Haley- Chair
• GGateway, Bassma Ali- Director – letter promised
• Husam Zomlot (Palestinian Ambassador to the UK)– letter promised
The letters of support can be seen below.
The Mayor of Gaza, Dr Yahya Sarraj [professor of civil engineering with a PhD], has written to us to express his support for twinning; we are presently working with the International Cooperation coordinator at the Gaza Municipality to develop plans:
Letters of support from others, several of whom are organisations in Gaza:
Support for twinning from two prominent Jews
Tory ex-Prime Minister David Cameron called Gaza, ‘an open-air prison’. For over 12 years now two million people have been crammed into a prison GHETTO in one of the most densely populated regions of Earth. This particular prison constitutes a form of collective punishment on a civilian population; it is illegal under international law. How can we help these people?
“For Edinburgh to twin with Gaza would be a blessed initiative”
-Ilan Pappe, Israeli historian
“It surely would be a blessing for Gaza if this proposal were adopted.”
-Norman Finkelstein, Jewish American Political Scientist
See Norman Finkelstein explain in 4-minutes “Why Twinning with Gaza has Nothing to do with Hamas”at https://youtu.be/UmeraZ3SGh0
Other Cities have recently twinned with Edinburgh
How it all began
