The Council has called upon Edinburgh Partnership…
In spite of UKLFI efforts to ban discussion (see Police Scotland declare Twinning with Gaza is not a criminal act – Twin Edinburgh with Gaza (twingaza.com)) , at the Policy Committee meeting on 30th August, Edinburgh Council decided to ask Edinburgh Partnership to consider whether there are any activities or projects which may be mutually beneficial and its members would wish to work with the people of Gaza on. The Edinburgh Partnership members are:
- City of Edinburgh Council (one member from each of the political groups including the Council Leader)
- Police Scotland
- Scottish Fire and Rescue Service
- NHS Lothian
- Scottish Enterprise
- Edinburgh Integration Joint Board
- Skills Development Scotland
- Edinburgh College
- University of Edinburgh
- Armed Forces
- Chamber of Commerce
- Equality and Rights Network (community of interest representative)
- Edinburgh Association of Community Councils (community of place representative)
- Edinburgh Voluntary Organisations’ Council (Third Sector Interface representative)
- Edinburgh Affordable Housing Partnership
To find out more about the Edinburgh Partnership or to get involved at a local level please contact their Communities Team at communityplanning@edinburgh.gov.uk. If you are involved with any of the above bodies, you are in a position to help. Please suggest Gaza projects to them – and let us know of these too, with an email to info@twingaza.com
The full motion that was adopted by the Council on 30th August can be viewed here (also at www.tinyurl.com/GazaMotion).
It was cobbled together from several motions; each Political grouping submitted their preferred take on Gaza: see pages 7 to 10 at (Public Pack)Agenda Document for Policy and Sustainability Committee, 01/11/2022 10:00 (edinburgh.gov.uk)
The Deputations were not allowed to speak, but had submitted written statements: (Public Pack)Deputations Agenda Supplement for Policy and Sustainability Committee, 30/08/2022 10:00 (edinburgh.gov.uk)
The webcast showing the discussion can be viewed at Policy and Sustainability Committee – Tuesday, 30th August 2022 at 10:00am – City of Edinburgh Council Webcasts (public-i.tv)
The Council wants the Scottish Parliament’s Cross-Party Working Group on Palestine to work with them on Gaza.
6th Dec 2022- UPDATE- The Council has still not sent its proposal to the Edinburgh Partnership. An FOI request has been submitted asking why: see https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/information_on_outcome_of_twinni#outgoing-1388720
NEWS REPORTING
The news item that covers the meeting is at Edinburgh City Council to explore partner projects with Gaza – Redress Information & Analysis (redressonline.com). Also see Council Discusses Twinning with Gaza – Twin Edinburgh with Gaza (twingaza.com) for other press reports.
If you want to be kept updated by us and help occasionally, please email info@twingaza.com with your details. And if you use Facebook and “like” our Facebook page, you can stay up to date with our progress. You can keep asking for twinning by writing to your Councillors by clicking here.
The Petition for Twinning
The Council Petitions scheme is unique to Edinburgh and guarantees its citizens a chance to put local ideas before the Council. The call for Edinburgh City Council to twin with Gaza City was lodged as a Council petition in spring 2019 and closed to new signers later that year. In total we garnered 362 signatures.
Then COVID intervened and our hearing at Policy Committee was delayed. It was to be discussed and voted on by councillors on 29th March 2022, but then Israel intervened and threatened our Councillors with jail if they discussed the matter, even negatively. (See UK Lawyers for Israel threaten Edinburgh Councillors with jail – Twin Edinburgh with Gaza (twingaza.com) and all posts that following it.)
Although Edinburgh Council has declared there will be no more twinnings; that policy is now being reviewed. Write to them directly to ask them to twin with Gaza in future- see how you can help with this below.
History
Here is how the petition appeared on the Council website when it was lodged in 2019:
However, a few months after the petition was validated by receiving will in excess of the 20 required, the Council then removed the petition from the website. It is back now, after much lobbying- see Twinning Edinburgh with Gaza – The City of Edinburgh Council. We were first offered a hearing at Policy Committee in June 2020, but then it was cancelled. It was only in early February, after repeated requests from the petitioner, that the Council eventually agreed to allow a hearing. The saga of Israel’s threats and our efforts to explore the delays over the past three years through an FOI can be found at Is our Chief Executive dead-set against twinning with Gaza? – Twin Edinburgh with Gaza (twingaza.com)
The full text of the petition was as follows:
“We call upon Edinburgh to twin with Gaza in the same way we are currently twinned with Munich, Xi’an, Vancouver, Santiago, Nice, Krakow, Kiev, etc
Twinning could give joint economic development arrangements which Gaza, in its current impoverished state, would clearly benefit from. At present Gaza is twinned with Tel Aviv, Israel; Dunkirk, France; Turin, Italy; Tabriz, Iran; Tromsø, Norway; Cascais, Portugal; Barcelona, Spain; the most recent being Cáceres, Spain in 2010.
However, Britain, having been to some extent the architect of the Palestinian’s misfortune by having gifted the beginnings of what is now Israel to Zionists through the 1917 Balfour Declaration, surely owes the Palestinians some recompense. Edinburgh, as the home university of Arthur Balfour, can play its part in helping acknowledge Britain’s historical responsibilities in the Holy Land. For Edinburgh Council to take this step to help the refugees of Gaza could be the beginning of the UK beginning to take responsibility for the situation it helped create in the Middle East. The majority of Palestinians living in Gaza are refugees who had to leave their homes when Israel was established. All they want is to be able to live in freedom and to return to the land their families came from.
We can offer joint civil undertakings to help develop opportunities for the people living through terrible conditions there. By twinning, the City of Edinburgh can show the people of Gaza they are not alone, and that Scottish people see their pain and care for their future wellbeing.”
Go to the most recent posting on our home page for more info on the petition’s failure to progress. If Council agrees to twin, we’d like it to adopt the following resolution:
We hope to model Edinburgh’s agreement on the one arranged between Nablus and Dundee.
Proposed Treaty
Our twinning would cost Edinburgh Council nothing. Rather, we will continue to call upon Policy Committee to commit Edinburgh Council to the following treaty:
“Proud of the contribution their respective cities will make to international friendship and understanding, the Lord Provost of the City of Edinburgh and the Mayor of Gaza Municipality pledge of both Edinburgh and Gaza City 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 hope the Council agrees to use the Edinburgh Partnership and the Edina-Gaza Twinning Association in furthering these objectives.
The proposed treaty can be downloaded here.
You can see the 36- minute video of the rally we held to promote the petition at the City Chambers on the 23rd March 2022 at https://youtu.be/MIkY8ad_9qs.
About the petitioner
The petitioner for this twinning proposal was Pete Gregson, though there is a steering group of four people who have helped write this website and who co-ordinated past events at Edinburgh Council Chambers. Pete has been vilified in the press for his criticism of Israel as antisemitic – but is determined not to stop his campaigning activities because of this. You can read about the smears against Pete- and his rebuttals to these, in his entry in the “Rogues Gallery” page on the Campaign Against Bogus Antisemitism website at www.bogusantisemitism.org/rogues-gallery/#pete-gregson
Most recently, the Jewish Telegraph declared that Pete had said that the Holocaust had been exaggerated. This is completely untrue; it is another example of the smears widely employed by Zionists to undermine those who support Palestine. See Gaza campaigner Pete Gregson defends himself against press attacks claiming he said the holocaust was exaggerated – Redress Information & Analysis (redressonline.com)
Pete has been successful in petitioning Edinburgh Council before. Nine years ago, when he was still an employee there (he worked in the Regeneration team), he, as a member of the public, lodged a Council petition for our ordinary Council staff working on the front line to be able to report bullying and mismanagement, by a whistleblower hotline.
The idea was that staff would not suffer for reporting wrongdoing. They needed to be able to access a whistleblower hotline, run by an honest broker, who would then report the matter to Councillors. Pete suggested using an outside company, Safecall, and allowing it to report to the Council Audit Committee. (Council officers are normally forbidden from talking directly to Councillors about Council business; they can only speak to their manager. For a number of reasons, that manager may choose not to take their concerns seriously).
[An early example of where the whistleblower was punished for speaking out was when Council worker Jinty Travers made an anonymous complaint by email against Mike Rosendale, then head of Community Education, to Council leader Cllr Donald Anderson in 2004. Cllr Anderson responded by asking Rosendale to carry out an investigation (!!). Rosendale was able to track the email to Jinty’s Council computer at Inch Community Centre; he suspended Jinty and disciplined him. Jinty appealed; but his union Unison disowned him; he had to take out a second mortgage to pay the legal costs of representation at an Employment Tribunal. Jinty ultimately won his case and £5,000 compensation from the Council and was able to keep his job, albeit he was moved from Community Education to Services for Communities, a different Department, away from Rosendale.]
There was fierce opposition from Council mandarins to Pete’s petition, because it cut them out of the picture, but, in the end – with the support of some key politicians (Cllrs Jeremy Balfour and Andrew Burns!) along with the 515 citizens who signed the petition- and the support of the Evening News – he won. Edinburgh had suffered some terrible scandals due to our city’s Corporate Management Team (CMT) mismanagement- the Trams fiasco, the Property Conversation scandal, the Baby Ashes scandal- to name but a few- and in every case senior Council officials had had the whistleblowers fired or bullied out of their jobs, often without the knowledge of our Council politicians- who then had to dig into Council coffers to remedy the ensuing nightmares (the trams cost £1Billion; The Property Conversion scandal £40 Million in compensation alone; the Baby Ashes scandal, centred on our crematoria throwing the remains of lost babies into a communal pit, broke the hearts of many).
Councillors saw that we needed both a safer mechanism- and a failsafe system- to avoid any more scandals. Our Council is now one of the only ones in the UK to have a whistleblower hotline- and is actually proud of it. As recently as December 2021 the Council showed that it continued to pride itself on the hotline Pete had petitioned for it to adopt back in 2012, along exactly the lines he requested- and that Susan Tanner QC, backed, in her paper to full Council a couple of months ago (see (Public Pack)Accessible Version – Review of the Whistleblowing and Organisational Culture of the City of Edinburgh Council Agenda Supplement for City of Edinburgh Council, 16/12/2021 10:00 ) . Whilst her report called for more complaints to be categorised as major/significant and investigated by Safecall, Ms Tanner said: “Having conducted an extensive review, I have not identified any evidence that any major/significant whistleblowing disclosures are being covered up by the council. Where a whistleblowing disclosure comes to the attention of the whistleblowing team and Safecall it will be investigated.”
As an ex-Council employee who was fired on many counts of misconduct for blowing the whistle in 2013, it was a bitter-sweet achievement for Pete, for he’d been fired for his whistleblowing and campaigning activities, at the behest of CMT mandarin Michael Thain, Head of Strategy and Policy, now Depute Director of Place. You can read all about that campaign on Pete’s own website at Whistleblowing Hotline at Edinburgh Council – Kids Not Suits.com
Whilst working at the Council, in his own time, [and most intensely when he was suspended by Michael Thain for six months on full pay], Pete was also heavily involved in “Save the Brae”- the campaign to save Castlebrae High School. Within the Regeneration Team, Pete’s patch had been Craigmillar, so he immediately knew that Mike Rosendale (then Head of Schools) was telling lies in trying to close it down [presumably to use its budget to shore up the Portobello High School running costs, as the Education Dept had suffered huge challenges in getting the land that the new school has been built upon]. Pete is massively proud of the fact that Craigmillar now has a brand new school- one that would never have come about, were it not for the Save the Brae campaign. More at Castlebrae High School has been saved – Kids Not Suits.com
Indeed, if you want to know about all Pete’s other pet projects, he has his own website, that he has been using since 2010; and has used to campaign on many issues, both local and national, at www.kidsnotsuits.com . He has also been making campaigning and community videos since he left the BBC in 1979: you can subscribe to his work on his You-tube channel here and see more details on the videos he’s produced on his website here
What difference does lobbying make?
We have a mountain to climb to get our Councillors to get our Council to commit to twinning in the future. The setback of the rejection of the twinning bid is very frustrating; to keep the matter alive, we need to continue to lobby our 63 Councillors; wherever you live in the city you will have 3 or 4 who represent you. They’ll be Tory, Labour, SNP, Green, Lib Dem or independent. You can see them all here.
The Policy meeting make decisions on twinning. The Policy Committee is largely made up from the chairs of the other Committees; officially the City is run by Labour; in practise it is an SNP/Labour/Green coalition, Councillors from these parties have most influence. All three parties favour Palestine, but all Cllrs will be nervous, following Israel’s intervention, about twinning with Gaza. Thus far, the only party to give the proposal full support are the Greens.
Lobbying your Councillor will take the form of emailing them and/or visiting them at their monthly surgeries. The old adage is if a Councillor gets one email, they bin it, if they get two, they file it, if they get three they do something about it.
We continue to need people to email their Councillors, to keep our twinning proposal alive for when Policy Committee reviews its twinning arrangements. It will only take you five minutes.
When we first lobbied in 2019, one Conservative Councillor responded saying “While I appreciate the humanitarian nature of the suggestion, in my opinion allowing our city to be linked at a civic level with Gaza would equate to a tacit endorsement of a terrorist regime which actively subjugates and exploits its own people. I would therefore actively oppose any proposal of this nature.” The Conservatives were planning to submit a motion to this effect to the Policy Committee on the 29th March 2022; they have been deaf to our endeavours to prove no Hamas involvement in Gaza City Council appointments.
We have pointed out repeatedly that Gaza Municipal Council are quite different from Hamas. Secondly, by taking this stance, the Cllr is refusing to acknowledge the suffering his own Party has created (Balfour was a Tory) and is supporting an isolationist policy. To find out more about Israel and Hamas, go to our “This Siege is Illegal” tab.
What chance have we got?
The Jewish News reported, in May 2017, that the Israeli envoy to UK was given a ‘very strong’ message by Scotland over Gaza. First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said her Scottish Government pressed the case that the situation in the Palestinian enclave must end. [see Israeli envoy to UK given ‘very strong’ message by Scotland over Gaza | Jewish News] Given the same party who lead the Government are also the largest at Edinburgh Council, we hope the SNP continue to consider the twinning proposal seriously.
The Greens at Edinburgh Council have to be admired for always supporting twinning 100%.
We succeeded in 2019 in getting an article about our bid published in Bella Caledonia and Common Space. Any politician scrolling through this page really ought to pause and read the piece in Bella Caledonia- it was not written by the petitioner, but by a TEFL teacher who has been assisting in the bid. It explains, with the help of Rabbie Burns and Scotland’s need for a positive international profile, what needs to be done- and why:
Please email all your Ward Cllrs to ask for continued support
First you need to know who your Councillors are– so click on MySociety.Org and enter your postcode. This shows the who your Councillors are.
Then, where it says “Choose your Representative”, click on the “Write to All Your Councillors” link to find the 3-4 who represent your ward. This lets you write to them all at once.
Then copy and paste in the text under the black line below.
The website says it blocks “copy & paste”- it does not, but it helps if you add some of your own views too- personalising it will add weight).
Everyone over 16 in your household can write a separate email to your Councillors.
It’s worth repeating the old adage: if a Councillor gets one email they put in the trash; if they get two they file it; if they get three- they do something about it. So everybody has a unique voice and your Councillors must respond to every single one on them.
After you’ve made any changes, enter your name & address and click “send”. Job done!
We’d very much like to read the responses you get. Please forward them onto info@twingaza.com
Dear Councillor,
I would like to know if you will support twinning Edinburgh with Gaza City in the future, should the Council decide to start twinning again.
I believe Edinburgh has never had a relationship with an Islamic city or the Arabic world, though there are some 15,000 Muslims in Edinburgh. We have twinned with many European ones, and one in the USA and even two in China, but have neglected the Arabic world, which has so much to offer – for business, for culture, and for young people. Arabic is spoken and written from Morocco to Pakistan, and many Arabic words exist in Urdu, so many Edinburgh citizens with roots in the Asian subcontinent can understand Moroccans, a land 4,500 miles distant. I would welcome a civic relationship with an Arabic city, in general, and Gaza City in particular. Gaza City is the biggest city in Palestine, with a population 20% larger than Edinburgh’s. You can read about the Council there and see how it compares to ours at www.tinyurl.com/GazaMunicipality
Twinning would help businesses in Edinburgh develop trade with Islamic people from Morocco all the way to Pakistan – some 420 million souls. All would be impressed if we were to twin with Gaza, as Gaza holds a special place in every Muslim’s heart. It is so close to the Al Aqsa mosque, the third holiest place in Islam. You must know how wide the dismay is that this great and ancient city, founded in 2,000 BC (over 4,000 years ago), has been brought to its knees by 15 years of illegal siege. The two million people of Gaza are desperately alone and isolated; their collective punishment is illegal under the Geneva Convention, but still it goes on. These people are descended from refugees from Palestine, driven there when 750,000 Arabs were ‘ethnically cleaned’ from their homes in the Nakba of 1948. They have suffered from the Israeli blockade for 15 years now, with half of them unemployed, just 10 unpredictable hours of electricity a day, 95% of the water undrinkable, 50% children expressing no will to live, and every citizen denied freedom of movement.
The young people from both cities would benefit so much from twinning; half the Gazan population are children. Twinning would give them some hope for the future, to know that some in the West care for them. Furthermore, it could help curb Islamophobia here.
The siege has at least had one positive outcome for the young people of Gaza: to beat the blockade, they have become adept at using the internet, learning coding and website development. Net-based jobs constitute a sphere Israel cannot police. The net is becoming the only way to communicate, and thanks to COVID we are able to use Zoom and Teams to work together. There are therefore great trade opportunities with Gaza: we can buy websites, IT and financial services from highly educated Gazans, many of whom also speak English.
The Edina-Gaza Twinning Association [EGTA] (see their page at www.twingaza.com ) is not only further boosting Gazans’ English skills with free conversational English classes on Zoom (delivered through its many volunteers) but is already working in partnership with Gaza Sky Geeks to link businesses in Edinburgh with IT developers in Gaza. Gaza Sky Geeks ( www.gazaskygeeks.com ), 11 years old now, is one of several training agencies running the Arab Developer Network Initiative- and is funded by US charity Mercy Corps, which has an office here in Edinburgh. Having trained thousands in Gaza, they are helping to manage our employment of Gazan developers. EGTA have already had a pilot website commissioned, for an on-line English teaching business [located here in Edinburgh at Slateford]; see it at www.nellenglish.com. Its Gaza build cost was £500; building it here would have cost four times as much. And so great is the demand for websites, that there are still plenty of opportunities for Edinburgh developers. Through helping Scottish businesses get their websites built in Gaza, to a higher quality and at a lower price than may be available elsewhere, we hope to help lift the Gazan economy from near-total dependence on foreign aid. Creating such jobs in Gaza is clearly mutually beneficial!
Taking things further, soon EGTA will develop business accounting services, allowing Scottish traders to upload their receipts and transactions to the internet, so Gazan book-keepers can do their accounts and tax returns (a Gazan lecturer at Heriot Watt University, who teaches Advanced Accounting, is going to help train Gazans in the UK tax regulations). [I am sure you know that Arabs are exceptionally numerate- algebra is an Arabic word]. As you can see, there are many opportunities…
And EGTA work with young people too- they are currently running free English classes with children every Sunday at the Take My Hand free education Centre for orphans and poor students. The children come from the Jabalia refugee camp, the largest of the Gaza Strip’s eight refugee camps and about 10 minutes from Gaza City by bus. Learn more about the centre at www.chuffed.org/project/help-gazan-orphans-to-learn
To conclude, I hope you can see that for Edinburgh to twin with Gaza City would be, as famous Jews Norman Finkelstein and Ilan Pappe declare, “a blessed initiative”. (see www.tinyurl.com/jews-gaza ). Please watch the 30-minute video at the City Chambers from March of this year, where Mohammed Alshorafa from Gaza outlines life there at www.tinyurl.com/gazarally
Twinning will cost our city nothing; all I ask is that we commit to the treaty at www.twingaza.com/what-you-can-do/#treaty
I look forward to your response, and thank you in advance for it.
Yours sincerely,
(signed)
[Add your name; the address will be added automatically by the software]
The 14 Policy Committee Councillors are Cammy Day (Convener- Lab), Mandy Watt (Vice-Convener- Lab), Adam McVey (SNP), Marco Biagi (SNP), Kate Campbell (SNP), Lesley Macinnes (SNP), Frank Ross (SNP), Alan Beal (LibDem) , Sanne Dijkstra-Downie (LibDem), Kevin Lang (LibDem), Clare Miller (Green), Steve Burgess (Green), Phil Doggart (Tory), Iain Whyte (Tory).
