Campaign is launched to oppose monetary aid to Palestine with anti-terror conditions attached

Headline: “The national campaign against conditional funding: The war against [conditional] funding is a long-term activity that requires continuing to reject political blackmail”

“The coordination committee of the national campaign against conditional funding held a meeting on Tuesday [Nov. 10, 2020], in order to discuss the prominent developments in the issue of conditional funding, strategies, and the campaign’s methods of action.

In this context, many positive indications and achievements recorded by the campaign were noted. One of the most important of them was the success of a number of the organizations that are members of the campaign in negotiating with three funders (France, Spain, and Ireland) [parentheses in source] on the conditions that appear in their contracts, which were replaced with contracts that do not harm the Palestinian national right (refers to contracts requiring Palestinian NGOs to denounce terror organizations in order to receive European funding –Ed.). In this way the campaign proved the civil society organizations’ ability to reject all the political conditions on the funding. It called to unite the Palestinian institutions’ efforts on the basis of refusing to make any concessions, and to begin dialogue with the funders in order to cancel the political conditions on the funding.

The campaign’s members discussed the importance of the continued activities and the meetings at the local and international levels, in order to direct attention to the dangers of the conditional political funding and its effects on the activity of the Palestinian civil society organizations. The future activities will focus on holding a number of meetings with the foreign embassies, representations, and institutions in order to explain the campaign’s position…

The campaign held the European Union (EU) responsible for the weakening and division of the Palestinian civil society. It emphasized that unity was and will remain the source of the civil society’s power…

The campaign will also turn to the EU member states and Palestine’s friends in order to take a position regarding these political conditions.”