18th Feb 2025
Dear Camden Mayor and Council
Thank you very much for your letter of 14th February and for your appreciation of CADFA and good wishes for our current visit from Palestine.
Yesterday we thought we hadn’t had an answer from you (your letter went to Meg who works part-time for CADFA) and we called a small demo by the Town Hall today to call on you to meet our visitors. We must now acknowledge that you have replied, but still won’t meet our visitors, and we will still demonstrate at the Town Hall as there are still important questions to answer.
You say that you cannot meet our visitors as we have sponsored a petition and so we are a lobbying body. We don’t know the detail of your rules, but surely you cannot be saying “you have an opinion and therefore we won’t meet you”-? We remind you that we are not asking for anything for ourselves but for your urgent action to stop violence and take the side of equality and human rights.
Our visitors have in any case not sponsored a petition and we are not asking for a meeting to negotiate but simply to politely acknowledge that they are here and that this is special! Some of our visitors yesterday met the Bedford mayor and others will in the next week meet mayors in Islington, Hackney, Pendle, Sheffield and perhaps more. We are sorry that they will not meet the Mayor of our own home borough.
We believe that underlying the decision not to see them is an issue of equality in Camden’s approach and that Camden should look at it. Camden’s public records are full of instances of Camden taking the side of the oppressed. Recently, Camden’s Mayor took part in Holocaust Day commemorations. Camden has worked in many ways to support Ukrainians. The last leader of Camden Council is shown in a video on Camden’s website naming a roundabout after a Russian human rights defender and saying “Camden always stands with the oppressed.’
Yet tens or more probably (according to the Lancet) hundreds of thousands of people have been killed in Gaza and hundreds in the West Bank and Jerusalem since October 2023 and the massive destruction, displacement, disease and misery is not finished. You surely can’t be unaware of the disgust that this arouses in a large percentage of Camden citizens and that probably the majority first wanted a ceasefire and now want divestment to try to stop the horror? (We are drawing here on national polling but in Camden just on impression, based on the popularity of the petition and the keenness of people to sign it, dramatically so among young people.)
We think that if you review it, you will find that the decision not to meet our visitors isn’t because we are expressing an opinion but because the visitors are Palestinian and have, like their parents and grandparents and more generations before them, been refused equality of concern by the west. And that the way the west continues to treat them is in direct conflict with the expressed values of a council such as Camden, so this causes a conflict and silence seems the easiest way out.
The difficulties cannot be got over through a head-in-the-sand approach. We believe our council is not just burying its own head but demanding that others – like Camden schools – do so too. We have heard from parents that the concerns and fears and need for affirmation by Palestinian children in your schools have not been met while other groups have had support, and that other children who understand something of the Palestinian situation have been asked not to bring this subject into schools. It is represented as ‘political’ and taboo where support for Ukraine has bern actually encouraged.
We believe that the refusal to meet our visitors is linked to this.
Your letter of 14th to us is appreciated and we wish we didn’t have to go further but do you not think that the charge of double standards is appropriate? Many of us were brought us with the notions of “never again” and the need to stand up against injustice – and yet the Palestinian issue is seen by Camden as too “sensitive” to even allow a handshake and maybe a cup of tea with our visitors.
Please reconsider as they are here still till 24th. After they leave, we will ask for further discussion with you on equality and human rights perhaps in particular with Camden education department.