There is not just one story of the Building Hope | Voices from Palestine visit that finished at the end of February – The fifteen Palestinian visitors from across the West Bank and Jerusalem were together for the first three days in London but after that went off in pairs and threes and fours on a number of visits to places linking with Palestine and/or working with CADFA on our visits – There were seven groups of visitors and an extra visit to Wales, and every participant had a full timetable of meetings, events and adventures. On the UK side there were hundreds of people involved with hosting and cooking and accompanying and helping – a very big thank you to all of you.
The background to the visit was the appalling stories from the West Bank and Jerusalem where Israelis have been conducting full-scale attacks on refugee camps and accelerated programmes of house demolitiion and racist oppression. We cannot forget for a second the pictures of emaciated, tortured prisoners who have been released from Israeli prisons in the recent prisoner exchanges, or the menace of returning attacks on Gaza. The journey for our visitors in both directions was very difficult – the number of military checkpoints and closures just keeps increasing. But the visit was purposeful, spreading the word, encouraging people to keep going.
There is no doubt that the visit moved forward the Building Hope | Voices from Palestine project, helped exisiting links forward with new ideas for work between women, teachers, university students and lecturers, community centres and more, and helped new links into existence. There were too many high points to be listed. What an amazing buzz of ideas and plans at the final conference in Birmingham on 22nd February – and what a lovely send-off everyone had in London on the night before the visitors left.
We and our partners in Hackney, East London, Bedford, Birmingham, Pendle, Sheffield and also other places that were involved are finishing the visit with so much to do that we cannot promise you a quick report! But we can promise that this has energised our work for human rights for Palestine all over the country. We are now at once finishing off the long list of things to be done after the visit and turning towards the work on our summer youth visit. from Palestine.