Labour Friends of Israel is proud to announce the publication of our new policy paper, Laying the Foundations for a Two-State Solution: An International Fund for Israeli-Palestinian Peace. This important paper makes the strategic and financial case for establishing a dedicated multilateral fund to support Israeli-Palestinian peacebuilding efforts and calls on the UK government to take a leadership role in its creation.
The paper urges donor states – including the EU, UK and Norway, which contribute around 60-70 percent of non-military aid to Israel-Palestine – to pool their resources in order to expand the reach of their spending.
“No single donor, especially with shrinking budgets, can alone shift the trajectory of the Israeli- Palestinian conflict,” the paper argues. “By pooling their limited resources into a dedicated multilateral fund, such as the International Fund for Israeli-Palestinian Peace, these states could scale up peacebuilding efforts tenfold without spending more. Such a fund would protect civil society from political volatility, align fragmented donor strategies and finally ensure funding matches the scale of the problem.”
Following Keir Starmer’s commitment last December that Britain will host an inaugural meeting of the Fund, the paper also calls for the government to use that meeting to announce an initial UK funding commitment, paired with matching pledges or political endorsements from partner governments. “British leadership will be key to unlocking coordinated international momentum,” it argues.
LFI’s new paper details how:
- Civil society is essential in building and maintaining peace. The UK should draw on the lessons of Northern Ireland, where Labour under Tony Blair helped secure the Good Friday agreement, with civil society playing a crucial role before, during and after the peace process. The International Fund for Ireland, established in the mid-1980s with contributions from the UK, Ireland, USA, EU, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, played a crucial role in “breaking up the hardened soil of sectarianism”, building new constituencies for peace;
- Rigorous academic research shows peacebuilding initiatives in Israel and Palestine are highly effective at fostering empathy, building trust, and countering extremism;
- Israeli and Palestinian peacebuilding organisations have proven remarkably effective and resilient, with more than a quarter of ALLMEP’s member organisations increasing their activities since the 7 October 2023 terror attack;
- In an era of shrinking aid budgets, pooling resources through a multilateral fund would significantly increase the impact of international support without requiring additional spending;
- The UK, with its history, credibility and convening power, can and must lead. It has the legacy of the International Fund for Ireland, the infrastructure to coordinate allies and the political momentum along with broad cross-party support to drive the International Fund for Israel-Palestine forward. In an age of austerity, multilateralism is not idealism, it is efficiency.
About the Authors
The paper is authored by John Lyndon, executive director of the Alliance for Middle East Peace (ALLMEP), and features a contribution by Rev Dr Gary Mason MBE, Methodist minister and director of Rethinking Conflict, who draw on lessons from the Northern Ireland peace process and the groundbreaking International Fund for Ireland.