ALLMEP Summit on the International Fund for Israeli-Palestinian Peace

The Alliance for Middle East Peace is a little known but highly significant coalition active inside the Beltway. it brings together the leading organizations involved in peace making between Israelis and Palestinians. On March 4 they will be holding a summit to publicly "embrace a new era of smart diplomacy that engages peacemaking not only from the top-down but also from the bottom-up, by building a groundswell of support for peace among ordinary citizens.

The center of this new era might will be the planned and hoped for International Fund for Israeli-Palestinian Peace. What would it do?

• Provide funding for collective action on the part of NGOs involved in reconciliation and
  peace building;
• Provide both funding for particular programs, activities, and initiatives, as well as capacity-building grants to NGOs, to ensure the long-term sustainability and improvement of these people-to-people coexistence and reconciliation efforts;
• Provide both short-term and multi-year funding, as appropriate;
• Support existing coexistence efforts, as well as encourage the development of creative new initiatives for fostering people-to-people coexistence and reconciliation;
• Ensure that all of the Fund's awards of grants and loans comply with the relevant laws applicable to grants by the donor parties to the Fund;
• Build strong strategic alliances with other agencies and bodies, ensuring that efforts are
  complementary, sustainable and mutually reinforcing;
• Establish community standards and benchmarks, by which funding recipients can reasonably
  evaluate and report on the results of supported programs, activities, and initiatives; and
• Engage current NGO coalitions, such as the Alliance for Middle East Peace and Peace NGOs Forum, as well as academic think tanks and other experienced institutions, to advise and aid in facilitating its strategic programming; support the organizational and professional collaboration, development, and capacity-building of coexistence NGOs; and sustain and build financial, political, and volunteer support for the NGOs' and the Fund's people-to-people efforts.

[Download the concept paper here.]

This is a great initiative. If successful, it will steer a portion of the money already spent on economic, humanitarian and military aid to the Middle East towards the organizations with a track record of engaging in peacemaking.

At the same time, it's fair to ask a pointed question. The organizations active now for many years (more than 15 years since Oslo!). In 2006 the Palestinians managed to vote for Hamas, which did everything it could to sabotage the peace process. In 2009, the Israelis not defeated the peace camp in the elections, they demolished Labor and Meretz, home of the Oslo architects, but gave an astounding 15 seats to neo-fascist Lieberman.

Can we ask some difficult questions? Like: anything you would have done differently? Are the kinds of new programs you'd like to develop, or old programs you plan to retire? Are non-political, non-partisan NGO efforts the best way forward? Are there long term studies tracking changing attitudes of past participants in people-to-people peace activities? Do we have a better system for preventing corruption, back dealing and opaque political interference in the formulas for allocating funds?

These kinds of questions are unlikely to recieve the attention they deserve - which is a shame. The onus is on the peace makers, as organizations, individual leaders, and funders, to face the music. Why have your efforts not produced peace? What will you do differently? And finally - who bears responsibility for the mistakes that were made by the peacemaking organizations?