WASHINGTON, D.C. (March 6, 2009) – More than 150 Israeli and Palestinian non-governmental organization leaders, Arab and Jewish American leaders, and key Middle East ambassadors met Wednesday at the Ronald Reagan Building in downtown Washington, D.C., as the Alliance for Middle East Peace (ALLMEP) publicly launched its initiative to establish a $200 million per-year International Fund for Israeli-Palestinian Peace.

The day-long “2009 Summit on the International Fund for Israeli-Palestinian Peace” included a closed-door ambassador-level meeting between ALLMEP leaders and chief Israeli, Palestinian, Jordanian, and Moroccan diplomats to discuss the proposed Fund. The ambassadors’ roundtable meeting was hosted by Amb. Juergen Chrobog, chairman of the BMW Foundation and a former German deputy foreign minister and ambassador.

Throughout the day, summit delegates met in both panel discussions and smaller stakeholder meetings focused on how to significantly expand the scope and impact of current “people-to-people” cooperative activities involving Israeli and Palestinian citizens in the region. Meetings centered on learning lessons from Northern Ireland and other conflict areas, the role of business interests and the media in building peace, as well as how to enhance cooperation between grassroots projects and government.

The Director General of the International Fund for Ireland (IFI), Alexander Smith, spoke poignantly at the conference of his hope for Middle East peace based on the Irish experience. He reassured participants that the IFI had been established during a difficult period in the Northern Ireland conflict, much like the current situation in the Middle East. Nonetheless, he said, in the 21 years since it was founded, the IFI has provided almost $1.5 billion in investments in peace and reconciliation projects in that troubled region. According to summit organizers, the idea for the proposed International Fund for Israeli-Palestinian Peace was inspired by the success of the IFI.  ALLMEP leaders said they intend to work closely with the IFI to learn from its experiences in establishing a new Israeli-Palestinian fund.

“ALLMEP is urging the United States and the international community to borrow an inspiring idea and a successful approach from another conflict that once seemed intractable,” said ALLMEP founder and summit organizer, Avi Meyerstein. “Just as the United States, the European Union, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand combined their efforts and resources to establish the International Fund for Ireland more than 20 years ago, today we call for those who care about peace in the Middle East to establish an International Fund for Israeli-Palestinian Peace,” he said. According to ALLMEP, legislation may be introduced in Congress within a matter of weeks to authorize U.S. participation in creating and supporting such a Fund.

Meyerstein argued that such a fund would “complement ongoing diplomacy” by building a strong constituency of citizens who would provide political support for future peace agreements. ALLMEP, thousands of Israelis and Palestinians are currently engaged in a variety of regular cooperative activities ranging from teachers and doctors working together to joint youth sports leagues. 

NGO leaders at the summit said these projects have ripple effects with each dollar spent because participants share their experiences and attitudes with their families and communities. They also said that current people-to-people efforts are easily replicated from one community to another and scaled up to include many more citizens, pointing to rapid growth of these projects in the past as even modest amounts of new funding have become available. “[I]f we want to give our diplomacy a chance of ultimate success, we must not be talking about just thousands of Israelis and Palestinians working together to solve their shared problems and invest in their shared future,” Meyerstein said. “We must be talking about millions.”

A diverse array of leading American advocates of peace in the Middle East participated, including Rabbi David Saperstein of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism and Dr. James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute. The summit was co-sponsored by Arab, Jewish, and Christian American organizations, including the American-Arab Anti Discrimination Committee, Americans for Peace Now, the Arab American Institute, Brit Tzedek v’Shalom, Churches for Middle East Peace, and J Street.

Leading academic experts on conflict resolution and the Middle East conflict also spoke throughout the day, including Dr. Joseph Montville of George Mason University, who first coined the term “track II diplomacy” in the early 1980s to describe non-governmental efforts to bridge conflicts. Several leading academic institutions co-hosted the summit, including the Center for World Religions, Diplomacy, and Conflict Resolution at George Mason University, the GW Institute for Corporate Responsibility, and Kogod School of Business at American University.

ALLMEP, a coalition of more than 60 Israeli-Palestinian NGOs building cooperation between Israelis, Palestinians, and other Arabs in the Middle East, said the Wednesday summit fell on the third day of its sixth annual conference in Washington. On Tuesday, its NGO leaders and volunteers held a total of more than 75 meetings at the White House; with members of Congress, senators, and their staff; with USAID and State Department officials; and with American Middle East policy advocates. Earlier in the week, the NGO leaders met privately to plan how to expand their projects, cope with a difficult political situation in the wake of the Gaza war, and work together to organize a broad movement for peace.