‘If our children leave, there is no future for Palestine. I want them to stay’

Huda Abu Arqoub was keynote speaker at Pathways to Hope, a public discussion in Sydney about building peace from conflict in Northern Ireland and the Middle-East

“THE AVERAGE AGE in the West Bank is 20; in Gaza it is 16. Our children have seen no peace; they know no peace. At the first chance they get, they want to leave.

“I don’t want my 33 nieces and nephews to leave Palestine. I want them always to know that they are Palestinians and they have the right to live in Palestine.

“And my way of doing that, of taking responsibility, is to liberate myself and in the process of doing that, liberate the oppressor.

These were the dramatic opening sentences of Huda Abu Arqoub’s stirring address at the Pathways to Hope public discussion held in Sydney last Thursday that explored how to build peace out of intractable conflict, in Northern Ireland and the Middle-East.

Abu Arqoub is the Regional Director of the Alliance for Middle East Peace (ALLMEP) and was the keynote speaker at a lively panel discussion in Bankstown, hosted by Rotary District 9675, in partnership with The Jewish Independent and Project Rozana.

In her first visit to Australia, Abu Arqoub, who represents 160 members of ALLMEP who work in people-to-people peacebuilding, was joined on stage by Ronit Zimmer, the Executive Director of Project Rozana in Israel, and Professor Timothy Lynch, from Melbourne University, who is a scholar of the Northern Ireland peace process.