Press Releases

PR/EN/100320/12

BADIL Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights participated in joint advocacy initiatives in Australia, arising from partnerships formed through our international mobilization course, which was held for the first time in 2019.

In December 2019, and the first months of 2020, BADIL has been engaging and meeting with Australian civil society and decision makers, including academics, students, activists and politicians by providing lectures, promoting Palestinian rights and sharing BADIL’s work and publications.

In December and February, BADIL met with 4 state and federal Greens politicians to discuss the case of Palestine with special focus on current events and presenting the facts on the ground. This culminated in a briefing for the New South Wales (NSW) Parliamentary Friends of Palestine, with 10 politicians and staffers from the NSW Labor party and NSW Greens party. In this briefing, BADIL highlighted  its recent research Israeli Annexation: The Case of Etzion Colonial Bloc.

BADIL also met with the leading national advocacy body for Palestinian rights, the Australian Palestinian Advocacy Network (APAN), to share learnings and possibilities for future partnership. Associated with this, we participated in the establishment of a local solidarity network in Melbourne, Australia and conducted a radio interview with the APAN Vice-President, Nasser Mashni, on his regular community radio program “Palestine Remembered”. During the interview, BADIL presented the main findings from our recently published Survey of Palestinian Refugees and Internally Displaced Persons 2016-2018.

In addition, BADIL presented a lecture for 40 people at the Melbourne Free University , to be published as a podcast online, and which led to an additional radio interview on annexation and colonization (also not yet published online). The lecture focused on presenting BADIL’s findings from its recent report: Israeli Annexation: The Case of Etzion Colonial Bloc, and contextualizing it within recent and current political issues; namely the Israeli elections and Trump’s so called Deal of the Century.

This approach is part of BADIL’s strategy to expand our scope and outreach to international civil society to enhance the mobilization of the international solidarity movement.