Ben Pawlowski
GAZA and the cities of Palestine will become Barcelona’s symbolic 11th district, reviving a model first used three decades ago to help towards the recovery of Sarajevo following the Bosnian War.
Barcelona’s mayor, Jaume Collboni, announced the initiative during an official visit to a UNRWA refugee camp in Jordan on Tuesday, and insisted the move would help to ‘scale up technical cooperation’ with cities including war-torn Gaza ‘until peace arrives’.
The project will be allocated an initial €1 million budget by the end of the year, Collboni said, which would allow city council workers to provide support to Palestinian authorities in urban planning, health, accessibility and education.
The investment will allow the newly-formed district to have its own councillor, a team of workers, resources and independent administrative infrastructure – replicating the support former mayor Pasqual Maragall gave to the blighted Bosnian capital in 1995.
“We want technicians to be on the ground and also to host technicians from there to be trained in Barcelona, as per their requests,” Collboni added.
“It is no longer a question of one-off cooperation with visits, but of a fixed structure with a view to utilising the talent of municipal technicians.”
Barcelona has ten official districts: Ciutat Vella, Eixample, Sants-Montjuic, Les Corts, Sarria-Sant Gervasi, Gracia, Horta-Guinardo, Nou Barris, Sant Andreu and Sant Marti.
The mayor also announced that the city council will double its annual financial contribution to UNRWA – the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East – from €200,000 to €400,000, intended to support the purchase of much-needed food and medicine.
The announcement comes just days after Israeli authorities barred Collboni from entering the country in a move the mayor slammed as a ‘hostile act’.
The mayor of Spain’s second largest city had been invited to visit by the mayors of Bethlehem and Ramallah, but he was informed last week by Israel’s Population Immigration and Border Authority that he would not be granted entry ‘in accordance with the Entry into Israel Law’.
Collboni is far from the only elected politician to have been blocked from entering Israel.
Earlier this year, two Labour MPs from the UK, Yuan Yang and Abtisam Mohamed, were detained upon arrival at Ben Gurion Airport and denied entry, with Israel’s immigration authority accusing the pair of intending to ‘document the security forces’ and ‘spread hate speech’.
Collboni’s ban is likely linked to the city council’s decision in May to cut institutional ties with the Israeli government and suspend its friendship agreement with the city of Tel Aviv.
At the time, Collboni, a member of the PSC, the Catalan sister party of prime minister Pedro Sanchez’s ruling PSOE, said that ‘the suffering and death in Gaza over the past year and a half, and recent attacks by the Israeli government, make any relationship unviable’.
Reacting to the decision to veto his entry into Israel, Collboni said: “Israel’s veto of the mayor of Barcelona is anecdotal. What is cruelly serious is that there are more than 6,000 lorries that cannot bring humanitarian aid into Gaza.”
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