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Quartet Representative Tony Blair urges US Congress to release funds for Palestinian State-Building

Listen to BBC Radio 4's interview with Quartet Representative Tony Blair:

Quartet Representative Tony Blair today urged the US Congress to release $200 million in funds for Palestinian state-building it has currently placed on hold.

Members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee have frozen the funding "until the Palestinian statehood issue is sorted out," one of the aides told reporters at the weekend.

Tony Blair said that he was working to persuade lawmakers that this isn’t good idea on the basis that: “even if you’re completely opposed to the Palestinian bid in the United Nations, this is not the right way to respond to it because it’s harming Palestinian people and it’s harming the very things that over the past few years we’ve been most strongly supportive of.”

In an interview with the BBC Radio 4 ‘The World Tonight’ programme, Tony Blair said: “Over the past few years, if you like the one success story in this whole business has been that we’ve managed to raise substantial sums of money for the Palestinian Authority.

“The Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, under the leadership of President Abbas, has actually made huge strides on security, on economic infrastructure, on all sorts of things to do with the growth of the economy which have resulted in double-digit growth on the West Bank in the last few years, and actually a situation where this year in fact the Prime Minister is asking for fewer amounts of funds than last year.

“So if we take this money away then, you know, it’s not actually being directed at the politics, whatever politics is being pursued, which you can agree or disagree with depending on your point of view. It’s actually taking away the money that’s going directly to support the very things that I think the whole of the international community in the last few years has said is a good idea for the Palestinians.

Describing the decision by Congress as “another difficulty to overcome”, Tony Blair said the money that had been going into the Palestinian economy since the 2007 Paris donors conference “really has made a difference in Palestine, in the West Bank, and even to an extent in Gaza because half of the money the Palestinian Authority pays out it pays actually into Gaza.

“So, it has made a big difference and yes, of course, I want to see if we can remove this difficulty and get on with building the process on the ground at the same time as I hope it’s possible to get back into negotiations.”