/To read the rest and see many pictures of the conference, click here <http://www.alternativenews.org/news/english/palestine-investment-conference-opens-in-bethlehem-20080522.html>.
The first-ever Palestine Investment Conference opened Wednesday afternoon, 21 May, in Bethlehem, amongst great international support and fanfare. With an estimated 1000 participants, including Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, Quartet Envoy Tony Blair, Managing Director of the World Bank Juan-Jose Dabdoub and the United Arab Emirates’ Minister of Economy Sultan Bin Saeed al-Mansouri, the conference promises to be an extravagant and photogenic event. The idea for the Palestine Investment Conference originated with Tony Blair and has been strongly backed by the Quartet. However, the occupied Palestinian territories do not suffer from a lack of international investment—they suffer from the lack of a political environment in which investments for sustainable development can be made. This, of course, is due to the Israeli occupation, an occupation the conference works hard to ignore.
“We are throwing a party and the whole world is invited” is the opening sentence of Prime Minister Fayyad’s greeting on the conference website, which is in English only. Neither the conference brochure nor the various sections of the website (including “Investment Climate”) mention the ongoing Israeli occupation, the number one reason for the de-development and increasing impoverishment of the Palestinian territories. In the opening session on “Revitalizing Gaza,” the agenda explicitly notes that “the panel discussion will focus on economic and not political issues.” As if politics and economics can ever be separated, and as if this conference itself is not a political statement by the international community as to its political-economic intentions for the region: more privatization.
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To read the rest and see many pictures of the conference, click here <http://www.alternativenews.org/news/english/palestine-investment-conference-opens-in-bethlehem-20080522.html>.