Our history
In October 2004, a workshop on Twinning with Palestine at the European Friendship Forum brought together people from Palestine and different groups who were working on some sort of twinning project with Palestine at the time.
The first Twinning with Palestine conference took place in London in 2005. It brought together representatives of nearly 20 groups across Britain who were at some stage of making friendship links. This included towns with established twinning agreements, groups with well-established informal friendship links with towns, villages and refugee camps, and others who were at the initial stage of building friendships.
The conference was a great success and led to the formation of the setting up of the Britain Palestine Twinning Network (BPTN). BPTN adopted its first constitution in 2007.
In 2014 a new constitution was adopted. Our name was changed to the Britain Palestine Friendship and Twinning Network which better reflected the variety of network groups.
The network has continued to meet every year since 2007, with a conference and an Annual General Meeting. These take place across the UK where there is an active group able to host it, and are arranged with support from the Network Committee. We now have over 35 member groups of all shapes and sizes, and continue to grow.
The network has also held conferences in Palestine including in Al Bireh, at Bir Zeit university, and most recently in Nablus and Sabastiya in 2019. This was attended by 45 people from Britain from 15 groups. We hope there will be more of these in future!