Screen stars support celebration of Middle East peacebuilders

Actors from TV and film franchises such as X-Men, Harry Potter and Fauda have added their support to a celebration of peacebuilding in the Middle East.

Sir Patrick Stewart, Jason Isaacs, and Laëtitia Eïdoto are backing the ‘Shine a Light’ Middle East peace initiative next week, which aims to bring together leading politicians and VIPs to celebrate Israeli and Palestinian peacemakers.

Stewart is perhaps best known for his roles in Star Trek and X-Men, while Isaacs played Lucius Malfoy in Harry Potter and French Lebanese star Laëtitia Eïdo played Dr Shirin El Abed in Israeli TV series Fauda.

The event on 15 December will “showcase the tireless community of Palestinian and Israeli peacebuilders” and is being organised by the Alliance for Middle East Peace (ALLMEP), a network of more than 125 organisations.

Among those attending the online event will be Shadow Foreign Secretary Lisa Nandy MP, the UN’s Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process Nickolay Mladenov and US Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer.

Earlier this year ALLMEP helped get a US law passed promising £200m over five years toward peacebuilding initiatives between Israelis and Palestinians, with the UK government also endorsing it.

Director John Lyndon said the international community was spending “a fraction” on Israeli-Palestinian peacebuilding compared to what it spent on grassroots initiatives in Northern Ireland, which helped to pave the way for the Good Friday Agreement.

“Successive attempts to resolve the Israel-Palestinian conflict through top-down diplomacy alone have failed,” he said. “Grassroots initiatives will create the bedrock of support among citizens, the only way that lasting peace can be achieved.”