A 15-YEAR campaign to twin Oxford with a Palestinian city got a major boost after Oxford City Council backed formal twinning.

The council was addressed by the Oxford Ramallah Friendship Association back in 2003 – and were told to return in five years once friendship links between the cities had been established.

Fifteen years on, the association said it had been ‘busy building those grassroots friendship links…but perhaps the time has come for the council to consider again an official twinning’.

The proposal had backing from former council leader John Tanner, who proposed a motion which was overwhelmingly passed by his colleagues at a meeting on Monday evening.

According to Jenny Stanton and Nikki Marriott, ORFA members who addressed the council, ‘there are good reasons for Oxford to choose to twin with Ramallah.’

They continued: “Both are university towns, both have leading museums, both have major hospitals that serve the surrounding area, and a group of Oxford medics teach at Bir Zeit University, Ramallah, for a few weeks every year.

“Both cities have a vibrant youth culture featuring dance and theatre. Oxford is multicultural and Ramallah has a diverse faith makeup, a majority being Muslims and 25 per cent being Christians.”

Ramallah is the de facto capital of the West Bank and, according to the Welcome to Palestine website, is the ‘cultural, commercial and governmental hub of the West Bank, alive with liberalism and intellectualism’.

The population of Ramallah city itself is relatively small, at about 30,000, while the municipality is far bigger, at about 300,000 people.

It lies about six miles north of Jerusalem, while the only Christian town in Palestine, Taybeh, is just north of Ramallah and has its own brewery.

Martyn Rush, a Labour city councillor for Barton and Sandhills, said more than 600 people had signed a petition in favour of the twinning.

He said: “This has been a grassroots, community-led campaign which has provided a model in how to build friendship and solidarity between communities and across international borders.

“We can’t have asked for a more eloquent exposition of this than from the Association themselves.”

Formal twinning is likely to take a number of months.

Oxford is already hoping to twin with Wroclaw in Poland and Padua in Italy.

It already has five twins cities, with links prominent across Oxford. Oxford’s twin cities are: Leiden in Holland, Bonn in Germany, Grenoble in France, Perm in Russia and Leon in Nicaragua.

A children’s football tournament will be held in Oxford next month with players coming from Perm, Bonn and Oxford.