The popular image of the Palestinians is of an impassioned and extremist people - the media are swift at capturing pictures of children holding weapons aloft. And that is the challenge for any youth policy within the Palestinian National Authority.
A few years ago I had the pleasure of working with the de facto youth minister for the Palestinians. Regrettably, he had to leave early because the Israelis were shelling then Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat's compound at Ramallah, where his family was. The minister was not a member of Hamas - rather of Fatah, the Movement for the Liberation of Palestine founded by Arafat in the 1950s. A medical doctor by profession, he had been asked by Arafat to develop a youth policy - with no building, no staff, no resources, and with a youth population eagerly enlisting to the more extreme elements of the Palestinian cause.
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