On June 12, 2025, the French Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs hosted a conference in Paris bringing together dozens of Israeli and Palestinian participants under the banner of supporting peace and advancing the two-state solution ahead of the G7 meeting on June 15. At first glance, the initiative appeared admirable.
France continues to invest political capital in keeping alive the prospect of peace at a time when both societies are exhausted by war, violence, and despair.
The idea of engaging civil society actors from both sides is intuitively attractive. Diplomats, donors, and journalists alike are naturally drawn to images of Palestinians and Israelis sitting together, discussing coexistence and reconciliation.
Yet beneath this attractive surface lies a reality that few are willing to discuss openly. Over the past three decades, an increasingly closed and professionalized “peace industry” has emerged around the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
What began as genuine efforts to build bridges between two societies gradually evolved into a highly specialized ecosystem of organizations, consultants, facilitators, conference organizers, and donor-funded professionals who have come to dominate the field of what is often described as Israeli-Palestinian civil society engagement.
The same names appear repeatedly. The same organizations receive funding year after year. The same participants travel from one conference to another, from Geneva to Brussels, from Paris to Washington.
They speak the same language, attend the same workshops, publish the same reports, and celebrate the same symbolic achievements. Meanwhile, the distance between ordinary Palestinians and Israelis continues to grow.
A self-reinforcing ecosystem has developed between donor governments, international bureaucracies, and the leadership of the peace industry itself.
Donors seek predictable partners who understand reporting requirements and avoid political controversy. Organizations learn how to secure grants and maintain institutional survival.
Both sides become comfortable with a model that minimizes risk, avoids confrontation with difficult realities, and rarely challenges the structures that prevent meaningful engagement between the two societies.
From dialogue to institutional self-perpetuation
The result is a form of peacebuilding that often takes place far away from the people it claims to represent.
In hotel conference rooms across European capitals, participants discuss coexistence while Palestinians and Israelis on the ground experience increasing separation. Violence rises. Political polarization deepens. Mutual distrust reaches new heights.
Yet conference after conference concludes with carefully drafted statements celebrating dialogue and reaffirming commitment to peace.
A parallel reality has emerged: one in which success is measured not by social impact but by the number of conferences held, grants secured, reports published, and donor evaluations completed.
This industry is not small. Every year, tens of millions of euros are invested in Israeli-Palestinian coexistence programs, largely funded by the European Union and its member states.
Recently, an €18 million European grant administered through a French intermediary was distributed among organizations operating within this ecosystem.
Yet if one searches for evidence of these investments among ordinary Palestinians or Israelis, the results are remarkably difficult to find.
Where are the mass movements that emerged from these investments? Where are the large-scale social constituencies that were built?
Where are the millions of citizens whose attitudes were transformed?
Where are the public campaigns that reached entire societies rather than the same small circle of professional participants?
The uncomfortable truth is that much of this activity remains largely invisible outside a relatively narrow community of practitioners. Many of these networks operate according to informal rules that have become almost sacred.
Meetings are frequently conducted under Chatham House rules. Participants are discouraged from publicizing discussions. Photographs are often avoided. Public debate is limited. Social media engagement is minimal.
The broader public is rarely invited into the conversation. Transparency – ironically – is often absent from organizations that speak constantly about democracy, accountability, and inclusion.
One of the pillars of this ecosystem is a Geneva-based organization that has successfully secured substantial portions of international peacebuilding funding over many years.
Yet a simple review of its public footprint reveals a striking disconnect between financial resources and public influence. Social media accounts reach only a few thousand followers.
Public engagement remains limited. Visibility inside Palestinian and Israeli society is marginal. This raises legitimate questions.
How many hundreds of millions of euros have been invested in this sector over the past 30 years? Which governments approved these expenditures? What evaluation mechanisms were used?
How were success and failure measured? Why have so many grants repeatedly flowed to the same organizations and the same individuals?
Most importantly, how is it possible that the gap between Palestinian and Israeli societies continues to widen while those claiming to represent dialogue and coexistence continue to receive praise, funding, and invitations to international conferences?
The problem is not the pursuit of peace. The problem is the illusion of representation. A handful of organizations do not represent Palestinian society. They do not represent Israeli society. They represent themselves.
The tragedy is that many well-intentioned European diplomats continue to confuse participation with representation and attendance with legitimacy. They see familiar faces around conference tables and assume they are hearing the voices of entire communities.
They are not.
Real peacebuilding requires leaving the comfort of elite conferences and engaging directly with the difficult realities on the ground.
It requires reaching citizens who disagree, communities that have never met one another, and young people who have lost faith in both politics and dialogue.
It requires transparency, accountability, measurable impact, and genuine democratic legitimacy. Until that happens, conferences will continue to produce photographs, declarations, and donor reports.
But they will not produce peace.
The writer is a Palestinian political activist and reform advocate. A lifelong Fatah member, he has become a prominent voice for democratic renewal, national elections, and institutional reform. He is among the founders of New Path (Masar Jadid), a new Palestinian political movement seeking to build a modern, accountable, and democratic political alternative.