The protracted armed conflict between Palestinians and Israelis involves competing historical claims to the same stretch of land – between the Jordan River to the east and the Mediterranean Sea to the west. It is part of a broader conflict between Israel and the Arab world. The roots of the conflict are the subject of harsh debates and opposite narratives. They focus on the Romans, on late 19th-century Jewish migration to  the Ottoman Empire, on contradictory promises made by Europeans to Arabs/Palestinians and Jews, on the United Nations vote in 1947 to partition land in the British mandate of Palestine into two states following the destruction of much of European Jewry in the Holocaust, on the Palestinian Nakba and on the parallel evolutions of Palestinian and Jewish nationalisms. Despite these conflicting narratives there is little disagreement on this conflict's tragic human toll.

This entrenched conflict has affected hundreds of thousands of people in Israel/Palestine and beyond, through massive displacements, occupation and annexation of land, deprivation of rights and regular outbursts of extreme violence. Since the tragic events of October 2023 and the devastating ensuing war in Gaza, physical encounters between Palestinian and Israeli peacebuilders have been close to impossible.

While peace agreements were signed between Israel and Egypt (1979) and Jordan (1994), efforts to broker peace between Palestinians and Israelis – including the 1978 Camp David Accords, the Oslo Accords of the 1990s, and more – have all failed.

In the midst of exponential violence, Palestinian and Israeli women bear the compounded weight of protecting their communities, raising children in unsafe realities, navigating alerts and checkpoints. They face the erosion of family and communal life through separation and displacement. Despite all of this, they remain almost entirely absent from the political and diplomatic processes that claim to be working for their future.

In both Palestine and Israel, peacebuilders, including women and feminist peace activists, encounter political polarisation, shrinking civic space and marginalisation. Joint peacebuilding efforts face increasing obstacles.

In spring 2026, we jointly developed the programme “From marginalised to essential: women transforming Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations” with our Palestinian and Israeli partners, the Jerusalem Center for Women and Itach-Ma'aki: Women Lawyers for Social Justice. The programme covers the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and Israel.

It addresses women’s exclusion from formal peace negotiations, aiming to strengthen Palestinian and Israeli women’s leadership in peacebuilding through joint engagement.

The programme builds on years of experience and expands the work of the 1325 Joint Israeli-Palestinian Women’s Steering Committee. Since its establishment in 2020, the Committee has demonstrated remarkable resilience and commitment, even amidst the ongoing war that has further restricted Palestinian mobility and heightened insecurity. The Committee serves as a unique platform for dialogue and cooperation among women peacebuilders from both societies.  

Promoting women's substantive inclusion in peace processes

Together with our Palestinian and Israeli partners, we strengthen Palestinian and Israeli women’s leadership in peacebuilding by consolidating an existing joint network of women leaders into a sustainable, safe and structured platform for dialogue, advocacy and strategy development.

Together we:

• Foster meaningful connections between Israeli and Palestinian women peacebuilders and within each community.

• Amplify women's voices and boost their influence in high-level peace and security deliberations, including formal and informal decision-making spaces, by actively promoting women experts, building strategic networks and mobilising stakeholders to champion qualified female negotiators as essential decision-makers, not as symbolic participants.

• Conduct outreach and media engagement to amplify the voices of Israeli-Palestinian women and the narratives of joint engagement and brief high-level decision-makers.

• Build strategic capacity for women peacebuilders in alignment with the principles of UN Security Council Resolution 1325, including through the inclusion and mentorship of a younger generation of women peacebuilders to ensure continuity and sustainability of leadership.

By strengthening both the Joint Steering Committee’s internal coordination and its external engagement, the programme aims to close the gap between women-led track 2 (informal) and track 1.5 (mixed official and unofficial) initiatives and formal track 1 decision-making spaces, where women still face significant barriers to access.