For Israeli-Palestinian peace, we need the international community to be a midwife, not an architect

3 October 2024, 11:34

For decades, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been a focal point of international diplomacy, with world leaders striving to broker peace between our two peoples.

For decades, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been a focal point of international diplomacy, with world leaders striving to broker peace between our two peoples.

As a peace activist working alongside young Israelis and Palestinians, I have witnessed firsthand the repeated failures of these efforts. The international community has largely acted as architects, attempting to design a solution from the outside, treating peace as a transactional process that can be engineered by external forces.

Yet, this top-down approach has consistently fallen short. Peace cannot be imposed—it must be nurtured from within.

There is an immediate and urgent role for Keir Starmer and other world leaders to make the necessary political pressure on all parties to de-escalate conflict and move us all away from this deadly brink. But beyond that what we need is for the international community is to step back from the role of architect and assume the role of midwife.

Rather than designing peace for us, they should help us bring it to life ourselves. We, the young Israelis and Palestinians, need to be at the center of peacemaking. It is our voices, our experiences, and our aspirations that must guide the path forward.

Like a midwife, the international community’s role should be one of support, not control. They can provide resources, facilitate dialogue, and create the conditions for peace to emerge organically. But the process itself—the difficult, often painful work of reconciliation—must be owned by those of us who live the reality of this conflict daily.

Young people, in particular, have a unique role to play. We are not bound by the entrenched narratives of the past. We are open to new ways of thinking, to reimagining what a shared future could look like.

The time has come for a shift in approach. Peace is not a building to be constructed by foreign hands. It is a living process, one that must be midwifed into existence by those who believe in it the most—young Israelis and Palestinians. Only then can we hope to create a future where both our peoples can live in peace and dignity.

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Eran Nissan is an Israeli peace activist and currently serves as the CEO of ‘Mehazkim‘, an Israeli progressive movement.

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