Planes may be grounded. Peacebuilding isn’t.
With last week’s outbreak of the Iran War, diplomatic failure has plunged the region – and millions of people living in it – into war. ALLMEP members and the communities they unite find their lives hanging in the balance, with uncertainty, fear, and grief spreading across Israel, Palestine and the entire Middle East.
This past week, the offices of several of our members were directly hit by interballistic missiles in Tel Aviv. As the threat of missiles continues, disruption is felt everywhere: gatherings are moved online, sirens interrupt calls mid-sentence, and public prayers can’t be held.
Israelis and Palestinians peacebuilders find themselves navigating the devastatingly familiar reality of war: rushing to shelters, checking on loved ones, and bracing for the next alert – all whilst continuing the essential work that refuses to accept this cycle of violence as inevitable: The incredible civil society network that will not be silenced, and that continues – with urgency and courage – to build the future it knows is possible. This crisis has demonstrated the resilience, breadth, and commitment of ALLMEP’s 200+ members. As we have seen in the past, civil society has not retreated but mobilised, providing direct services where governments have failed, supporting communities under fire, and choosing, deliberately and publicly, hope over despair and unity over division.
More than 90 organisations came together on 5 March during ALLMEP’s Members Call – a shared space to speak honestly, listen, understand, and support one another. Members shared their experiences of the past days and the realities they are facing on the ground: the threats, the gaps, the small and large acts of solidarity – and how ALLMEP and its network can best support one another and reaffirm the resilience that drives civil society even through crisis and escalation.
Unequal Protection: A Crisis Within a Crisis
A core theme of the call: the current escalation exposes the gaps and injustices that for too long have defined life in Israel-Palestine. The humanitarian crisis in Gaza grows as the Rafah crossings were closed for multiple days in response to the current escalation. Across the West Bank, Palestinian communities face deepening restrictions and escalating daily settler violence. Palestinians across Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza have limited-to-no access to shelters, demonstrating the clear unequal protection of Israeli Jews and Palestinians in the land.
As Abraham Initiatives’ Co-Executive Director Amnon Beeri-Sulitzeanu warned in a recent op-ed, only 29 out of nearly 12000 public shelters are located in Arab municipalities and functional — meaning that Palestinian citizens of Israel, comprising 20% of the population, must rely on less than 0.2% of sheltering facilities. In neglected urban peripheries, a handful of overcrowded public shelters must suffice for entire Israeli communities. In Jerusalem, the gap between West and East is equally stark. In the unrecognised Bedouin villages of the Negev, it is starker still: communities that already lack basic infrastructure are now also without shelter from ballistic missiles.
ALLMEP members have not only reported, but acted on this reality. Ir Amim has highlighted the striking gap in shelter provision between West and East Jerusalem; Sikkuy-Aufoq and the Abraham Initiatives have repeatedly called for equal protection, refusing to allow Arabs and Palestinians to be treated as second-class citizens. Even before the current escalation, the Negev Coexistence Forum for Civil Equality (NCF) highlighted protection cleavages for Bedouin communities. Standing Together raised 300,000 shekels in a single day to install shelters in unrecognised Bedouin villages in the Negev, while the Regional Council for Unrecognised Arab Villages in the Negev (RCUV) and A New Day in the Negev have been providing emergency information and support to communities navigating the crisis with little institutional backing.
The shelter crisis is not a technical failure but the result of a deeper structural inequality – one that ALLMEP members are consistently addressing, and that the war has made impossible to ignore.
Settler Violence Does Not Pause for War – Nor Does the Solidarity Work
While the world’s attention has turned to the skies, on the ground in the West Bank the violence has continued – and, according to our members’ direct testimonies, intensified – attacking purposefully whilst eyes are diverted elsewhere.
Unarmed Civilian Protection in Palestine (UCPiP) and Rabbis for Human Rights, have documented escalating settler attacks amid the bombing – a pattern in which moments of regional distraction become cover for accelerated violence against Palestinian communities. Looking the Occupation in the Eye has chronicled incident after incident in the West Bank, providing the kind of on-the-ground documentation that is essential when broader attention is diverted elsewhere. Civil society continues to stand in solidarity and refuses to stay silent: Combatants for Peace, The Parents Circle, Standing Together, and many others have consistently highlighted that occupation and violence do not go on hold during wartime, and the work of solidarity on the ground – more dangerous than ever – continues.
A Shared Future – Chosen Together
Women Wage Peace has asked the questions that too few people in power are asking: “What is the goal? What is the expected outcome? Where are they leading us?”
Despite challenges, and against despair, Rabbis for Human Rights, in partnership with the Interfaith Forum for Human Rights and Spirit of Galilee, brought together diverse religious and spiritual leaders for a unique interfaith prayer gathering: a powerful reminder that shared sorrow can become a foundation for solidarity rather than fracture – and that the strength to keep building a different future is found, above all, in community.
Search for Common Ground, ROPES, Rabbis for Human Rights, The Parents Circle, Tomorrow’s Women, This Is Not an Ulpan, Combatants for Peace, Itach Ma’aki, and countless more organisations have taken public stances against the violence, affirming their commitment to a path beyond military escalation.
The reach of this network extends beyond the region. When the escalation began, over 20 ALLMEP members were in Washington, DC, attending the J Street conference alongside ALLMEP colleagues – and, in an echo of last year’s Paris conference, now find themselves without a way home. Members have joined senior ALLMEP staff at political meetings on the Hill, discussing what a political future beyond conflict can look like. Rather than fall silent, they have continued their engagement, bringing the voices of Israelis and Palestinians who refuse to accept this trajectory directly to the international public.
Civil Society as the Living Microcosm of a Different Future
The breadth and speed of this response – across organisations and borders, across multiple communities, in Hebrew, Arabic, and English – is itself a statement. It speaks to what civil society embodies: a living infrastructure of solidarity that provides services and advocates for the most vulnerable through crisis, and consolidates a shared future when political leaders are leading toward division and war.
ALLMEP’s member organisations have been cultivating this model for decades. These communities are a living microcosm of what a different future could look like across the region – one rooted in dialogue, mutual understanding, shared safety, and shared prosperity. A future that is not naive about the scale of the injustices that must be addressed, but that refuses to accept the status quo as permanent.
Through previous wars and diplomatic paralysis, civil society has kept building across divides and against the odds. ALLMEP’s commitment remains to ensure that, even when military action and hardline geopolitics dominate the international conversation, grassroots peacebuilders who are advocating for and building a different reality are not forgotten – but amplified, supported, and placed at the centre of the conversation where they belong.
