Torn by war, Israelis and Palestinians tie their fortunes together

Salah Hussein, a Palestinian from Nablus, is excited about investors' interest in his venture that uses AI and cameras to detect and prevent greenhouse pests. Tovia Smith/NPR

Tovia Smith/NPR

"If we are not the ones looking for change, who will be? We are the right people at the right place, at the right time. We have to move on," he says. "I don't want my kids to be living in a world full of hatred."

Yana Shaulov is the Jewish Israeli on Hussein's team. A 37-year-old molecular biologist, she joined 50:50 hoping to launch an idea of her own, but ended up joining Hussain's team instead. Having grown up in a mixed neighborhood of Haifa, she says, she's used to coexistence.

"It's not always easy, you can feel the tension sometimes, but [Israelis and Palestinians] are both here to stay, and we have to live together at the end of the day," Shaulov says. She concedes that the small collaborations at 50:50 are just "a small start," but believes what they're doing will be "contagious."

"It's already worth it just to show other people that it's possible," she says.

The team also includes two others: a Palestinian from the West Bank and a Christian woman who is an Israeli citizen. Their company, Qanara Tech, is developing AI cameras to detect and prevent insects in greenhouses growing food. Other teams include one with a patent pending to build a better heart monitor, and another that uses egg shells and plant seeds as the filter in a water purification system.

Sometimes, even when the ideas are viable, the partnership is not. Hussein says he had a previous venture that fell apart shortly after Hamas's deadly attack on Israel on October 7th, 2023, and the war that ensued. The tension was just too much, both within the team and especially from hardliners back home. The scorn and backlash can be so intense, Hussain says, it's hard to keep it from getting in your own head.

"Sometimes even thinking about what I'm doing right now fills me with some negative [voices], like, 'Salah, you're a normalizer. Be careful!', he says. But then the "other voice" in his head chimes in, "Keep going, Keep moving! All these tiny effects can lead to change."

Israelis participating in the program, like 27-year old Aviv Meir, say they feel it, too.

"It's hard to put yourself in the enemy's shoes," she says with a sigh. "You need to have so much strength to feel safe, [and to believe that understanding their side will not demolish your side. It's sometimes making you crazy."

Meir has been involved in bridge-building initiatives since she was a teenager. But 50:50 is reaching new people, too.

The hard conversations

Salah Elsadi, a Palestinian who lived in Gaza for 15 years, says he wasn't even aware of the peace-building aspect of 50:50 when he applied to the program. He was interested in building his business, not bridges. But he has learned to lean in when he has to. For example, at a recent 50:50 event in Boston that was open to the public, a French Israeli woman, Sarah Blum, drew Elsadi into conversation. A short while in, she told him that about 10 years ago, a Palestinian man from Jerusalem attacked her with a knife.

"He wanted to kill me," she said.

Elsadi was visibly taken aback, but continued listening as Blum shared that some of the first people who called to check in on her were close friends who were Palestinian, and how important it is to continue dialogue even in the most difficult moments.

Then, in what seemed to be a bid to ease the moment, she asked Elsadi how his family in Gaza was doing. But it did little to diffuse the tension.

"Not good," he answered. "They're struggling to find water or food. My youngest brother has chronic disease and can't get medicine."

Blum said she could understand.

"I have close family friends who were in Kfar Aza on October 7th who are traumatized from the massacre, and some who lost loved ones [who were] taken hostage and killed in Gaza, and [did not have] access to medicine when they were in captivity," she said.

It's the kind of conversation that could have easily spiraled out, but Blum and Elsadi managed to take in each other's pain. The encounter ended with a hug, and both said afterward that it just reinforced their conviction that focus must shift from past grievances to future possibilities.

"We need to start a new thing, not just to remember the last things which remind us that 'Oh, I need to take revenge," Elsadi says. "We cannot continue war, war, war, war. How long do we want it to continue?"

Program leaders take pains to say that 50:50 is not a political organization. That's what allows it to create an environment where each side can see the other as people, not enemies.

In one stark example, a Palestinian man who grew up in a refugee camp near Hebron was sharing how he felt humiliated and harangued by IDF soldiers at checkpoints. Then he found out one of the Israelis he had come to know in the program was actually one of the soldiers stationed near his home. It was striking, he says, to hear that former Israeli soldier share how terrified he and others were of Palestinians.

"They feel [the Palestinians] will attack them, or maybe shoot them, so they always stand by, [with] nerves tense," the Palestinian man said. "At the end of the day [the soldier is] a human being. He's someone like me who just wants to get back home safe and have dinner with [his] family."

But that kind of talk doesn't go over well back home, this Palestinian man says, which is why he asked that his name not be used in this report.

"People say it's like betraying, especially in this situation, [where] everything is on fire," he said. "I don't want to be a target to [be] hurt or something."

Building trust organically

The 50:50 Startups program was co-founded by Israeli-American Amir Grinstein in 2019, and the program later partnered with Tel Aviv University and Northeastern University in Boston, where he's a marketing professor. The idea is that short of marriage, creating a business together may be the most profound way to bond two people together; it's a partnership based on equality, a shared goal and a mutual trust and reliance on each other's support.

"Its very intimate, it's very intense, it's up and down like a roller coaster, and it's long term," Grinstein says. "They have to try hard to work together. They'll fail together or they'll succeed together."

As a start-up itself, 50:50 has had to pivot and iterate through challenges Grinstein could never have imagined: COVID, October 7th, and several wars. Each has made it difficult or impossible for the entrepreneurs to travel to Boston for the capstone session at Northeastern. This year, because of the ongoing war in the region, more than half the entrepreneurs could only attend by Zoom.

Israeli and Palestinian entrepreneurs in the 50:50 Startups program attend a workshop at Harvard Business School about data analysis. Salah Hussein

Salah Hussein

"You are still under missiles with this war raging outside, and we hope you're doing well," Grinstein says at the start of a recent class. He then pivots to the day's lesson, which happens to be about negotiation and rebuilding trust when things become tense or adversarial, an especially apt lesson for these entrepreneurs.

But that's as close as 50:50 gets to any specific instruction on cross-the-divide collaboration. Unlike other coexistence programs, there are no dialog workshops or trust-building exercises. Grinstein says that just happens organically.

"The elephant is obviously in the room, so we're not ignoring it," Grinstein says. "But what I want is to see the Israelis and Palestinians develop friendships that transcend the business, and then naturally you will have coffee with your partners and you might be in a better position – after you build trust, after you work together — to have conversations that are tough and challenging."

Still a relatively small program, 50:50 has taken on some 320 participants since it began. But Grinstein says the relationships they forge have significant ripple effects on friends, and family, as well as on the Northeastern undergraduates who are part of his class, and work as interns for the start-ups.

Senior Alexa Garcia, says just watching the entrepreneurs working together, laughing and teasing each other, was a lightbulb moment for her.

"Sometimes it's so easy to forget that they're on such different sides of a conflict because they seem like such good friends, like the banter is crazy," she says. "A lot of times it's just completely out of my mind that they are on two different sides of conflict."

Garcia and two other students who stopped to talk after class say they each started the semester with a clear leaning toward either the Israelis or Palestinians. But that changed, they say, as they got to know the entrepreneurs personally and came to understand the hardships suffered by both sides, like when team meetings were delayed because a Palestinian was stuck at a checkpoint, or an Israeli had to run to a bomb shelter.

All three say their views have now shifted toward the middle.

"Both sides have been through so much, both have done right, both have done wrong," says Garcia. "The more I learn, there's no side for me."

A 'hippie heart' and a 'capitalist brain'

The 50:50 session in Boston ends with a Shark Tank-style chance for the teams to pitch their ventures to potential investors and hope an investor will bite, or at least offer some useful feedback.

For their part, investors grill the entrepreneurs about not only their ideas, but also their partnerships; they're investing in a team as much as a product. And while some see the collaborations as inherently risky, others see them as an asset – at least potentially.

Hagar Shmaia, from Israel, was one of about a dozen Israeli and Palestinian entrepreneurs who pitched their ideas to a room of investors, as part of the 50:50 Startups program. Shmaia has designed an online platform called "Besty" that allows women to find a wide range of support on-demand Tovia Smith/NPR

Tovia Smith/NPR

"I always say I have a hippie heart and a capitalist brain," says Brian Abrams, founder of B Ventures, one of the investors who listened to the pitches. "My hippie heart loves this kind of collaboration. My capitalist brain insists it makes business sense."

In a best-case scenario, Abrams says, the Israeli-Palestinian partnerships could create a "halo-effect" around a brand, helping a start-up to build momentum.

"The collaboration builds the brand, attracts other people, helps them get bigger, and at best that becomes a virtuous cycle," Abrams says.

Ultimately, the case could be made that startups run by these unlikely co-founders could actually be safer investments, says Tomer Cohen, Co-Founder and Director of Tech2Peace, a bridge-building program similar to 50:50 for younger participants.

"If the entrepreneurs have managed to come together in spite of the political reality, it actually says a lot about them as individuals, that they will be more resilient and can overcome most of the challenges that [entrepreneurs] face in early-stage ventures," he says.

So far, Grinsteen says, 50:50 ventures are beating the odds. It's still early for many, but of the roughly 55 start-ups, about a half are still in the game.