On June 12, the French Government convened a gathering of Israeli and Palestinian civil society peacebuilders for the second time. The first such conference was held in Paris on June 13, 2025, with the purpose of enabling civil society to provide input to the New York Declaration on the settlement of the Palestine question and to boost the demand for recognition of the State of Palestine. The second conference, held one year later, was convened with a similar objective: to provide a platform for civil society to convey a call to the G7 leaders gathering in Evian on what areas require urgent action and what steps should be taken.

On the eve of the event, Samir Sinjilawi, a Palestinian political activist who has spent many years advocating at home and abroad for a peaceful resolution of the conflict and was himself a featured personality at last year’s Paris conference, published an op-ed in the Jerusalem Post sharply criticizing what he called a “closed and professionalized ‘peace industry’.” He asserted that the same governments fund the same people to hold the same dialogues in order to perpetuate the cycle of awarding grants to keep alive “the illusion of investment in peacebuilding.” In fact, were it not for European funding of encounters abroad, Israeli and Palestinian peace activists would never find themselves in the same room.

To his scathing criticism of civil society engagement, he added a lack of transparency, arguing that meetings........

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