For more than two years, Israeli and Palestinian peacebuilders have been trying to do something that often feels impossible: build a path toward conflict resolution in the middle of a widening regional confrontation. This week, as violence again underscored the fragile and volatile reality on the ground, their work faced yet another test.

Time and again, their efforts have been interrupted by escalating hostilities that expose the mounting costs of diplomatic failure. Yet each time, their response has been the same: adapt, persist, and redouble their efforts.

These disruptions tell a story of resilience, but they also reveal a troubling reality. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which represents the molten core of this ongoing regional instability, is increasingly being overshadowed by broader geopolitical escalation. If Europe and its partners want lasting security in the Middle East, peacebuilding and the people doing it must finally be placed at the centre of diplomacy.

In April 2024, the Alliance for Middle East Peace (ALLMEP) convened Israeli and Palestinian leaders of civil society at the European Parliament to brief European policymakers directly. Iranian missile strikes forced participants to join remotely. But they insisted on taking part.

The pattern repeated in June 2025, when over 350 Israeli and Palestinian peacebuilders gathered in Paris to launch the Paris Call for Israeli-Palestinian Peace, an effort to mobilise civil society around practical proposals for a negotiated two-state solution.

The meeting coincided with the outbreak of a twelve-day war between Israel and Iran. Flights were cancelled, leaving participants to find creative routes home to support their families and organisations. But others who could not make their way home turned disruption into an opportunity. More than 100 Israeli and Palestinian peacebuilders remained in Paris, working together to develop policy ideas, campaigns and initiatives aimed at advancing diplomacy.

In the midst of regional escalation, they chose to deepen cooperation rather than abandon it. The results were comprehensive policy recommendations that fed into the French-Saudi New York Declaration, endorsed by 142 members of the United Nations General Assembly.

Once again, an effort in partnership with the UK government to convene Israeli and Palestinian civil society leaders in London over the coming days was interrupted as hostilities intensified in Iran, and later Lebanon. Violence exercised its familiar veto, tipping the region into turmoil and postponing the work of peacebuilders and diplomats, who were gathering to make progress on the establishment of an International Fund for Israeli-Palestinian Peace.

For those working in this field, such disruptions are routine. Yet for all the resilience of peacebuilders, peace efforts cannot succeed if they are continually sidelined by wider geopolitical escalation, which is itself the result of our collective failure to address the core problem.

Across Israel and Palestine, civil society continues its work despite immense challenges. Joint initiatives protect vulnerable communities in the West Bank from settler violence; campaigns are organised to rebuild public support for diplomacy and a two-state solution; food and medicine are delivered to civilians in Gaza amid a devastating humanitarian crisis.

But although Israelis and Palestinians find themselves under the same missiles fired from Iran, their lived realities remain profoundly unequal. Many Israelis have access to shelters and warning systems; Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza do not. At the same time, the underlying conflict between Israelis and Palestinians is being subsumed into a broader geopolitical contest.

Instead of addressing the core issue, external powers often treat the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a tool in broader geopolitical struggles, turning Palestinians and Israelis into instruments of outside actors rather than agents shaping their own future. If the international community truly wants stability in the wider Middle East, it must address the conflict as its overriding regional priority and empower those working every day to resolve it. That means investing in a transformed approach to diplomacy that integrates the civil society leaders who can help shape and sustain it.

World Bank research estimates that every dollar spent on peacebuilding can save 16 dollars later spent on crisis response or military measures. Yet global priorities are now moving in the opposite direction. While aircraft carriers and fighter jets deploy across the region and billions are spent every day on military operations, funding for development assistance and peacebuilding is shrinking dramatically – a dynamic that the Berghof Foundation’s Chris Coulter has described as “defunding peace and calling it security”.

Europe has the opportunity to take a different approach. By supporting Israeli-Palestinian peacebuilding, by strengthening multilateral diplomacy that includes Arab states and regional actors, and by ensuring civil society voices shape policy, governments can help build the foundations for a sustainable resolution.

Israeli and Palestinian peacebuilders have persistently demonstrated that even when war grounds planes, closes borders and shifts the world’s attention, it does not affect their commitment.

They now need a world willing to invest in peace with the same urgency it invests in war. And diplomacy that places those experiencing the conflict first-hand at the heart of efforts to resolve it.