Hiba Qasas

We drew on lessons from dozens of countries to understand what lies beneath the success and failure of peace processes and develop principles and tools and methodologies and data and simulations and AI support and political dialogue infrastructures to help those who are trying to make peace hold.

Because this is the challenge of our time.

How do you build peace, how do you cultivate legitimacy in a world where might is right again, where power politics is back and transactionalism is in fashion?

My answer is not by countering power with idealism, but with principled pragmatism, because principled pragmatism is self-interest with a spine.

I recently became a proud Swiss,

but I was born and raised a proud Palestinian.

So people often expect me to start with victimhood, to start with moral argument, to start with pain.

My pain, their pain, everybody's pain.

But I learned something early that I wish was not true.

When identities are shaped by loss, by violence, by victimhood, othering becomes normal.

Dehumanizing the other side becomes reflex.

Groupthink becomes shelter.

And violence becomes currency.

Empathy for the other side is rarely the entry point.

When I was 19, I was invited to the kind of dialogue program the world loves to celebrate.

It's a perfect grassroots project.

You bring in a few young Israeli and Palestinians, you put them somewhere nice, maybe in a retreat location in Europe, you encourage us to pour our hearts out, you encourage sharing, you encourage empathy, you encourage hugs, and you bring out that hummus.

And I hated it.

Not because I do not believe in empathy, and by the way, I love hummus.

But because when I went home, the reality stayed hard, complicated, unsafe, and I couldn't do anything about it.