Hiba Qasas

Thank you.

Thanks for having me.

How are you feeling after getting off the stage?

It was a great feeling.

It's my first time at TED and just the energy in the room, the connection you feel with everyone who's there because people are coming to hear the message.

They want to engage with it.

And just all the interactions right after the talk, it was really phenomenal.

It was a hard one because, you know, I've dedicated my career to working on conflict.

And I have been in the field of peace building and conflict prevention and development for almost 22 years, working with the UN in many conflict countries.

And my last assignment was in Iraq.

And it was a time of the ISIS operations and the stabilization effort.

And it was a very tough time.

And I saw the limitations of the whole peacemaking toolbox and how we do the same thing again and again and again and expect different results, which is the definition of insanity.

It was really partly why I wanted to establish Principles for Peace and I wanted to rethink and reshape peacemaking and support peacemakers to adopt a much more nuanced approach to peace and more focused on legitimacy and inclusion and effectiveness and principled pragmatism.

But I really did not want to touch the Israeli-Palestinian conflict because I think we all in that part of the world, and I always say Israelis and Palestinians, we have so much intergenerational trauma.

It's almost imprinted in our DNA that we react to it in different ways.

And for me, I just didn't want to touch my conflict.

Yeah, it was just avoidance.

Yeah, it was that.

And it was just too painful.