SHIFTing environmental peacebuilding
This month’s spotlight shines a light on ECCP members thinking about the environment, climate, conflict, and peace in Palestine and Israel. Their thinking has led them, with partners, to develop the SHIFT Framework: an ambitious and actionable long-term roadmap, jointly written by young Palestinians and Israelis in the wake of October 7, 2023, to clear the socio-political barriers to a just and lasting peace. It isn’t a plan that prescribes a detailed final-status resolution. Instead, it lays out a path for creating the conditions that would allow negotiations to succeed and any agreement to hold.
This interview with Anna, Rawan, Gali, Husam, and Tarek explores the paths that led them to SHIFT and how SHIFT engages environmental peacebuilding for lasting change.
1. What makes the SHIFT Framework different from the many peace plans already out there?
Anna: Like my Palestinian and Israeli partners at SHIFT Futures, I came of age in the Oslo era, a Russian immigrant to Israel. Over the decades that followed, I saw a dozen peace processes and plans come and go. They are announced with great fanfare, they stall, and they disappear. None differed much from the next in terms of scope and scale. We decided to write our own plan because our leaders failed us. They failed to protect our collective future. What they had written and negotiated was not enough to ensure a sustained peace. It needed to be updated and made more comprehensive. And so we set out to address the systemic barriers to a negotiated peace. Advancing from the premise that our destinies are inextricably intertwined, we framed deadlock issues as areas of opportunity, and the crisis of the post-Oct 7 world, as an invitation to be visionary and bold.
We did not seek to replace other plans, rather to complement them with a call for holistic reconstruction, transitional justice, preparing the public for peace, consolidating responsive governance, centering trauma-informed healing, and robust international engagement. We are not experts in these fields, but we did our homework, referencing research, other plans, and case studies throughout the pages of our Framework. So while other plans are negotiated around the final status issues by political elites, we were 5 Palestinians from Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza, and 5 Jewish Israelis - all under 35 years old - who thought out of the box and reached consensus on new ideas and new approaches.
2. Give us a sense of who you are as the people behind the words. What life paths led you to collaborating with Israelis/Palestinians just months after October 7, 2023?
Gali: Well, first, we are all alumni of New Story Leadership, a program that brings young Palestinians and Israelis to Capitol Hill to work in congressional offices and share our story in the Beltway. But long before that, what led me to cross-border collaboration was a genuine belief that this is the only way to protect my loved ones and create a better life for my future children. This belief started forming years before the events of October 7th, but it was fully solidified during the war.
I come from a very typical Jewish Israeli family. Both my parents served in the army, and my sister served in a combat unit. Though growing up in Jerusalem, I first learned about the occupation during my own army service, and the first time I met a Palestinian was in my twenties, at the Arava Institute, where I studied Environmental Studies.
It was the personal relationships I formed there with Palestinians that taught me about the reality in Gaza and the West Bank, and ultimately led me to choose journalism and education as my main fields.
On October 7th, I was supposed to join my friends at the Nova festival. As fate would have it, I ended up not going. My friends were killed.I realized then that the only way to truly protect my loved ones in the future is to work toward a reality in which everyone has equal human rights.
Rawan: My life began in a small West Bank village of Huwara. You may recognize the name from the news headlines of settler programs, attacking neighbors and setting our buildings ablaze. But unlike your typical village girl, my parents brought me and my siblings to New York in search of an income. I grew up in Flatbush poverty with a New York tongue and public school education. Then Sept 11 struck. My mother’s headscarf was torn off. I pretended to be Latina. My parents became more conservative and took us back to the village.
You could take me out of New York, but not New York out of me. In Huwara, I negotiated with soldiers. I defied the elders who said girls shouldn’t ride bikes. After university, I lived alone and made good money working at a call center. Unlike the other teens, I had no intention to get married off and spend the rest of my life taking care of a family. I ventured into Israel where I was first exposed to Israeli society in all of its colors. I then got a fellowship to study at King’s College and was eventually accepted to the New Story Leadership summer program. Anna and I ended up co-directing the organization and it was our ability to influence policy makers and policy together that affirmed for me the power of allyship.
3. The SHIFT Framework is a long document. Which parts would you highlight as most groundbreaking or impactful?
Husam: I am from Gaza. I lived through 8 wars, but managed to get out of Gaza for graduate school in Belgium before October 7, 2023. My other 9 family members did not. Our four homes were destroyed and on October 31, my niece left her home to buy a pack of gummy bears, but never returned - her life taken by a bomb manufactured in Pennsylvania. Bearing the tremendous guilt of having my family there, it was the section on Gaza reconstruction that I see as the most powerful. We envision Gaza rising from the ashes and the rubble, like the mythical Phoenix whose statue once adorned a plaza in Gaza City. Not just through basic infrastructure, elaborate luxury developments, and manufacturing centers, but through robust mental health and educational systems, localization of development and governance efforts, and economic growth driven by market leadership in such special fields as recycled concrete and prosthetic limbs. We see a role in Israel contributing to Gaza’s reconstruction and stability, not just as a matter of responsibility, but as a guarantor of both Gaza and Israel’s own security.
4. You have presented the Framework to State Dept officials, MPs, think tanks, congregations, EU diplomats, international peace summits, UN side events, university students, and even one prime minister. Which engagement stands out to you the most, and why?
Rawan: In the summer of 2025, I was part of a delegation of 6 Israelis and Palestinians to advocate for the Framework in Washington, DC. Besides the dozens of congressional visits packed into that week, I also remember presenting to an audience of foreign policy experts at the Middle East Institute. I imagine some of them had spent more time studying, reading, and writing about the Middle East than I have been alive, so understandably, I was a bit nervous. But we were prepared. Each of us shared a bit of our story. Driving as a paramedic in the south of Israel on October 7. Going from invisible to silenced as a Palestinian Citizen of Israel. And for me, being taught from a young age to lower my head when I meet a solider, but to run as fast as I can when I meet a settler. Each of us then summarized a different area of opportunity, highlighting a selection of our favorite innovations with it. As someone who now works in tech, I loved to share the role that digital technology can have in promoting accountability, participatory democracy, and even reconciliation at scale. When we ended and opened the floor to questions, there was a brief silence. Then one of the oldest faces in the room told us he had never felt this hopeful and inspired in 30 years of Middle East policies. Other voices similarly chimed in.
It was not just our ideas, but our vision and perhaps a bit of our audacity not to be defined or confined by the generations before us.
5. How does the Framework connect environment, climate, conflict and peace, and how does this translate to other contexts?
Tarek: In our Framework, we write, “Addressing environmental challenges in post-war Gaza involves a comprehensive approach that takes into account soil and air hazards, unexploded ammunition collection, and long-term consequences for both the environment and human health. The people of Gaza would not be the sole beneficiaries of the environmental reconstruction. As nature knows no border, and political lines do not bind water or other natural resources, ecological pollution impacts all humans living in the area. Palestinians and Israelis alike suffer from sewage waste flooding the coastline, as well as groundwater and air pollution. Addressing these issues will benefit both peoples and contribute to regional stability and economic opportunity. Therefore, an expansive framework should be envisioned. Environmental reconstruction efforts must involve transboundary cooperation between governments and civil society to ensure the reconstruction of the entire ecosystem.”
For us, sustainability, self-sufficiency, resilience, and circularity all fit together. Gazans, as a people under war and occupation, will benefit tremendously from local control of renewable and reusable resources such as solar-powered desalination plants and power generation. This is an area where Israel can contribute technological know-how as part of its own role in reconstruction. Building from scratch, we suggest leap-frogging, rather than investing in old-fashioned, environmentally harmful technologies. As former CEO of Geopolymer International, one clear opportunity to me was the use of low-carbon alternative cements such as geopolymers, which can incorporate millions of tons of concrete rubble and demolition waste in manufacturing an alternative that is stronger, longer lasting, and more fire resistant at 20% of the carbon emissions of ordinary Portland cement.
6. So what is your ask to readers? What is one action you suggest?
Anna: We ask you to review the Framework, or its executive summary, which can be found at https://www.shift-futures.com/, and pass it on to anyone who may be interested. On our website, you will also find new companion resources, lessons on women, gender, peace, and security, from this summer’s delegation to the island of Ireland. Rawan, four other Palestinian and Israeli SHIFT women, and I met with leaders of the Northern Ireland Women’s Coalition, among other prominent figures in the Good Friday Agreement that ended three decades of “the Troubles.” We invite and challenge anyone with the relevant authority and capacity to implement any of our specific recommendations. And more generally, we hope these documents will move policy makers and the public to be more innovative and visionary, to center the next generation, and to meaningfully include women in all aspects of peacebuilding. Of course, our speaking engagements tend to inspire more than the fine print, so consider inviting us to talk with your group or community by reaching out to info@shift-futures.com.
