I have spent the last four decades in the reality of conflict. As a child, as a mother and as a professional. And I'm not the exception. 1 in 4 people today are living the reality of conflict. We are living in an era where war and violence are becoming the reflex -- the choice -- not the last resort. What we've been witnessing with Iran is just the most visible example, because it’s been sending shockwaves well beyond its borders: in energy prices, in trade routes disruption and in political polarization. And sadly, even when wars end and when agreements are signed, violence often returns within five years. Over the course of my international career with the United Nations, I noticed something that should not be controversial, but still is. We have overly bureaucratized peace. We've built an entire industry around it, with the familiar Western liberal model and a familiar toolbox: bring in the peacebuilders and mediators, launch dialogues, push for elections, train the police, launch stabilization programs, add grassroots, women, maybe sprinkle some youth so you can tick an inclusion box, write reports and repeat. And don’t get me wrong, this work is important. But too often we mistake process for progress. And too often, we do not build enough political legitimacy, enough aligned self-interest, enough public backing to make peace hold. We have seen the limitations of this. In the Middle East, tens of millions of people are living the unfinished business of wars, of failed political settlements, of occupation. Or take Afghanistan: 20 years of vast intervention and investment, and the story ended exactly where it began -- Taliban to Taliban. So why does peace break down when we do everything we think we're supposed to do? The answer I kept coming back to was not ideology -- it was power, politics and incentives. And for the broader public, it was legitimacy and trust. And legitimacy is a felt experience -- in good governance, whether you trust your police force, whether your children can walk to school safely, whether your dignity is preserved. Without these, a peace agreement becomes a lid on a boiling pot. It looks calm until the pressure finds the weakest point -- then it erupts.

So I got fed up. With the bureaucracy, with the system, with its toolbox. And I founded Principles for Peace Foundation to help those in the hot seat, to help peacemakers build more legitimate and durable peace. We drew on lessons from dozens of countries to understand what lies beneath the success and failure of peace processes, and developed 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 the perfect grassroots project. You bring in a few young Israelis and Palestinians. You put them somewhere nice -- maybe in a retreat location in Europe. You encourage them to pour their 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. And a few months later, the Second Intifada started and those we were sharing with were back in uniforms, fighting in our own towns. I lost friends. My house was destroyed, and I lost hope. And for nearly two decades, I dedicated my career to working with people affected by conflict, but I avoided working on my own. It was just too painful. Then October 7 happened, and the war in Gaza expanded. And I realized, if I truly believe in my work, I have to bring in Israelis and Palestinians to the hardest room in my life.

So that's what I did. Come into that room with me. It’s weeks after October 7: The war is raging. Loss and trauma are overwhelming. The door closes and 76 people sit down, carrying decades of grievances and recent loss. No one trusts anyone. Not the room, not the process, not each other, not me. They're Israeli and Palestinian leaders, but they're not the usual suspects. They're security leaders, business leaders, investors, political figures, journalists [and] serious operators. And outside that room, the public narrative is collapsing so fast -- it's so hard, it's so polarized. In a room like that, if you start with the word peace, you get laughed out of the building. So I named the tension plainly because anything softer would be dishonest. "We are here out of urgency and responsibility for our own people. Because the status quo neither delivered security to the Israelis, nor dignity nor an end to the occupation for the Palestinians. And we are at an inflection point. We either break this cycle or condemn both our people to a perpetual state of loss, of trauma, of insecurity of occupation." We agreed not to dwell on our national and historical narrative -- there is no common ground to be found in the past. Instead, we focused on what you cannot afford to lose: security, dignity, the future you want for your children. Because, you see, common ground does not begin with moral agreement -- it begins with self-interest. Everything else comes later. So let me tell you what we've done differently, because this is where the old peacemaking toolbox often misfires. We did not organize this around the grassroots, but the grasstops. Not the convinced, but the persuadable -- people with influence on power, on politics, on the economy. People who know that the status quo is not sustainable, but they can do something about it. And I introduced a sequence that almost looks too simple until you watch it work. Self-interest, transaction, recognition and then humanity. I called it STIR. And I called it STIR on purpose, because if you do not stir the room, you get positions sitting next to each other forever. You can certainly put the chickpeas next to the tahini, next to the lemon juice, and not get that hummus. Self-Interest. The status quo is not sustainable because it neither delivers security to the Israelis nor an end to the occupation of the Palestinians. Then you seek that common ground -- that transaction -- a political solution within a regional framework. For Palestinians, that means an end to the occupation and a non-militarized Palestinian state, side by side with Israel. For Israelis, that means security and a pathway to regional integration, rather than isolation. Once you find that common ground, you can build something that is principled and pragmatic. You can build a platform for dialogue and for action. That became Uniting for a Shared Future Coalition. That's our coalition. And it grew and it held and it expanded. And today it brings more than 550 Israeli and Palestinian leaders -- realists and possibilists. What's very special about this coalition is that we work together -- even in the midst of the war -- to push for a political solution. In the months that followed, we started to advocate together, from heads of state to briefing the UN Security Council with a joint message. And I saw Israelis and Palestinians who did not see eye-to-eye begin to speak about the future in the same grammar. And trust began to grow in our coalition, in our process and in each other. I watched Palestinians and Israelis recognize each other's losses. They no longer dehumanized the other. They no longer relativized pain. That's what STIR made possible.

But let me be clear. The reality continues to be brutal. Both people are trapped in deep insecurity. And Israelis and Palestinians feel existentially threatened. And my people, Palestinians, continue to live the reality of occupation, settler violence, devastation in Gaza and the threat of annexation in the West Bank. And the whole Middle East is at a crossroads. It either stays locked in a perpetual state of confrontation and different wars -- same wars, I dare say, with different names -- or it moves into a new logic of new political security and cooperation framework. And stops exporting this whole instability to the rest, to all of us, to the rest of us and all of us. But I would argue that that can only happen if we resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, because it's the key fault line that continues to fuel radicalization. So my lesson is this: in a transactional world, the antidote to "might is right" is not idealism. It is not moralizing. It is principled pragmatism. It is launching coalitions of the willing around enlightened self-interest that can advance peace and security. If you want humanity, you have to earn it. But start with self-interest -- self-interest, transaction, recognition and then the return of humanity. Wherever conflict rules, STIR that room until humanity rises.