NPR · 6 hours ago

Torn by war, Israelis and Palestinians Tie Their Fortunes Together

Salah Hussein was once so traumatized by a childhood encounter with Israeli soldiers that any uniform terrified him, yet today the Palestinian entrepreneur has deliberately bound his future to an Israeli Jewish co-founder. Through 50:50 Startups, mixed teams of Palestinians and Israelis spend six months building businesses together-partnerships as intimate and demanding as marriage, requiring what one participant calls "so much strength to feel safe, and to understand that understanding their side will not demolish your side." The conversations are often wrenching: a French Israeli woman who survived a stabbing by a Palestinian tells a Gaza-born entrepreneur about her trauma, then asks about his family, only to hear they're struggling to find water and medicine. Yet these unlikely partnerships are yielding something unexpected-not just startups that beat industry failure rates, but a quiet insistence that shared futures matter more than inherited grievances, even when both sides face fury from home for daring to collaborate. As one Palestinian reflects after meeting an Israeli soldier he'd come to know through the program, "At the end of the day he's a human being... someone like me who just wants to get back home safe and have dinner with [his] family."