Palestinian Civic Movement and Civil Society Position on So-called “People-to-People” and "Peacebuilding" Initiatives
June 2026
We, the undersigned Palestinian organizations, assert that we do not and will not engage, promote or participate in any project, initiative or activity bringing together Israeli and Palestinian civil society and private sector actors, under the misleading frameworks of “people-to-people” or “peacebuilding” that only normalize the oppression of our people.
We also assert that anyone organizing, supporting or contributing does not in any way represent us and cannot be labelled as a representative part of “civil society”.
Palestinian civil society has consistently witnessed the harmful consequences of ineffective, exclusionary, and performative international political approaches.
The latest iteration of the so-called Two State Solution conference, hosted in Paris on 13 June 2026 under the name “Paris Call”, reproduces a harmful political approach which has the effect of erasing Palestinian agency. Similarly, any conference organized in Palestine or outside Palestine with organizations such as “ALLMEP”, the “Principles 4 Peace” or “Palestinian Peace Coalition” and all their members, is similarly contributing to such harm.
By framing our reality as one of a protracted conflict between two peoples that can be solved through mutual understanding and dialogue, these initiatives deliberately whitewash the Israel’s crimes underpinning its settler colonial apartheid regime, unlawful occupation, and genocide. Tokenizing and symbolically bringing Palestinian voices or international law into their discourse does not hide the dangerous reality of their political agenda.
At a time when our people in Gaza are facing an ongoing Israeli genocide in which over 73,000 have been killed, and 173,000 Palestinians have been injured, including over 1,000 killed since the so-called ‘ceasefire’ of October 2025, we are dismayed to see such initiatives being promoted by so-called allies and those who pretend to be supporting Palestinian rights.
Our resistance in all its forms to occupation, apartheid and colonisation is being increasingly sanctioned, criminalized, undermined and delegitimized, despite being rooted in international law. Instead of public platforms and international support, actual civil society organizations and their leaders are marginalized, smeared or imprisoned. For decades, Palestinians have explained how so-called dialogue with Israeli individuals or organizations that does not challenge the settler colonial reality or recognise Palestinian fundamental rights - including the inalienable right of self-determination and return of refugees- only serves to perpetuate injustice and oppression.
In June 2025, Palestinian civil society groups, representing a diverse range of the 15 million Palestinians in Palestine and in exile, warned that the NYC Conference must be re-centred on UN General Assembly Resolution ES-10/24 and the July 2024 Palestine Advisory Opinion of the International Court of Justice. The imperative of enforcing international law is a prerequisite to the achievement of Palestinian self-determination, without which, progress on all matters, economic or humanitarian, will remain illusory.
The ICJ Advisory Opinion clearly obligates all states not to aid or assist in the maintenance of Israel’s illegal presence in Palestine and to work together to bring the unlawful presence to an end. Nonetheless, the very bodies and institutions responsible for enforcing international law are instead utilising their powers to normalise the colonial occupation of Palestine. The phenomenon is clearly visible in how UN Security Council Resolution 2803 endorsed the so-called ‘Board of Peace’ and imposed it on the Palestinian people without their consent, constituting a blatant violation of the inalienable right of the Palestinian people to self-determination.
International actors should be supporting Palestinian civil society in their efforts to mobilize and challenge the violence they face and put an end to systematic violence. Rather than promoting a defunct framework allowing Israeli crimes and preventing Palestinian self-determination, Third States and international organisations should be promoting the strengthening of international mechanisms to hold the Israeli regime accountable, and meet their own legal obligations by not assisting ongoing Israeli violations, and by ceasing their own state, corporate and institutional complicity in the denial of our fundamental rights.
International donors, countries that provide aid to the Palestinian people should adopt a coherent framework for their interventions which centres Palestinian rights and agency whether in the humanitarian, socio-economic or diplomatic arenas, without trying to engineer our democratic movement or pick and choose who represents Palestinians. Only by addressing such power asymmetries will we build a future of freedom, justice and dignity.
