It’s not easy to accept the other side. We know very well that this is a long, long process.
Abeer Bandak does not approach dialogue as someone untouched by the conflict.
A Palestinian from East Jerusalem, Abeer has spoken about growing up believing that Israelis were her enemies. In Jerusalem, Palestinians and Israelis may live only streets apart, yet inhabit profoundly different political and social realities. They see one another, but often through the conflict: through soldiers, checkpoints, news reports, fear, and inherited narratives.
Abeer’s own journey led her into the difficult space between those separate worlds. After spending a decade working with the United Nations, she became increasingly involved in dialogue facilitation in Israel, Palestine, and Europe. Her work did not ask her to become less Palestinian or to soften the demand for Palestinian rights. It asked whether people could speak from their own reality while learning to hear the reality of someone they had been taught to fear.
In 2018, Abeer co-founded Tech2Peace with Uri Rosenberg and Tomer Cohen. They wanted to reach young Palestinians and Israelis who might not enter a traditional peace program, but who were drawn to technology, entrepreneurship, and professional opportunity. The result was a model that placed difficult dialogue beside practical cooperation.
At Tech2Peace seminars, participants learn technical and entrepreneurial skills, but they also discuss history, identity, occupation, security, inequality, and competing national narratives. They may disagree deeply. The purpose is not to manufacture consensus or pretend that the power and circumstances of Palestinians and Israelis are the same. It is to replace distance and abstraction with sustained human contact—and to give young people experience working together on something concrete.
Abeer understands that this kind of change is slow. People who have spent their lives separated by fear, violence, and unequal realities do not build trust in a single conversation. But learning together can create relationships that survive beyond a seminar: as colleagues, collaborators, community leaders, and people who can no longer think of the other side only as a faceless enemy.
B8 of Hope has supported Tech2Peace since it joined our grantee network in 2019. In the difficult weeks following October 7, Abeer and fellow co-founder Uri Rosenberg also led a dialogue for the B8 of Hope NextGen community, creating room for participants to voice fear, grief, anger, and questions without being reduced to opposing camps.
Abeer’s work is grounded in a modest but consequential idea: living near one another is not the same as knowing one another. Connection must be created—and then sustained through the moments when it is hardest to remain in the room.