In Boston and online this year, a smaller-than-usual cohort of Israeli and Palestinian founders gathered for the capstone of 50:50 Startups, an accelerator that pairs mixed teams to build companies together. The six-month program blends business training, mentoring and investor pitch opportunities with the unstated ambition that shared work can create durable human connections across a long-standing conflict.
One compelling example is Salah Hussein, a 33-year-old entrepreneur from Nablus. At 11, Hussein was traumatized when Israeli soldiers entered his family home; for years he says seeing soldiers triggered fear. Decades later he has chosen to co-found a company with partners who include a Jewish Israeli, another Palestinian from the West Bank and a Christian Israeli citizen. Their venture, Qanara Tech, is developing AI-enabled cameras to detect and prevent pests in greenhouse agriculture.
“I don’t want my kids to be living in a world full of hatred,” Hussein says. Beyond the practical needs for capital and market access, he sees the partnership as a way to model a different future. Still, the work is not free of consequence: Hussein says a previous venture collapsed after the October 7, 2023 attacks and the ensuing war, amid intense backlash and pressure from hardliners who view cross-community cooperation as betrayal. He describes an internal tug-of-war between fear of being labeled a “normalizer” and the conviction that small acts can add up to change.
His co-founder, Yana Shaulov, a 37-year-old molecular biologist raised in a mixed Haifa neighborhood, says she joined the team after initially applying to launch her own idea. She acknowledges the tension but emphasizes coexistence as a pragmatic reality: “We’re both here to stay, and we have to live together at the end of the day.” For Shaulov and others, small collaborations are a start that can be “contagious.”
Not every partnership survives the pressure. Some teams dissolved after the war’s escalation, and more than half of this year’s entrepreneurs could only participate remotely. The program’s founder, Israeli-American marketing professor Amir Grinstein, says 50:50 has had to pivot repeatedly—from its 2019 launch through COVID and multiple wars—but persists because the business-first model creates durable incentives to work together.
50:50 intentionally avoids formal peacebuilding sessions. There are no structured dialogue workshops; instead organizers rely on the intensity of co-founding—a relationship based on shared goals, interdependence and mutual accountability—to generate trust. “They have to try hard to work together. They’ll fail together or they’ll succeed together,” Grinstein says. He wants friendships that extend beyond the venture, opening space for difficult conversations once trust exists.
Those conversations can be raw. At a public event in Boston, a French Israeli woman, Sarah Blum, told Salah Elsadi, a Palestinian who spent 15 years in Gaza, about being attacked a decade earlier. She described how Palestinian friends reached out to support her afterward. Elsadi, who was worried about family in Gaza with limited access to food, water and medicine, answered bluntly. The exchange could have exploded, but it ended with a hug and a shared sense that focusing on the future is critical. “We cannot continue war, war, war, war,” Elsadi said.
Program leaders stress their nonpolitical stance as a strength: it allows participants to see one another primarily as people and business partners. That realization can be striking. One Palestinian participant learned a former Israeli soldier he’d come to know had once been stationed near the Palestinian’s hometown; hearing the soldier describe his own fears at checkpoints made the soldier’s humanity real in a new way.
The 50:50 program has partnered with Tel Aviv University and Northeastern University. Northeastern undergraduates work as interns for the startups and often report shifted perspectives. Senior Alexa Garcia said watching entrepreneurs from both sides laugh, disagree and collaborate transformed her view of the conflict; students who initially leaned toward one side found their sympathies moving toward the middle as they learned about hardships on both sides—delayed meetings because someone was at a checkpoint, or an Israeli partner who had to run to a bomb shelter.
The accelerator ends with a Shark Tank–style pitch event where teams present to investors who evaluate both the product and the partnership. Some investors see cross-community teams as risky; others consider the collaboration an asset. Brian Abrams of B Ventures calls himself a “hippie heart and a capitalist brain”—his heart likes the mission, and his business instincts see potential. He suggests that a company born from such a partnership can create a halo effect, boosting brand momentum. Tomer Cohen, co-founder of Tech2Peace, argues these founders may be more resilient: if they can bridge deep political divides, they may be better equipped to navigate the inevitable stresses of early-stage startups.
Since its founding, 50:50 has worked with roughly 320 participants and helped launch about 55 teams. Grinstein reports that roughly half of those startups remain active—better than typical early-stage survival rates—though many are still nascent.
For the entrepreneurs involved, the payoff is both economic and personal. They seek investment and market traction, but many also speak of the difficult, unusual work of building trust with people they once regarded as strangers—or enemies. In the shadow of conflict and amid occasional threats and social backlash, participants like Hussein, Shaulov and others keep pushing, believing that building businesses together can also build the kinds of human ties that ripple outward through families, students and communities.