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Torn by war, Israelis and Palestinians tie their fortunes together

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Torn by war, Israelis and Palestinians tie their fortunes together

This year’s cohort of Israeli and Palestinian entrepreneurs taking part in 50:50 Startups is smaller than usual, because the war prevented many from travelling. 50:50 co-founder Amir Grinsteen (third from right) founded the program seven years ago, believing that building businesses together would also build lasting bridges, that could advance the cause of peace.

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Dena Yadin

BOSTON – Salah Hussein was 11 years old when he was woken up in the middle of the night by Israeli soldiers in his family home in Nablus in the West Bank. It left him traumatized and terrified for years.

It was “triggering” to see any Israeli in uniform, he says. “For me, all of them were a threat.”

But decades later, Hussein, now a 33-year-old entrepreneur, has willingly and purposefully tied his fortune to his co-founder, who is an Israeli Jew.

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Hussein is one of about 35 entrepreneurs taking part in a start-up accelerator program called 50:50 Startups, where mixed teams of Palestinians, Israeli Arabs and Israeli Jews spend six months in a kind of business bootcamp, going to workshops, lectures and connecting with mentors. The program culminates with a session in Boston, where the entrepreneurs pitch their ideas to potential investors.

The cross-the-divide collaboration brings an extra layer of challenge to what is already a heavy lift. By most estimates, about 90% of startups fail. But Hussein is fiercely determined, not only because of pragmatic considerations, like the need for resources and access to capital for his business, but also the more lofty ideals.

Salah Hussein, a Palestinian from Nablus, is excited about investors’ interest in his venture that uses AI and cameras to detect and prevent greenhouse pests. Through the 50:50 Startups program, he has teamed up with another Palestinian from the West Bank, a Jewish Israeli woman, and a Christian Palestinian who is a citizen of Israel.

Salah Hussein, a Palestinian from Nablus, is excited about investors’ interest in his venture that uses AI and cameras to detect and prevent greenhouse pests.

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“If we are not the ones looking for change, who will be? We are the right people at the right place, at the right time. We have to move on,” he says. “I don’t want my kids to be living in a world full of hatred.”

Yana Shaulov is the Jewish Israeli on Hussein’s team. A 37-year-old molecular biologist, she joined 50:50 hoping to launch an idea of her own, but ended up joining Hussain’s team instead. Having grown up in a mixed neighborhood of Haifa, she says, she’s used to coexistence. 

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“It’s not always easy, you can feel the tension sometimes, but [Israelis and Palestinians] are both here to stay, and we have to live together at the end of the day,” Shaulov says. She concedes that the small collaborations at 50:50 are just “a small start,” but believes what they’re doing will be “contagious.” 

“It’s already worth it just to show other people that it’s possible,” she says.

The team also includes two others: a Palestinian from the West Bank and a Christian woman who is an Israeli citizen. Their company, Qanara Tech, is developing AI cameras to detect and prevent insects in greenhouses growing food. Other teams include one with a patent pending to build a better heart monitor, and another that uses egg shells and plant seeds as the filter in a water purification system.

Sometimes, even when the ideas are viable, the partnership is not. Hussein says he had a previous venture that fell apart shortly after Hamas’s deadly attack on Israel on October 7th, 2023, and the war that ensued. The tension was just too much, both within the team and especially from hardliners back home. The scorn and backlash can be so intense, Hussain says, it’s hard to keep it from getting in your own head.

“Sometimes even thinking about what I’m doing right now fills me with some negative [voices], like, ‘Salah, you’re a normalizer. Be careful!’, he says. But then the “other voice” in his head chimes in, “Keep going, Keep moving! All these tiny effects can lead to change.”

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Israelis participating in the program, like 27-year old Aviv Meir, say they feel it, too.

“It’s hard to put yourself in the enemy’s shoes,” she says with a sigh. “You need to have so much strength to feel safe, and to understand that understanding their side will not demolish your side. It’s sometimes making you crazy.”

Meir has been involved in bridge-building initiatives since she was a teenager. She’s the type you’d expect to sign up for a program like this. But 50:50 is also drawing in participants not already inclined toward dialogue.

The hard conversations

Salah Elsadi, a Palestinian who lived in Gaza for 15 years, says he wasn’t even aware of the peace-building aspect of 50:50 when he applied to the program. He was interested in building his business, not bridges. But he has learned to lean in when he has to. For example, at a recent 50:50 event in Boston that was open to the public, a French Israeli woman, Sarah Blum, drew Elsadi into conversation. A short while in, she told him that about 10 years ago, a Palestinian man from Jerusalem attacked her with a knife.

“He wanted to kill me,” she said.

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Elsadi was visibly taken aback, but continued listening as Blum shared that some of the first people who called to check in on her were close friends who were Palestinian, and how important it is to continue dialogue even in the most difficult moments.

Then, in what seemed to be a bid to ease the moment, she asked Elsadi how his family in Gaza was doing. But it did little to diffuse the tension.

“Not good,” he answered. “They’re struggling to find water or food. My youngest brother has chronic disease and can’t get medicine.”

Blum said she could understand.

“I have close family friends who were in Kfar Aza on October 7th who are traumatized from the massacre, and some who lost loved ones [who were] taken hostage and killed in Gaza, and [did not have] access to medicine when they were in captivity,” she said.

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It’s the kind of conversation that could have easily spiraled out, but Blum and Elsadi managed to take in each other’s pain. The encounter ended with a hug, and both said afterward that it just reinforced their conviction that focus must shift from past grievances to future possibilities.

“We need to start a new thing, not just to remember the last things which remind us that ‘Oh, I need to take revenge,” Elsadi says. “We cannot continue war, war, war, war. How long do we want it to continue?”

Program leaders take pains to say that 50:50 is not a political organization. That’s what allows it to create an environment where each side can see the other as people, not enemies.

In one stark example, a Palestinian man who grew up in a refugee camp near Hebron was sharing how he felt humiliated and harangued by IDF soldiers at checkpoints. Then he found out one of the Israelis he had come to know in the program was actually one of the soldiers stationed near his home. It was striking, he says, to hear that former Israeli soldier share how terrified he and others were of Palestinians.

“They feel [the Palestinians] will attack them, or maybe shoot them, so they always stand by, [with] nerves tense,” the Palestinian man said. “At the end of the day [the soldier is] a human being. He’s someone like me who just wants to get back home safe and have dinner with [his] family.”

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But that kind of talk doesn’t go over well back home, this Palestinian man says, which is why he asked that his name not be used in this report.

“People say it’s like betraying, especially in this situation, [where] everything is on fire,” he said. “I don’t want to be a target to [be] hurt or something.”

Building trust organically

The 50:50 Startups program was co-founded by Israeli-American Amir Grinstein in 2019, and the program later partnered with Tel Aviv University and Northeastern University in Boston, where he’s a marketing professor. The idea is that short of marriage, creating a business together may be the most profound way to bond two people together; it’s a partnership based on equality, a shared goal and a mutual trust and reliance on each other’s support.

“Its very intimate, it’s very intense, it’s up and down like a roller coaster, and it’s long term,” Grinstein says. “They have to try hard to work together. They’ll fail together or they’ll succeed together.”

As a start-up itself, 50:50 has had to pivot and iterate through challenges Grinstein could never have imagined: COVID, October 7th, and several wars. Each has made it difficult or impossible for the entrepreneurs to travel to Boston for the capstone session at Northeastern. This year, because of the ongoing war in the region, more than half the entrepreneurs could only attend by Zoom.

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Israeli and Palestinian entrepreneurs in the 50:50 Startups program attend a workshop at Harvard Business School about data analysis.

Israeli and Palestinian entrepreneurs in the 50:50 Startups program attend a workshop at Harvard Business School about data analysis.

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Salah Hussein 

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“You are still under missiles with this war raging outside, and we hope it will be over soon,” Grinstein says at the start of a recent class. He then pivots to the day’s lesson, which happens to be about negotiation and rebuilding trust when things become tense or adversarial, an especially apt lesson for these entrepreneurs.

But that’s as close as 50:50 gets to any specific instruction on cross-the-divide collaboration. Unlike other coexistence programs, there are no dialog workshops or trust-building exercises. Grinstein says that just happens organically.

“The elephant is obviously in the room, so we’re not ignoring it,” Grinstein says. “But what I want is to see the Israelis and Palestinians develop friendships that transcend the business, and then naturally you will have coffee with your partners and you might be in a better position – after you build trust, after you work together — to have conversations that are tough and challenging.”

Still a relatively small program, 50:50 has taken on some 320 participants since it began. But Grinstein says the relationships they forge have significant ripple effects on friends, and family, as well as on the Northeastern undergraduates who are part of his class, and work as interns for the start-ups.

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Senior Alexa Garcia, says just watching the entrepreneurs working together, laughing and teasing each other, was a lightbulb moment for her.

“Sometimes it’s so easy to forget that they’re on such different sides of a conflict because they seem like such good friends, like the banter is crazy,” she says. “A lot of times it’s just completely out of my mind that they are on two different sides of conflict.”

Garcia and two other students who stopped to talk after class say they each started the semester with a clear leaning toward either the Israelis or Palestinians. But that changed, they say, as they got to know the entrepreneurs personally and came to understand the hardships suffered by both sides, like when team meetings were delayed because a Palestinian was stuck at a checkpoint, or an Israeli had to run to a bomb shelter.

All three say their views have now shifted toward the middle.

“Both sides have been through so much, both have done right, both have done wrong,” says Garcia. “The more I learn, there’s no side for me.”

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A ‘hippie heart’ and a ‘capitalist brain’

The 50:50 session in Boston ends with a Shark Tank-style chance for the teams to pitch their ventures to potential investors and hope an investor will bite, or at least offer some useful feedback.

For their part, investors grill the entrepreneurs about not only their ideas, but also their partnerships; they’re investing in a team as much as a product. And while some see the collaborations as inherently risky, others see them as an asset – at least potentially.

Hagar Shmaia, from Israel, was one of about a dozen Israeli and Palestinian entrepreneurs who pitched their ideas to a room of investors, as part of the 50:50 Startups program. Shmaia has designed an online platform called “Besty” that allows women to find a wide range of support on-demand

Hagar Shmaia, from Israel, was one of about a dozen Israeli and Palestinian entrepreneurs who pitched their ideas to a room of investors, as part of the 50:50 Startups program. Shmaia has designed an online platform called “Besty” that allows women to find a wide range of support on-demand

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“I always say I have a hippie heart and a capitalist brain,” says Brian Abrams, founder of B Ventures, one of the investors who listened to the pitches. “My hippie heart loves this kind of collaboration. My capitalist brain insists it makes business sense.”

In a best-case scenario, Abrams says, the Israeli-Palestinian partnerships could create a “halo-effect” around a brand, helping a start-up to build momentum.

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“The collaboration builds the brand, attracts other people, helps them get bigger, and at best that becomes a virtuous cycle,” Abrams says.

Ultimately, the case could be made that startups run by these unlikely co-founders could actually be safer investments, says Tomer Cohen, Co-Founder and Director of Tech2Peace, a bridge-building program similar to 50:50 for younger participants. 

“If the entrepreneurs have managed to come together in spite of the political reality, it actually says a lot about them as individuals, that they will be more resilient and can overcome most of the challenges that [entrepreneurs] face in early-stage ventures,” he says.  

So far, Grinsteen says, 50:50 ventures are beating the odds. It’s still early for many, but of the roughly 55 start-ups, about a half are still in the game.

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Federal judge bars Trump from implementing proof of citizenship requirement to vote

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Federal judge bars Trump from implementing proof of citizenship requirement to vote

A federal judge on Wednesday permanently barred President Donald Trump’s administration from implementing most of his first executive order on elections, part of which sought to require people to show documentary proof of citizenship when they register to vote.

The ruling by U.S. District Court Judge Denise Casper in Boston effectively converts a preliminary injunction she issued a year ago, in which she temporarily blocked many of Trump’s efforts to overhaul elections, into a permanent ban.

Casper rejected the Republican administration’s argument that the lawsuit to block the changes brought by Democratic state attorneys general was premature because the rules had yet to be put in place. Instead, she agreed that the Constitution gives states and Congress the authority to regulate elections, and that Trump’s requirements violated the separation of powers.

The Constitution “does not grant the President any specific powers over elections,” wrote Casper.

Among other proposed changes, Trump’s order would have required people to provide documentary proof of citizenship when registering to vote, prevented mail ballots from being counted if they arrive after Election Day, even if they were postmarked by then, and punished states that failed to comply by withholding certain federal money.

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In a statement, New York Attorney General Letitia James said she was grateful the court had blocked Trump’s “unconstitutional attempt to seize control of our elections” and would continue to defend voting rights in this year’s midterm elections.

“Generations of Americans fought tirelessly for the right to vote, and we honor their legacy by protecting that right against anyone who tries to undermine it,” said James, a Democrat.

A voter casts a ballot during New York’s primary election on Tuesday, June 23, 2026, in New York. (AP Photo/Ryan Murphy)

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California Attorney General Rob Bonta, whose state was the lead plaintiff in the case, said the ruling reaffirmed the constitutional principle that it s up to the states and Congress to set election rules.

“While we are proud of this result, we are clear-eyed that President Trump’s attacks on voting rights and our elections show no signs of slowing down,” Bonta, a Democrat, said in a statement. “So let me be clear: we will keep fighting back every step of the way.”

Requests for comment sent to the White House and he U.S. Department of Justice were not immediately returned.

The ruling was the latest in a series against the elections executive order Trump signed just months after taking office for his second term. The Republican president has since signed another executive order on elections that seeks to create a national voter list and limit mail balloting. That directive also faces multiple legal challenges.

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Last fall, a federal judge in Washington, D.C., overseeing a separate challenge to the first election executive order by civil rights and Democratic Party-aligned groups blocked the government from taking steps to include the proof-of-citizenship requirement on the federal voter registration form. That judge later barred Trump’s defense secretary from requiring documentary proof of citizenship when military personnel register to vote or request ballots.

In an apparent nod to the difficulty of implementing a proof-of-citizen requirement by executive order, Trump is pushing legislation in the Republican-controlled Congress to create such a mandate. The SAVE America Act has passed the House but has stalled in the Senate, leading Trump to advocate for eliminating the filibuster that is blocking the legislation.

On Wednesday, he abruptly canceled the expected signing of a bipartisan housing bill, saying he would not sign legislation until Congress passes his proof of citizenship requirement for voting.

The president and many of his Republican allies have been promoting the narrative that voting by noncitizens is a major problem, when in fact it’s quite rare. The federal voter registration form already requires people to attest that they are U.S. citizens. Violating that is punishable as a felony that can lead to prison or deportation.

In another major voting case, the U.S. Supreme Court is due to issue an opinion soon on whether mail ballots must arrive by Election Day. That could immediately change the rules in 14 states that allow grace periods ranging from days to weeks if the ballots are postmarked by Election Day.

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Casper, who was nominated by Democratic President Barack Obama, is the chief judge for the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts.

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Video: Mamdani Allies Sweep New York Primaries

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Video: Mamdani Allies Sweep New York Primaries

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Mamdani Allies Sweep New York Primaries

Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s progressive coalition had a big night on Tuesday. Brad Lander, Darializa Avila Chevalier and Claire Valdez won their Democratic House primaries.

“I see a New York that we can all afford. I see a New York that truly invests in its babies, not bombs.” Reporter: “What’s the first thing you’re looking forward to doing in Congress?” “Well, tomorrow — thank you — I mean, tomorrow morning, you know, I’m going to be back at 26 Federal Plaza doing court watching, and we want to carry that into Congress as well.”

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Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s progressive coalition had a big night on Tuesday. Brad Lander, Darializa Avila Chevalier and Claire Valdez won their Democratic House primaries.

By Julie Yoon

June 24, 2026

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Appeals court allows Trump administration expanded use of speedy deportations

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Appeals court allows Trump administration expanded use of speedy deportations

A massive 826,780-square-foot warehouse sits illuminated Feb. 12, 2026, in the El Paso suburb of Socorro, Texas, that was recently purchased by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security for $122.8 million.

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A federal appeals court on Tuesday allowed the Trump administration to resume carrying out speedy deportations of undocumented migrants throughout the United States, not just near the border.

A divided three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit threw out a lower court decision that temporarily blocked President Donald Trump’s expanded use of expedited removal. The ruling was a big victory for the Republican administration, which views the expansion of so-called expedited removal as a key tool for carrying out its mass deportation policy.

Expedited removal — quick deportation without a chance to appear before a judge — has previously been applied to migrants arriving by sea or caught at or near the border shortly after crossing.

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In January, Trump expanded its use to undocumented migrants all over the United States. Immigration agents began whisking migrants away from courthouses where they had gone for immigration proceedings and then removing them from the country within days.

“The Trump administration’s push for fast-track deportations will subject people to an unfair and error-prone system,” Anand Balakrishnan, senior staff attorney with the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, said in a statement.

Balakrishnan represented plaintiffs in arguments before the appellate panel and said its ruling “undermines the fundamental principle that people receive due process when the government seeks to deport them.”

DC Circuit Judge Justin R. Walker, one of the judges on the panel, said the plaintiffs had not shown the expanded use of expedited removal violated due process rights. Immigrants received notice of removal proceedings and were given a chance to respond, he wrote in his opinion.

Walker and the second judge in the majority, Neomi Rao, were appointed by Trump. The third judge on the panel was appointed by President Barack Obama, a Democrat.

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Walker said there was no requirement that the administration inform immigrants that they can avoid expedited removal if they can show they have been in the United States for more than two years.

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