In Baku, emerging Israeli and Arab leaders prepare for a post-conflict Middle East
Amid war, ROPES summit gathers people from across the region to discuss Israel’s integration, but some insist that without tackling the Palestinian issue, true peace remains elusive
Gianluca Pacchiani is the Arab affairs reporter for The Times of Israel
BAKU — Over a sweltering August weekend, around 30 young activists, entrepreneurs, and academics from Israel, the Middle East, and North Africa convened in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, to discuss what may seem like a distant utopia amid the ongoing war: a Middle East defined by cooperation rather than conflict.
“It has been a long time since I was last in a meeting where hope was discussed,” said Nir Boms, the director of the Program for Regional Cooperation at the Moshe Dayan Center of Tel Aviv University, during the opening session.
The three-day event was the annual summit of ROPES, the Regional Organization for Peace, Economics, and Security, an organization founded in 2017 to expand the coalition for peace between Israelis and Palestinians by involving emerging leaders from the Arab world.
The weekend provided 14 young Israelis – nine Jews and five Arabs – with a rare opportunity to sit with peers from countries hostile to Israel, such as Algeria and Syria. Other participants arrived from locations with ties to the Jewish state, official or covert, but where people-to-people contact seems elusive, like Egypt and Saudi Arabia. A Libyan participant canceled at the last minute.
The gathering also included two Gazans now living in Europe. One of them left the war-torn Strip in February, after an IDF airstrike hit her home. Her story stirred participants, including many Israelis who had never personally encountered a Gazan.
The meet-up took place at a time when the Middle East seemed on the brink of all-out war, as Israel braced for a large-scale attack from Lebanon and Iran after the assassination of key Hamas and Hezbollah leaders. Isolated from the relentless stream of grim news, relations among the participants were surprisingly cordial and friendly as they brainstormed to envision a post-conflict Middle East.
“There is never a right time to come together,” said ROPES CEO Ksenia Svetlova during the opening session. “Gathering now, during a war, is an act of defiance, a refusal to let others define our agenda and our lives.” Svetlova, a former Knesset member and an expert on the Arab world, regularly contributes to The Times of Israel’s Hebrew-language sister site Zman Yisrael.
Attendees were captivated by a presentation on water management solutions from Tareq Abu Hamed, the Palestinian director of the Arava Institute in the Negev, where Israeli, Palestinian, and Jordanian students study environmental sustainability together.
“The scarcest resource in the Middle East is not water; it’s trust,” he said poignantly.
Another session featured Einat Levi, ROPES director of educational programs and an expert on Morocco, and Salaheddine Moutacharif, a Moroccan engineer and investment fund manager, who shared their experiences in disaster relief following the powerful earthquake that struck Morocco in September 2023.
In another discussion, an Israeli and a Palestinian presented their work with Tikkun Olam Makers (TOM), a Tel Aviv-based organization that produces and distributes affordable solutions for people with disabilities. In January, TOM opened its first center in Ramallah in the West Bank, bringing together young Palestinian engineers and clinicians to develop new solutions in partnership with Israelis.
An Egyptian media producer led a workshop on how civil society groups can effectively lobby for social change, encouraging participants to consider common issues they could collectively campaign for across the region.
In the evenings, participants explored Baku’s nightlife, socializing over drinks and taking part in a lively karaoke night where they sang at the top of their lungs in multiple languages. The atmosphere was a rare display of cross-border camaraderie, offering a glimpse of what a future Middle East could look like.
The benefits of closer ties between Israel and the Arab world
In one-on-one interviews with The Times of Israel, participants from countries without formal relations with Israel highlighted the potential benefits of closer cooperation with the Jewish state.
Shadi Martini, 51, a Syrian who fled his homeland shortly after the civil war began in 2012 and now lives in Michigan, shared his perspective.
His first encounter with Israelis was in 2016 when he led an aid program called Operation Good Neighbor, delivering humanitarian supplies into war-torn Syria from Israel.
Today, he is involved in a similar project with the New York-based organization he works for, the Multifaith Alliance, to deliver aid to Gaza.
“Israel is very advanced in technology, agriculture, and water management, and other countries need this expertise. The better the economic situation is for the people in the region, the more tensions will calm down, and the whole area will become more stable,” Martini said.
Amina (not her real name), a woman of Palestinian origin who grew up abroad and works in the world of tech startups, also spoke about the region’s potential to learn from Israel.
“It’s no secret that some of the best startup founders in the world are Israelis. They can scale their businesses into the US at an incredible pace. Israelis work hard and are comfortable with failure – which happens a lot in the tech scene.”
Amina emphasized that investment decisions are often based on the personality of the startup founder, and she finds that Israelis often have an edge in the tech industry. She believes Palestinians could benefit from following in their footsteps.
“I think the best entrepreneurs are those with a chip on their shoulder. Many Israelis are like that — they have something to prove. Funnily enough, many Palestinians share this trait. Israelis and Palestinians have much more in common than people might think, not just because of their experiences, but also from a cultural standpoint,” Amina said.
‘Don’t leave Israelis and Palestinians alone in the room’
In her opening remarks, Svetlova highlighted that Arab countries have never served as mediators in bilateral talks between Israeli and Palestinian leaders. “One of the mistakes of past peace talks was leaving Israelis and Palestinians alone in the room,” she noted.
“In negotiations, it would be preferable to have mediators from the region — foreign diplomats often have a very Western understanding of this conflict. Twenty years ago, Israelis assumed that Arabs would automatically side with the Palestinians. But after the Abraham Accords [the normalization deals Israel signed with four Arab countries in 2020], that perception has somewhat changed. ”
The realization of the need to involve Arab countries in the peace process had driven the establishment of ROPES in 2017. Ben Birnbaum, its founder and president, explained that the idea was to “fill a void in the peace-building ecosystem.”
At the time, over 100 organizations were focused on bilateral Israeli-Palestinian efforts or Jewish-Arab dialogue inside Israel — which, according to Svetlova, isn’t necessarily a positive sign.
“The more peace initiatives you have, the less peace you have,” she remarked.
Birnbaum noticed a significant gap in that almost no peace groups involved “the other 400 million citizens of Arab countries.” Leveraging his contacts in the region from his previous career as a journalist, he launched ROPES.
Today, the network has over 120 alumni, including diplomats and politicians, forming what Birnbaum describes as an “underground railroad of connections that, in addition to Israel and the Palestinian Territories, encompasses 12 Arab countries across the Middle East and North Africa.”
The organization’s members, mostly aged between 25 and 45, are leaders in various fields — public service, academia, technology — who can “influence their societies.” The activities of ROPES are mostly under the radar, aiming to build a “social infrastructure” for a post-conflict Middle East.
One of the guiding principles of ROPES is that progress in regional cooperation must be linked to advancements in Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, which have been stalled for years.
“My initial thinking was that Israelis need to be aware of the opportunities that exist in the Arab world, which could be seized if there is progress on the Palestinian front,” Birnbaum said.
“This message resonates better with people in the Israeli center-right than just the traditional talk of a Palestinian state in isolation. Ultimately, we want to bring everyone together under a vision of a post-conflict region.”
An excess of optimism following the Abraham Accords
With remarkable foresight, Birnbaum launched ROPES three and a half years before the signing of the Abraham Accords, which opened the doors of four Arab countries to Israelis.
However, Birnbaum cautioned that that deal may have given Israelis a false sense of optimism that a diplomatic breakthrough with other Middle Eastern countries, particularly Saudi Arabia, was possible without addressing the Palestinian issue. As flights have been ferrying thousands of Israeli tourists and businessmen to Dubai and Abu Dhabi, the expectation was that they would soon be heading to Riyadh and Jeddah as well.
Aziz Alghashian, a Saudi researcher specializing in his country’s foreign policy toward Israel, delivered a dispassionate critique of this expectation at the Baku summit.
The Israeli public has been ignoring the “big but” that Saudis have signaled in negotiations, he said.
“Netanyahu promised the Israeli public that he would bring the Saudis on board, but the Saudis have a price,” said Alghashian. “Many people like to analyze our foreign policy based on what they want to hear, not what the Saudis are actually saying.”
“Saudi Arabia still demands a pathway to a Palestinian state — it has been demanding this since the Arab Peace Initiative it presented in 2002. Today, normalization would also come with the price tag of a mutual defense pact with the US,” Alghashian said.
Without these two elements – the latter of which hinges on approval by the US Congress – a peace deal with Saudi Arabia remains highly unlikely, Alghashian predicted.
He also emphasized that the UAE and Bahrain should not be seen as templates for the rest of the Gulf region, as they have unique foreign policy considerations and seek to diversify their international alliances and distance themselves from their larger and hegemonic neighbors, Saudi Arabia and Iran.
Other Arab participants stressed that despite the camaraderie they developed with individual Israelis, the idea of welcoming the Jewish state with open arms as a full-fledged member of the region while war rages in Gaza remained far-fetched.
Karim (not his real name), an Algerian in his late 30s working in an organization for regional cooperation, said that he had reservations about attending the Baku summit.
“There are two parts of me. One feels guilty because of what’s happening right now in Gaza and what’s been happening all over the Palestinian territory for years. The other feels this work has to be done with Israelis,” he said.
Karim described Algeria as “the furthest possible Arab country” from normalization, given the country’s bloody liberation war from France in the 1950s and 60s and its identification with the Palestinian cause. Many in the North African country justify Hamas’s October 7 atrocities as a response to Israeli policies toward Palestinians, he said.
However, he added, Israel’s presence in the region is not something even the most radical governments can wish away.
“I think we’ve come to a point where most governments in the region accept Israel,” said Karim. “The whole conflict with Israel by now is not about its existence at all within the region, but about them respecting Palestinians. Algeria calls for the respect of the 1967 borders, and then recognition of Israel would happen naturally.”
Perhaps the most poignant plea in favor of a new Middle East characterized by cooperation came from Rana (not her real name), an engineer in her early 40s, one of the two Gazans who attended the summit. Today, they are both living in Europe.
Rana’s house in Gaza City was destroyed in an Israeli airstrike in the first few weeks of the war. Thanks to the intercession of relatives abroad and after a months-long wait, she and her parents managed to secure humanitarian visas to leave for Europe, where they currently reside.
When asked about October 7, Rana painted a complex picture of the attitudes she saw around her before Hamas’s savage onslaught, when invaders from Gaza killed 1,200 people in southern Israel amid acts of brutality and sexual violence, and abducted 251. Since 2007, the Strip had been practically isolated from the rest of the world, under a blockade imposed by Israel shortly after Hamas took control of the coastal enclave, and enforced in cooperation with neighboring Egypt to prevent the terror group from adding to its arms stockpile and becoming an even greater menace after it repeatedly declared its intention to destroy Israel. Under the blockade, the movement of both goods and people into and out of Gaza was severely restricted.
“Many were convinced that the use of force and [armed] resistance were the only way to obtain their rights. But there were others who believed that there can be coexistence between the Israeli and the Palestinian people – after all, we are all human beings,” she said.
“Today, people [in Gaza] are fed up with war, they just want to live. We’ve lost our homes, our jobs, our future. Over the past 10 months, people have aged 10 years. They no longer support the resistance, they support an end to the conflict,” Rana said.
“I see this conference as something very positive,” she added. “I see many people who are convinced that the future must bring peace and coexistence.”
