This year’s intake for 50:50 Startups, a cross-border accelerator, was smaller than usual because the war made travel difficult. Still, about 35 entrepreneurs — Palestinians, Israeli Arabs and Israeli Jews — took part in a six-month program of workshops, mentorship and investor training that culminates in a capstone session in Boston.
For many participants, the project is both pragmatic and personal. Salah Hussein, now 33, remembers being woken in the night at age 11 by Israeli soldiers in his family home in Nablus. The experience left him afraid of anyone in uniform. Decades later he has chosen to go into business with partners who include Israeli Jews. Hussein says he wants to build something that changes the future for his children and counters hatred.
His team includes Yana Shaulov, a 37-year-old molecular biologist from a mixed neighborhood in Haifa, who set aside plans to launch her own idea and joined Hussein’s venture instead. The group also has another West Bank Palestinian and a Christian Israeli citizen. Their company, Qanara Tech, is developing AI-enabled cameras to detect and prevent insect pests in greenhouses — an example of the kind of practical, market-oriented work the program encourages.
Other teams in the cohort are tackling medical devices, water purification using eggshells and seeds as filters, and more. Investors at the Boston pitches probe both product viability and team dynamics: when you invest in one of these startups, you invest in an unusual partnership as much as a technology.
Not every cross-community collaboration survives pressure. Hussein says a prior venture unraveled soon after the October 7, 2023 attacks and the war that followed; internal tensions and backlash from hardliners made the partnership untenable. He describes a constant internal debate between fear of being labeled a “normalizer” and the belief that small cooperative acts can add up to broader change.
Other Israelis in the program report similar struggles. Aviv Meir, 27, says it can be psychologically difficult to empathize with people you have been taught to treat as enemies — but doing so doesn’t negate one’s own identity. Some participants come from long involvement in bridge-building; others apply simply to advance a business idea and find the social lessons by accident.
Tough conversations are inevitable. At a public event in Boston, a French Israeli attendee recounted surviving a knife attack years earlier; the first friends who checked on her were Palestinian, she said. The story led to an exchange with Salah Elsadi, who lived in Gaza for 15 years and had not applied to the program for peacebuilding reasons but for business. He spoke of shortages of food, water and medicine for his family in Gaza. The two listened to each other’s pain and, after an emotional exchange, hugged — an encounter both said shifted their focus from revenge to building something new.
Program leaders emphasize that 50:50 is not a political organization. Founded in 2019 by Israeli-American Amir Grinstein, and later partnered with Tel Aviv University and Northeastern University in Boston, the accelerator avoids structured dialogue sessions or formal reconciliation exercises. Instead, Grinstein argues that working intensely toward a shared commercial goal creates natural, durable trust: partners must depend on one another, share risk and confront real problems together.
Classes range from negotiation and data analysis to investor pitches; one session in Boston took place at Harvard Business School. The war has repeatedly forced the program to adapt — COVID-19 and recent conflicts meant many entrepreneurs attended the capstone remotely this year — but organizers say that the pressure can deepen the work of rebuilding trust because it is taught in the context of real crises.
The program also reaches beyond founders. Northeastern undergraduates serve as interns and watch the entrepreneurs’ interactions up close. Many students report that seeing the teams work, joke and support one another changed their initial partisan leanings and gave them a more nuanced view of both sides’ suffering.
Investors see both risks and potential upside in these mixed teams. Brian Abrams of B Ventures says his emotional support for cross-border cooperation is matched by a belief it can make business sense: the partnerships can create a brand “halo effect” that attracts customers and partners. Tomer Cohen of Tech2Peace argues that entrepreneurs who persevere through political obstacles demonstrate resilience that can make a startup a stronger bet.
Since its founding, 50:50 has worked with roughly 320 participants and produced about 55 startups; roughly half of those ventures remain active. For the entrepreneurs who remain engaged, the program offers more than mentors and funding channels: it provides a space where, despite explosions and checkpoints and political pressure, people with divergent histories deliberately tie their fortunes together in pursuit of shared success.