Roughly 150 activists sat down together in Paris on Friday, drawn from opposite sides of one of the world's most intractable conflicts, to draft a list of demands for seven of the wealthiest governments on the planet. Their message, delivered ahead of a G7 summit due to convene at Évian-les-Bains, a spa resort in the French Alps, carried an unusual mix of urgency and resignation. The chance to salvage a two-state outcome, they argued, is still alive. Just barely.
The meeting brought Israelis and Palestinians under one roof at a moment when formal diplomacy has gone nowhere for half a year. Progress on Palestinian self-governance and an Israeli pullout from Gaza has been frozen since late last year, with each party accusing the other of refusing to meet the conditions laid out in the 20-point framework promoted by Donald Trump. The fighting, meanwhile, grinds on. Two more people were reported killed in an Israeli strike in Gaza, the kind of dispatch that has become grimly routine, and the kind that gives the Paris gathering its edge.
The window everyone says is closing
The participants did not mince words about the state of things. "Gaza is devastated, Israel remains under threat," the groups said in a joint statement, before listing settler violence, settlement expansion, creeping annexation and the weakening of the Palestinian Authority as forces eating away at any future Palestinian state. Their core fear was procedural as much as political: that Gaza would be quietly bumped off the G7 agenda altogether, treated as a problem for another day. The odds of the leaders issuing a unified statement on the conflict were described as close to nil, according to the Guardian's account of the meeting.
What the activists wanted instead was a set of concrete commitments. A permanently monitored ceasefire. Real penalties for settler attacks in the West Bank. Guaranteed humanitarian access. And a transparent, multi-year funding channel for reconstruction that puts Palestinians, including civil society, in a position of genuine ownership rather than passive recipient. They also pressed for the various competing peace tracks, among them the so-called Board of Peace initiative, to be folded into a single coherent effort instead of running in parallel and undercutting one another.
The diplomatic deadlock has a familiar shape. Hamas insists Israel must withdraw from Gaza before it gives up its remaining heavy weapons. Israel wants the disarmament first. A separate meeting of Palestinian factions in Cairo this week reportedly nudged Hamas slightly toward handing over its heavier arsenal to some unnamed Palestinian body, though the gains were modest. Anyone who has watched this file for long knows how often modest gains evaporate.
Why civil society, and why Paris
One theme ran through the day with a certain bitterness. John Lyndon, who directs the Alliance for Middle East Peace, an umbrella body that he says brings together upwards of 200 non-governmental organisations, observed that it can be easier to convene Israeli and Palestinian peace groups abroad than on home ground. He pointed to restrictions imposed by the Israeli government as the reason, and called the situation ironic, given that France was effectively hosting a conversation the region itself struggles to permit. Diplomacy in this conflict, he argued, has been "too elite-driven, too top-down," cut off from how ordinary Israelis and Palestinians actually live.
There is something to that observation, and it cuts against the usual narrative of two populations locked in mutual loathing. Lyndon's contention is that an appetite for a two-state arrangement persists inside Israeli society but finds almost no expression among the country's political parties, especially with elections looming later this year. Whether a constituency without a party can shape national policy is an open question. History does not offer much encouragement on that front.
The Paris organisers structured the gathering around five working groups, and they pulled in foreign ministers from Arab and European capitals, among them Kaja Kallas, the European Union's foreign policy chief. The aim was practical: to weld the formal diplomatic machinery onto the grassroots networks that have managed, against considerable odds, to keep functioning across the divide. Earlier in the week, Britain, Canada and Australia moved to set up a dedicated funding stream for peace groups in the region, a step those organisations had sought for a long time.
The pressure on the Palestinian Authority
Much of the anxiety in the room centred on the Palestinian Authority, which the groups described as starved of money and short on democratic legitimacy. The warning was blunt. Without proper financing, the activists said, instability in the West Bank would worsen, and that instability would in turn deepen Hamas's grip on Gaza while leaving Israel with an expanding security crisis and, in their phrasing, "no political exits." They called for Palestinian elections to be held this year, a demand that has gone unmet for so long it has nearly lost its meaning.
The gathering also floated the idea that broader regional integration could help bring the occupation to an end, but only if it were treated as a complement to Palestinian statehood rather than a clever way around it. That distinction matters. Several recent diplomatic schemes have invited the suspicion that normalisation between Israel and Arab states is being offered as a substitute for, rather than a path to, a Palestinian state. The Paris participants seemed determined to head off that interpretation before it took root.
The backdrop to all of this is bleak. Aid groups have described Gaza as buckling under shortages of fuel, engine oil and spare parts: the unglamorous logistics that keep hospitals and water systems running. Reports this week indicated Benjamin Netanyahu had ordered the Israeli military to take control of a large majority of the Gaza Strip, a move critics characterised as a breach of the ceasefire arrangement. The Paris statement's insistence that the opening for a solution "remains open, but it is narrowing" reads less like rhetoric than like a measurement.
What happens at Évian will tell us how seriously the major powers take that measurement. If the leaders sidestep Gaza, as the activists fear, the civil society networks will have spent their political capital on a document that lands in nobody's inbox. If even a fraction of their demands finds its way into the summit's conclusions, the Paris meeting will count for something. The strikes, in the meantime, do not pause for summits. Two more dead in Gaza this week, and a list of proposals waiting for someone with the authority to act on them.