The Vision
A Joint People's Assembly — not another summit of diplomats — is the missing piece in the Israeli-Palestinian peace equation.
From the Oslo Accords of 1993 to Camp David in 2000, from Annapolis in 2007 to the Trump peace plan of 2020 — every serious attempt at a negotiated solution between Israelis and Palestinians has collapsed. The pattern is too consistent to be accidental. It points to a structural flaw.
The Elite Capture Problem
Every major peace initiative in this conflict has been generated by a small circle of diplomats and political leaders. The proposals they produce must then pass through concentric layers of political approval on both sides: cabinet, party leadership, coalition partners, parliament, and ultimately the public. At each stage, new actors enter with their own agendas, their own constituencies to protect, their own veto power.
The result is a process that is simultaneously top-down and fragile. By the time a proposal reaches the public, it carries the fingerprints of dozens of political compromises. Communities that never participated in crafting it have little reason to defend it when hardliners attack — and hardliners always attack.
The Trauma Problem
The conflict has left layers of unprocessed collective trauma on both sides. For Israelis: the Holocaust, the existential wars of 1948 and 1973, decades of suicide bombings, the October 7 massacre. For Palestinians: the Nakba, occupation, siege, repeated military campaigns, and the daily humiliations of a stateless existence.
Political negotiations treat these as background noise. The Oslo framework proceeded as if trauma were irrelevant to the durability of any agreement — as if communities that felt their deepest fears had been unheard would nonetheless ratify what their leaders had signed. Oslo collapsed in part because neither people felt that the process had seen them.
The Hamas Problem — and Its Solution
Current impasses often point to Hamas as the obstacle: no Palestinian leadership can enter talks without their legitimacy being contested, no Israeli government can be seen negotiating with a faction that has carried out mass atrocities. The logic seems airtight — and has been used to block substantive engagement for two decades.
The Joint Assembly dissolves this impasse structurally — not by excluding political actors, but by excluding terror. Delegates are drawn in equal parts from elected political parties and organized civil society, but the inclusion criterion is simple: no delegate may be a member of a terrorist organization. This is a structural criterion, not a political test applied by governments — and it is what dissolves the Hamas impasse. Hamas cannot authorize or delegitimize a body it is legally barred from participating in. The same holds on the Israeli side: no faction can claim ownership over a process whose eligibility rules exclude it by law, not by informal convention.
Peace agreements with civil society participation are 64% less likely to fail than those reached exclusively by political elites.
Pax Democratica proposes a joint, democratically elected People's Assembly: 600 delegates in total, 300 from each side, drawn in equal parts from elected political parties and the full cross-section of civil society.
Who the Delegates Are
Representation is drawn in equal parts from elected political parties and organized civil society. Political delegates are appointed by parties in proportion to their weight in democratic national elections — while the civil society half ensures political establishments cannot dominate the process. Both tracks share the same inclusion criterion: no delegate may be a member of a terrorist organization.
The civil society track draws from:
- Trade unions and labor federations — representing workers on both sides
- Civic organizations and NGOs — including peace movements, human rights bodies, and community associations
- Religious institutions — Jewish, Muslim, and Christian clergy and lay leaders who hold trust within their communities
- Business and professional associations — chambers of commerce, medical and legal associations, farmers' federations
- Academic institutions — universities and research centers
- Cultural and arts organizations — representing communities through the lens of shared humanity
- Youth organizations — the generation that will live longest with the outcome
Gender Parity — Built In, Not Bolted On
The assembly is designed from the outset with roughly equal numbers of male and female delegates. This is not a quota applied after the fact — it is built into the election rules that govern each participating organization. Research on peace process durability is clear: when women actively participate, agreements are 35% more likely to last 15 years.
The historical record explains why. Women's organizations in Northern Ireland, Colombia, and Liberia were among the most consistent voices for negotiated solutions — precisely because they had the least to gain from continued conflict and the most direct experience of its costs.
Democratic Legitimacy
The assembly's authority rests on democratic legitimacy — civil society delegates directly elected by their sectors, political delegates apportioned in direct proportion to their parties' own electoral mandate. This is the critical distinction from previous civil society initiatives. An advisory forum can be ignored; a democratically legitimated assembly with a mandate to reach binding territorial and security agreements cannot be as easily dismissed.
Based on this democratic election legitimization, the assembly has the authority to reach territorial solutions, define security arrangements, and address the status of Jerusalem and the Palestinian right of return — not just to dialogue and recommend.
The assembly is not a one-time meeting. It is a structured process with built-in stages — from confidence-building through to binding agreements.
Full Transparency
Every session is livestreamed. Proceedings are distributed through media on both sides. Both communities can follow in real time what their delegates are saying, arguing, and deciding. This serves two purposes: it prevents backroom deals that can be repudiated later, and it builds the organic sense of ownership that makes an eventual agreement defensible to skeptics.
Equal pay, equal office budgets, and equal resources for every delegate — regardless of which side they represent. The message is practical and symbolic: both peoples enter the room as equals.
Trauma-Informed Dialogue
Collective trauma is not set aside until the "real" negotiations begin. It is addressed as part of the process itself. The assembly creates space — in its formal agenda — for grievances to surface, for testimonies to be heard across the table, for memorials to past atrocities to be acknowledged jointly.
This draws on the insight from transitional justice: that durable peace requires something closer to truth and reconciliation than to a contract signed under pressure. Communities that have not had their suffering acknowledged will not honor agreements that ask them to move on.
International Shepherding
A coalition of "Friends of Pax Democratica" — governments, international organizations, and civil society bodies committed to the process — provides three things: intermediation when the assembly reaches impasses, financial support for the entire operation, and political legitimacy that insulates the process from pressure by regional spoilers.
This mirrors the role of international guarantors in every successful modern peace process — from the guarantors of the Oslo framework to the international witnesses at the Good Friday negotiations.
From Assembly to Legislation
The path to action runs through existing legislatures. Organizations can engage governments and political bodies to back the assembly concept and apply pressure on the Knesset and Palestinian Legislative Council to pass the legislation that would enable assembly elections. The international coalition plays a key role in applying that pressure — making support for assembly elections a condition of diplomatic and economic engagement.
The Pax Democratica model is not untested theory. Its core elements appear in every successful peace process of the modern era.
Ireland — The Good Friday Agreement (1998)
The Northern Ireland peace process is the closest analogue to what Pax Democratica proposes. After decades of negotiations between political parties and governments repeatedly collapsed, the critical breakthrough came when the process was broadened to include a wider range of civil society voices.
The Northern Ireland Women's Coalition — formed specifically to gain seats at the multi-party talks — introduced a reframing of the agenda from political interests toward human rights and victim-centered reconciliation. Women delegates advocated for the inclusion of victims' voices in the formal process. The agreement that emerged incorporated mechanisms for addressing the past that the earlier elite-driven talks had neglected entirely.
The Good Friday Agreement has now held for more than 25 years. It is not perfect, but it is durable — precisely because the communities it serves helped build it.
El Salvador — The Chapultepec Peace Accords (1992)
After twelve years of civil war and 75,000 deaths, the Salvadoran peace process succeeded in 1992 when it moved beyond the belligerents to incorporate civil society testimony directly into the formal process.
The Catholic Church, the National Debate for Peace, and a broad coalition of civil society organizations brought citizens' accounts of suffering — from both sides — into negotiations from which they had previously been excluded. The UN Truth Commission that emerged was itself a civil society innovation: a formal mechanism to address atrocities committed by both the government and FMLN forces.
The Chapultepec Accords held. El Salvador has not returned to civil war. The incorporation of civil society testimony into the formal process made it politically costly — and morally illegitimate — for either side to walk away.
Colombia — The Peace Accords (2016)
The Colombian peace process under President Juan Manuel Santos marks perhaps the most deliberate application of inclusive process design in recent history. After decades of failed negotiations, the Santos government made a structural decision: the people most affected by the conflict — indigenous communities, Afro-Colombian populations, women's organizations, farmers' federations — would be brought not just as consultees but as formal participants.
Over four years of negotiations in Havana, delegations from more than 60 civil society groups presented testimony and proposals. The resulting accords addressed land reform, political participation, illicit crop substitution, victim reparations, and transitional justice — subjects that earlier, more narrowly constituted talks had never adequately engaged.
The accords won President Santos the Nobel Peace Prize. Implementation remains incomplete, but the broad architecture of the agreement has held — and the civil society participation is widely credited with producing an agreement far more comprehensive than any that political actors alone could have reached.
The common thread across all three cases — and across the broader quantitative research on peace process outcomes — is grassroots ownership. Communities that helped shape an agreement are communities that honor it. The inverse is equally true: communities that feel an agreement was imposed on them without their participation are communities that look for ways to undermine it.
The Case Is Made. Now Comes the Work.
The most effective thing individuals can do is lobby the peace organizations they have access to — urge them to seriously debate this proposal and support building a coalition to advocate for it.