BOSTON — About 35 Palestinian, Israeli Arab and Israeli Jewish entrepreneurs pitched business ideas to potential investors in Boston, concluding a six-month accelerator program called 50:50 Startups. The program pairs participants in mixed teams and culminates with the Boston session, and its leaders say it is not a political organization.

Salah Hussein, a 33-year-old entrepreneur whose venture uses AI and cameras to detect and prevent greenhouse pests, 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. "For me, all of them were a threat," Hussein said. His team includes Yana Shaulov, a 37-year-old Jewish Israeli molecular biologist who grew up in a mixed neighborhood of Haifa, a Palestinian from the West Bank, and a Christian Israeli citizen. The company, Qanara Tech, is developing AI cameras to detect and prevent insects in greenhouses growing food.

Hussein said a previous venture fell apart shortly after Hamas's attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, and the ensuing war, and that hardliners back home subjected the partnership to intense scorn and backlash. "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 said.

Shaulov described working across the divide. "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," she said. "It's already worth it just to show other people that it's possible."

Salah Elsadi, a Palestinian who lived in Gaza for 15 years, said he was not aware of the peace-building aspect of the program when he applied. "We cannot continue war, war, war, war. How long do we want it to continue?" Elsadi said.

One participant, a Palestinian man who grew up in a refugee camp near Hebron, said he felt humiliated and harangued by IDF soldiers at checkpoints, and later discovered in a podcast interview that an Israeli he had come to know in the program was a soldier stationed near his home. "They feel [the Palestinians] will attack them, or maybe shoot them, so they always stand by, [with] nerves tense," the 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."

The ventures developed in the program span several industries. One team has a patent pending to build a better heart monitor, and another uses egg shells and plant seeds as the filter in a water purification system. Approximately 90% of startups fail.