In 2024–2025, TEMA achieved a strategic breakthrough: successfully drawing in voices and communities long absent from formal dialogue and civic engagement around the conflict. TEMA, a Federation grantee, explores the conflict from its different names: regional, Israeli-Palestinian, Jewish-Arab, Jewish-Muslim, and more. At a time of deep political fragmentation and existential fear, TEMA is quietly building new legitimacy for diverse forms of participation.

While peacebuilding efforts in Israel have often centered around already-engaged sectors, TEMA has expanded the circle. Its model offers frameworks that resonate with people’s lived experiences, sacred values, and identities, especially for groups that have historically been disengaged, skeptical, or excluded from such discourse. As a result, a wide range of communities — from Ultra-Orthodox and National-Religious to Mizrahi, Russian-speaking Israelis, women, and Arab citizens of Israel — are now exploring their relationship to the conflict in new and meaningful ways.

From Discourse to Action: A Grassroots Innovation Engine

TEMA’s Innovation Hub offers tailored mentoring, strategic guidance, and seed funding to leaders from its identity-based groups who wish to turn new thinking into grassroots action. So far, 11 initiatives have launched through this platform; addressing interfaith dialogue, civic education, new media, and culturally grounded approaches to conflict transformation. These efforts are designed to not only influence public narratives, but also build real bridges within and between communities. A recent call for more initiatives has already received more than 25 proposals covering all sectors.

Shifting the National Conversation

TEMA’s impact is also visible in public discourse. Media outlets, including Walla, Ynet, Jerusalem Post, Channel 7, and Israel Today, have highlighted the initiative’s role in reframing the conversation about the conflict. By presenting civic dialogue not as a political threat but as a democratic necessity, TEMA is helping normalize complexity, disagreement, and mutual responsibility in the public square.

A Strategic Model for a Polarized Society

At its core, TEMA provides a model for societal readiness — preparing communities not just to “talk about peace,” but to imagine different futures, articulate values-based positions, and participate in shaping policy and public culture. Its model of working simultaneously across grassroots and elite spaces — connecting identity leaders to diplomatic, civil society, and academic arenas — has proven uniquely effective in today’s volatile landscape.

In a time when the conversation about the conflict often feels stagnant or polarized, TEMA has created room for something new: a serious, inclusive, and pragmatic space where Israelis from across the spectrum can begin to ask what comes next — and how they might be part of it.

Ester Biro is the Program Officer of the Federation’s Israel Office