Our Story

How a joint conference became a six-year partnership, maintained through conflict, built on a shared conviction that peace is the only way in which women’s rights, safety, and participation can be fully realized.

How We Began

The Joint Steering Committee was established in June 2020 in partnership with colleagues from Ramallah. What began as planning for a joint public conference to mark the 20th anniversary of UN Security Council Resolution 1325 became, following the conference’s success, a sustained commitment to something more ambitious: developing new policy tools, building joint working groups, and laying the institutional groundwork for women’s genuine inclusion in any future political process between Israelis and Palestinians.

We are brought together under the joint framework of Itach-Ma’aki’s Women, Peace and Security Center and the Jerusalem Centre for Women (JCW). We have maintained this coalition under conditions that have made such work increasingly rare and, at times, dangerous.

What We Believe

“The goal of UNSCR 1325 is not to count women at the table. It is to ensure that the presence of women changes what happens at the table, that their lived knowledge shapes agreements, and that those agreements are therefore more likely to hold.”

The Committee’s work is grounded in a conviction shared by all its members: war is the most devastating force in women’s lives, on every side of this conflict. The structural barriers to women’s inclusion, including the privileging of military expertise over civilian and community knowledge, the silencing of women in public life, and the normalization of armed presence, diminish all of us.

“There is no version of security that is built on the destruction of another people.”

The Committee’s long-term goal is to lay the foundation for a permanent joint gender equality body, modelled in part on mechanisms embedded in the Colombian peace process, to accompany any formal or informal political process between Israelis and Palestinians.

Women Who Have Walked This Path

Miriam Coronel Ferrer	Philippines	The first woman in the world to sign a peace agreement as lead signatory.
Juanita Millán	Colombia	Former military officer and member of the gender equality commission in the Colombian peace negotiations.
Avila Kilmurry	Northern Ireland	Co-founder of the Women’s Coalition that helped bring about the Good Friday Agreement.
Simone Susskind	Belgium	Former senator who led Israeli-Palestinian women’s partnerships in the 1990s.
Dr. Araceli (Arancha) García del Soto	Colombia	Led collection of women’s testimonies and integration of gender analysis into the Colombian peace process.

October 10, 2023

“That we are here, together, is itself an act of resistance.”

Following Avila Kilmurry’s counsel to never cancel a meeting of the joint group, no matter what, the Steering Committee convened on October 10, 2023, three days after the Hamas attacks and in the earliest hours of a devastating war on Gaza. As many binational collaborations collapsed, the Committee met: not to minimize the horror, not to paper over the pain, the fear, or the unspeakable, but to reaffirm their partnership, their commitment to each other, and to the work. That meeting, and every meeting since, is a demonstration of what this coalition is built for: not peace as an abstraction, but partnership as a daily practice, especially when it is hardest.