“Once you enter into the Startup Weekend event, there is no Israeli, Palestinian, or American – there are entrepreneurs, developers, investors, designers working together to build technology and have fun.”

Wednesday, July 14 through Friday, July 16 is Tel Aviv Startup Weekend organized by Tel-Aviv StartupDigest Curator Amir Harel and Eddy Resnick in conjunction with the Peres Center for Peace. The following is Chris McCann‘s interview with Amir about the event and how it’s bringing together people who have historically been farthest apart for the first time.

What is Startup Weekend in your own words?

The event is an open platform of ideas and projects that provides networking, resources and incentives for participants to learn how to turn an idea into a product. It is a place to meet and work with programmers, marketers, entrepreneurs and investors to build companies and more importantly build a community. Our motto – Less talk. More action.

What happened at the last Tel Aviv Startup Weekend?

We had an amazing event last December at IBM HQ. We had 130 participants, 50 of whom pitched ideas that turned into 13 projects, and one company that now raising money.  We had some creative and interesting ideas developed over the event. For example, one team turned the PC keyboard into a guitar – they designed a keyboard hanger with straps like a real guitar and placed a mouse pad on the numbers keys on the right, and the F1-12 where cords. You could stroke the strings with the mouse and chose the chords with the F keys.

What is the Peres Center for Peace and why are you working with them for this year’s event?

The Peres Center for Peace is an independent, non-profit, non-partisan, non-governmental organization founded in 1996 by President of Israel and Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Mr. Shimon Peres. It aims to further the vision of Mr. Peres for people of the Middle East to work together to build peace through socio-economic cooperation, development, and people-to-people interaction. Simply put – like us they also believe – Less talk. More action :-)

How exactly are Israeli and Palestinian entrepreneurs working together at the event?

Once you enter into the Startup Weekend event, there is no Israeli, Palestinian, or American – there are entrepreneurs, developers, investors, designers working together to build technology and have fun. We are not taking any political stand, and we are not associated with any political group – we just want to send a message – we can do things different, we can do things better, and it needs to come from the ground up. We just want people to connect in their field of interest and get to know new people regardless of their religion, nationality, gender, or anything else.

There have been some Israeli-Palestinian startups, like Ghost, but never has there been such an event where you just come to meet, work and talk about the things that we know best with people from the other side. I think we need more companies like that, more events like that. We are pioneers, but we are just a drop in the sea, we need more action from the people, from both sides, to do things in order to achieve real progress.

Where did your inspiration come from to organize Tel Aviv Startup Weekend?

First of all, I just wanted to participate in Startup Weekend, so I tweeted, “How come there is no Startup Weekend in Israel?” I got a reply from the US team: “so do it” – and here I am organizing rather than participating, but it’s a lot of fun working with Eddy Resnick, my co-organizer of the events here in Tel Aviv.

After a successful first event, Eddy and I thought about how we could bring Startup Weekend to the next level, and we wanted to use this platform to advance social change. We thought about organizing a women’s Startup Weekend and a few other ideas, but since Startup Weekend is such an amazing platform to bridge gaps, we decided to focus on the greatest one — the one between Palestinians and Israelis. We got in touch with the PC4P and we started to work on it.

On a personal level, I’m not politically involved, and for some time I got a little desperate about the situation, but I decided that like with Startup Weekend, I should do something to make a change. I see it as my own, yet small, contribution to increase the chance for a peace.

How many of each group are signed up and expected to attend?

We expect about 130 attendees, 20-30 of whom are Palestinians. We need to get authorizations from the government/army for each Palestinian participant. This is not an easy task, and this is where we use the help of PC4P. Additionally, Startup Weekend pays for a hotel and transportation for each Palestinian participant. This is why this event is very complicated and expensive, but we have the help from our sponsors like PayPal, Google, and IBM to make it happen. This is why we had to set a limit from the Palestinian side. We are now fully booked with a waiting list – which I think its amazing, taking into consideration that we had only 3 months of work on this. That is a very short time for this kind of event.

How can others get involved with if they’re not in Israel?

We’re working on a livestream (it’s not that easy in term of authorizations), our Twitter is @SWIsrael and we will have our event hashtag: #swtlv