Cars burn in a street during an anti-regime protest in Tehran, Iran, Jan. 8, 2026. Photo: Stringer/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS

Michael Gamal walked into the room expecting a fight.

A Coptic Egyptian, Michael is a former anti-Israel activist who had spent years certain of who his adversaries were. Two weeks ago, in London, he sat across the table from a Jewish anti-extremism activist. The room was the New Middle East Laboratory, a Tel Aviv Institute convening—the first of its kind anywhere in the world. Where Michael came from, that doesn’t happen. Not online, not at a conference, not ever.

“These conversations can’t happen online, they always devolve into insults and defensiveness,” Michael said following the summit. “But when you’re face-to-face, you’re forced to listen. When you’re sitting across from someone else’s trauma, you’re forced to think about solutions.”

That is the breakthrough. Not a policy. Not a treaty. A room — one that this week’s news should have torn apart.

I’m writing this the same week Iran finally buried Ali Khamenei, more than four months after he was killed in a U.S.-Israeli strike and succeeded by his son, Mojtaba, as Supreme Leader. It’s the same week the ceasefire with the United States collapsed, American forces struck dozens of targets along Iran’s coast, and Tehran’s negotiator warned that the Strait of Hormuz opens on Iran’s terms or not at all. It’s also the week reports surfaced that at least 101 people were executed in Iran in June alone, many of them protesters swept up in January’s uprising.

None of that is abstract to the people who sat in our London room. Coussar Banaie, an Iranian scholar, was one of twenty leaders we convened: Iranian dissidents, Kurdish activists, Druze peace advocates, Assyrian and Coptic Christians, reform-minded Muslim thinkers, Jewish activists working against extremism within their own communities. People whose communities have spent generations as enemies, in exile from one another, or simply invisible to each other. For Coussar, what mattered wasn’t the freedom to speak. It was that the people listening had every reason not to. “We had two days of amazing exchanges and precious networking,” she said, “and most importantly, two days of unconditional free speech.”

This is the part that gets lost when the region is covered only through strikes and funerals: the future of Iran, and of the Middle East around it, is not just being decided by generals and clerics. It’s being shaped by people like Coussar, who will have to build whatever comes next with neighbors they were taught to see only as enemies. A transition of power in Tehran doesn’t create trust between an Iranian dissident and a Kurdish activist. A ceasefire doesn’t create it either, and neither does its collapse. Only people choosing to sit across from each other do that.

Layla (name changed to protect her identity), a Moroccan Jewish writer and commentator who was also in the room, put it sharply: “This wasn’t a resistance summit. It was a resilience summit. A solutions summit. A peace-or-nothing summit. The goal wasn’t to win an argument, it was to help someone see a blind spot they didn’t know they had.”

None of it was easy. It wasn’t meant to be. Honest disagreement is the only kind of dialogue that leads anywhere—and it becomes an entirely different exercise when one person’s country is, that same month, sentencing protestors to death.

This is exactly why the work doesn’t end when the room empties. It only begins there. Introductions become partnerships. Partnerships become networks. Networks become the kind of infrastructure that can absorb the shock of a death, a war, or a regime transition without the people inside it reverting to strangers or enemies.

Governments negotiate ceasefires. They don’t build the trust that outlasts them. That has to be built person by person, before the crisis and after it, through people willing to stay in the room when it would be easier to leave.

Coussar Banaie stayed. So did Michael Gamal and the Jewish activist across the table from him. Whatever happens next in Iran, the relationships forged in that room are still standing.

Ron Katz is president of the Tel Aviv Institute. He holds a Ph.D. in rhetoric from the University of California, Berkeley.