Just over four years ago, Congress achieved a major breakthrough when it came to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: It allocated up to $250 million for people-to-people peace-building efforts.
Named after a longtime Jewish lawmaker who championed peace, the Nita M. Lowey Middle East Partnership for Peace Act had bipartisan support. It immediately became the largest investment of any single country in Israeli-Palestinian civil society initiatives, by a wide margin.
Since then, the MEPPA fund, as it is known, has engaged more than 10,000 people, sustaining its work even as the Israel-Hamas war has undone or strained other peace efforts. And when Lowey died on Sunday at 87, U.S. Jewish groups praised the act as her lasting legacy.
But that legacy is in jeopardy. All of the peace-building groups supported through the MEPPA fund have had their grants canceled amid the Trump administration’s slashing of USAID, the United States’ civilian foreign aid agency, and it’s unclear whether restoring them is possible.
“It took years to get MEPPA passed, and when it was passed, it never occurred to anyone that it could be terminated by the president,” said Dan McDonald, a career civil servant who has overseen MEPPA’s implementation at USAID since its launch. “After years of carefully building these structures to see them all smashed to pieces in just moments is just one of many global tragedies that are playing out right now.”
Donald Trump targeted USAID from his first day in office as profligate and out of sync with the values he wants to promote. His administration has gutted the agency, cutting off funds for health care, poverty relief and education around the world.
Like most agency employees, MEPPA staff were placed on administrative leave shortly after Trump took office in January. And earlier this month, the fund’s beneficiaries were informed that their contracts were being terminated.
Among the 27 civil society organizations to have their funds slashed: the Parents Circle, which had been promised $540,000 to amplify young Israelis and Palestinians calling for nonviolence; Women Wage Peace, one of whose prominent volunteers was murdered when Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023; and the Jerusalem Youth Chorus, which appeared on “America’s Got Talent” last July and announced in December that it had been allocated $500,000.
Some of the grantees received much larger gifts — including $3.3 million to EcoPeace, which uses sustainability as a centerpiece for relationship-building, and $5 million to Middle East Education Through Technology, which teaches coding and design to Israeli and Palestinian teens. For some of the groups, the MEPPA funds allowed for unprecedented expansion.
Each of the groups learned that their funds had been cut off via an email this month that attributed the decision to the “convenience and the interests of the U.S. government,” according to McDonald, who himself is set to lose his job next month. He said the email — which he learned about only through the grantees — was likely written by “folks in Washington who had never heard of MEPPA.”
For the organizations that had been receiving MEPPA funds, the abrupt cuts are especially painful because they thought they had already weathered the biggest crisis they could imagine: Oct. 7.
The Interfaith Encounter Alliance had just signed for a $500,000 MEPPA grant when Hamas attacked Israel in 2023. Immediately, nearly all 40 chapters of the group, founded during the second intifada to bring Jews and Muslims together, shut down across Israel and the West Bank.
But within months, most of the chapters had resumed full operations and many had expanded their efforts. Using the USAID funds, the groups held Jewish-Muslim Ramadan Iftar meals and launched a large-scale social media campaign to recruit new participants, bringing in several hundred people who had not previously engaged in interfaith activities.
“When a cycle of violence happens, it shakes everybody. Some of those who are shaken become more afraid, more closed off. But others are moved to become more active in trying to create a different future, a better future. And they find us,” said CEO Yehuda Stolov. His group had $300,000 of its grant rescinded this month.
The Alliance for Middle East Peace, a coalition of peace-building groups, says a quarter of its 160 member groups have expanded significantly since Oct. 7, while only a handful have contracted. Now, the MEPPA and broader USAID cuts are undercutting that growth, said John Lyndon, ALLMEP’s executive director.
“This is a very consequential and high-stakes moment for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, for the region, and to take the civil society actors who are working for peace and equality and coexistence off the playing field at this moment is a mistake,” Lyndon said.
He argued that bottom-up efforts like those undertaken by USAID recipients aligns with Trump’s stated goal of regional stabilization — and dream of brokering more peace deals between Israel and Arab nations.
“If you want to hear more ideas about diplomacy rather than further violence, peace-builders are the ones that essentially socialize those ideas, de-risk them, so that politicians then pick them up,” Lyndon said.
The appetite for such efforts appears suppressed on all sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In Israel, the governing coalition hinges on hardliners skeptical of diplomacy — and who have advanced their own legislation designed to hobble nonprofits. A proposed Knesset bill seeks to heavily tax foreign government funding for Israeli NGOs, threatening support not only from the United States but from other key backers like the EU, Germany and various embassies.
Among Palestinians, leadership is split between the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, widely seen as corrupt and ineffective, and the Hamas terror group in Gaza that is committed to Israel’s destruction. Some Palestinian activists, meanwhile, dismiss coexistence efforts as efforts to “normalize” Israel.
And the United States under Trump has officially abandoned a commitment to a two-state solution, while also retreating from the historic role America has played in intervening abroad. Among the many overseas expenditures that officials have assailed are funding for Tomorrow’s Youth Organization, a Palestinian NGO that Rep. Mike Lawler charged was headed by a “vicious anti-Israel rapper who advocates for Jew hatred” and, by Trump himself, support for an Arabic-language version of “Sesame Street.”
But even some advocates of funding peace-building efforts see in the moment of crisis an opportunity to make improvements on flawed programs in the Middle East.
Some critics of peace-building initiatives note that while many can count small-scale, individual successes, the field has failed to bring the region closer to peace.
The MEPPA fund specifically has drawn criticism for favoring recipients who were inoffensive — and also potentially less effective. Samer Sinijlawi, a Palestinian activist and former Fatah member who spent five years in an Israeli prison during the first intifada, recalled that his bid for funds in partnership with Yishai Fleisher, a settler leader from Hebron, was rejected.
'It was just cosmetic'
“MEPPA didn’t want to do something serious — it was just cosmetic,” said Sinijlawi. He added, “It needs to get complicated, messy, because that’s where we live. You can’t get anything done around here if you’re scared of getting into trouble.”
Meanwhile, some in the field are receptive to the argument that the fund and other international aid programs may include waste or are larger than needed.
“Clean up shop, that’s fine. Trim the fat,” said Meredith Rothbart, co-founder and CEO of Amal-Tikva, a Jerusalem-based nonprofit that seeks to expand capacity in the peace-building field. “But don’t exclude societal leaders who have the deepest understanding, because then you leave a vacuum with no societal buy-in, creating a reality in which any agreement or desired future is essentially a house of cards.”
Rothbart and Amal-Tikva’s chief strategy officer, Ariel Markose, are soon heading to the United States to try to chart a path forward. Initially, they had planned to go to Washington to lobby for MEPPA’s reinstatement, but with that seemingly off the table, their focus has shifted to understanding where the administration now stands on civil society peace-building.
In New York, the pair will turn to private philanthropy to explore ways to secure more stable, flexible funding to insulate the field from political shifts. Stolov, too, said he aimed to make up the lost MEPPA grant with private fundraising.
Lyndon is also looking to diversify ALLMEP’s support. In December, the group met with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer to advocate for an independent fund seeded by an array of entities that would not be vulnerable to shifting political winds in any particular country.
“We want private donors, individual governments, independent entities all investing and leveraging their relative strengths to really engage Israeli and Palestinian society and build support for peace from the bottom up,” Lyndon said.
Some in the United States remain hopeful that the MEPPA funds can be distributed through another government agency, such as the State Department or the International Development Finance Corporation, which has distributed some of the act’s funds and so far has escaped the hatchet wielded by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.
But with the Trump administration still in slash-and-burn mode — literally, in the case of USAID, as workers have reportedly been told to burn documents — it’s unclear whether U.S. support for any of the efforts has a future.
Rep. Steny Hoyer, a Democrat from Maryland, cited MEPPA in his statement mourning Lowey on Sunday. In a statement to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, he decried cuts to the program.
“My friend Nita Lowey championed the Middle East Partnership for Peace Act because she understood that fostering grassroots engagement between Israelis and Palestinians is vital to the security of both peoples and the region,” Hoyer said. “DOGE’s unconstitutional effort to defund the program is part of the Trump Administration’s disastrous strategy to force America to retreat from the world. Trump has sabotaged America’s reputation and credibility, leaving our country, our allies, and our world less safe.”
The White House did not return a request for comment.
As U.S. Jewish groups such as the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC praised MEPPA in encomiums to Lowey, they did not mention its current turmoil. The American Jewish Committee, for example, said in a statement that the act, “a transformative law, continues to be central to AJC’s advocacy as we work to build trust and understanding between Israelis and Palestinians, and strive for a more peaceful and interconnected Middle East.”
But behind the scenes, some of the organizations have been actively engaging with the Trump administration, Congress and external partners to push for MEPPA’s continuation and gain clarity on its fate, according to Benjamin Rogers, the AJC’s director of Middle East and North Africa Initiatives. He called the fund vital for Israeli-Arab cooperation at a time of “heartbreak, mistrust and trauma.”
One key question, Rogers said, is whether any part of MEPPA can be salvaged and in what form, citing the possibility of shifting it from USAID to the State Department, which would entail different oversight and legislative priorities.
“We’ve heard people saying MEPPA is dead, while others are saying it’s not. We’re just trying to get clarity right now,” he said. “Will there be any exceptions made? Will it be for the entire MEPPA program or just for certain individual contracts?”
Rogers said that no decisions had been made and expressed concern over the lack of a clear timeframe, noting that many organizations were “fervently reliant on MEPPA for their survival.”
It’s not just the groups that are fighting to survive, said Markose, and it’s not just idealism that keeps her and others trying to do difficult work at a fraught time.
“I’m not doing it for the Palestinians. I’m not doing it because I assume that I have Palestinian partners — even though I believe that I do,” she said. “I’m doing it for my own family, for my own kids. This is something that I think hasn’t been given a chance. We have five men in my family serving in the IDF at the same time, my brother-in-law was injured — it’s unsustainable. For me, this is personal.”
