Following the 1993 Oslo Accords international donors have initiated numerous joint Israeli, Palestinian and international women’s peace-building projects, often heralding them as a model for peace and gender development. In such initiatives, particularly in psychosocial approaches to conflict resolution, the feminist slogan ‘the personal is political’ is often called upon to support the focus on the (inter-) personal level and the claim that women find it easier than men to overcome national, class, ethnic and other divides. This, however, is a misinterpretation of the feminist slogan. Its meaning was changed from denoting that women’s so-called personal problems stem from and are linked to broader systemic structures, to proposing that all political circumstances are the result of personal choices and actions of individuals. Supporters of psychosocial conflict resolution argued that people need to change their personal attitudes toward the other first, before political structures can be changed. In joint Palestinian-Israeli women’s dialogue groups a discussion of women’s strategic gender interests is often encouraged to establish a shared platform across the divide. Based on ca. 50 semi-structured interviews, several focus groups and many informal conversations with women from the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza during 2007-9 my paper shows that most Palestinian women reject such psychosocial approaches. The great majority of my informants wanted to see political and material changes first, before they would consider personal or strategic gender issues and reconciliation. For them policy interventions that start from the personal are not convincing, because they risk doing what ‘the personal is political’ was originally intending to prevent: they might detach individual personal problems and agency from broader material, political and ideational structures and thus minimise chances of ‘reaching up’ to affect political changes. Women’s transnational peace initiatives can be successful in bridging national, class, ethnic and other divides only if they adhere to the original meaning of the feminist slogan ‘the personal is political’. Rather than pathologising the Palestinian-Israeli conflict as one stemming from (individual) identity issues, they need to acknowledge its political and historical roots and the direct and harsh impact that the occupation has on women’s everyday lives. Women’s transnational peace activism in Palestine/Israel needs to follow a joint political agenda of resisting the occupation, additional to - but not instead of - which it might propose shared gender or feminist goals.