The Seeds of Peace are maturing into young adults. It’s not summer camp any more.
BY ISABEL KERSHNER | WHEN AARON D. MILLER left the State Department a year and a half ago, after advising six consecutive secretaries of state on the Arab-Israeli peace process, he did so with a sense that in the Israeli-Palestinian case American diplomacy simply hadn’t worked, and wasn’t about to either.
“This is a generational conflict,” says Miller, who was at State for 25 years, speaking to The Report during a recent visit to Israel, “and it won’t be resolved anytime soon. I left the State Department because I realized that this is a conflict that has played out over time, and will only be resolved in phases over time.”
Since then, as president of the Seeds of Peace organization, Miller has concerned himself with the next generation—one he hopes will produce a crop of leaders on both sides who can break the mold and forge a right environment for peace.
“Seeds of Peace is not a grassroots organization,” Miller goes on. “We’ll never have thousands of people forming a mass movement with public constituencies. Rather it’s about creating and empowering new leadership.”
Miller was there when the first “seeds,” as the participants call themselves, stood in the crowd on the White House lawn in 1993 while President Clinton, late Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO chief Yasser Arafat shook hands and signed the Oslo Accords. It was a time of great optimism, and through the mid-90s the program—dedicated to regional coexistence, conflict management and resolution—grew.
Its centerpiece, the international summer camp in Maine, has expanded from that 1993 group of 47 male Israeli, Palestinian, Egyptian and American teenagers, picked as delegates by their respective governments, and a similar mix of girls only in 1994, to close to 500 15-year-olds from over a dozen nations in three co-ed sessions.
The seeds from those early years have also grown. The Israelis became soldiers and then students; the Arab youths went on to university. Many have remained in touch with the organization, returning to summer camp as staffers or reconnecting after a break. And as they start to emerge from military service and years in the ivory towers, they are facing new challenges—fulfilling the leadership potential for which they were selected by their governments in the first place; defining how to move forward, together, as Seeds alumni; and maintaining faith and cross-border friendships in a time not of peace, but war.
Remarkably, given the regional tensions and the trend, particularly in Arab society, against dialogue and “normalization” of ties with Israelis, the organization is getting almost too big to contain itself.
“I have to raise $7 million this year,” says Miller, “and it’s never enough.”
Founded by John Wallach, an American author and journalist who died in 2002, Seeds of Peace has widened in scope over the years to take in youths from other conflict areas including the Balkans, Cyprus, India, Pakistan and Afghanistan. This year, Miller is launching a new Beyond Borders project, bringing in youths from countries outside the immediate sphere of the Middle East conflict like Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Iraq together with Americans for a Muslim-Jewish-Christian dialogue.
The main focus remains the Arab-Israel conflict, with new efforts going into programming for the over-18s and over-20s who remain actively involved. Last year the Seeds of Peace Center for Coexistence, in the French Hill neighborhood on the seam of east and west Jerusalem, ran a 90-hour mediation and negotiation course for seeds over 20.
Next, a “Difficult Conversation” course is in the works, to train participants for intensive dialogue and handling debate in groups with diverse opinions. And dozens of Israeli, Palestinian, Egyptian and Jordanian graduates, or “mature seeds” as they are known within the organization, recently returned from a closed workshop abroad where they met “to talk about all that’s happened, all that’s come between them like the army, the intifada, and how to go forward as adults,” in the words of one Seeds staffer.
Shira Kaplan, 21, an Israeli from Herzliyah and a graduate of the Seeds Class of ’97, finished her compulsory military service three months ago and has come back to work at the Jerusalem center before leaving to take up a scholarship to Harvard in the fall to study liberal arts.
“We still maintain friendships that are now seven years old,” she says, stressing that she is only speaking for herself, and not on behalf of her Israeli or other peers; Seeds is proud of encompassing diversities of opinion across the political spectrums on all sides. “It is harder for younger seeds to form these friendships because of the political situation now, but we have come to realize that our friendships can serve as a network. In the long run,” she goes on, in what must be music to Miller’s ears, “maybe we can create an environment for peace on the basis of our education, our medicine, our business and all the different fields we’re getting involved in, as well as politics.”
In March, Kaplan and a Palestinian peer, Fadi al-Salamin from Hebron who is now studying in the United States, joined Miller on a fundraising tour in California.
Having Miller as the organization’s president has “put Seeds of Peace in a very serious context,” says Kaplan, in that “he sees a future in this, more than the State Department. After the failure of the peace process, he presents us as the alternative, whereas we used to be presented as a nice summer camp.”
NOT SURPRISINGLY, THE ISSUE of the Israeli seeds’ military service is a controversial and sensitive one. For one thing, says Sami al-Jundi, a Palestinian supervisor at the Jerusalem Center, “one side is going into the army while their friends on the other side are going off to enjoy themselves at university.”
Then there’s the pressure put on Palestinian and Arab seeds from people around them who don’t agree with normalizing ties with Israelis, and who use the fact that their “friends” are going into the army—the strong arm of an often brutal, humiliating occupation in Palestinian eyes—as a wedge to prize them away from the organization.
Jundi also points to the pressures the Israeli seeds face from their peers at school who accuse them of cosying up to “terrorists.”
Kaplan acknowledges the “seeds’ dilemma of soldierhood” that she and her peers all faced. No male graduates of the program have refused to do their compulsory army service for political reasons, though some of the females have. Rather, as outstanding youths with leadership qualities to start with, many of the Israeli seeds have gone into officers’ courses and elite units.
Kaplan and Jundi both say that the Palestinian seeds have come to accept that doing compulsory army service is the duty of the young Israelis.
“In my interpretation,” says Kaplan, “they don’t understand those who choose to be combat soldiers or to stay in the army beyond conscription. We have one seed who’s been in the army for six years now.”
But in many cases, the experience the seeds bring with them affects how they serve. Ned Lazarus, the outgoing program director who has worked for Seeds of Peace for eight years and is now going on to doctoral studies, assumes that a seed manning a checkpoint would treat the Palestinian civilians with more respect than other soldiers.
Lazarus has some background on the subject, having spent many hours at checkpoints and calling army contacts trying to facilitate the movement of West Bank and Gaza seeds to events in Jerusalem and elsewhere, held up even when they hold valid permits.
Lazarus relates a case of a seed serving in a liaison unit at the Jordanian border, who used his Seeds of Peace skills to put warmth into a previously cold, formal relationship with Jordanian officers on the other side.
Seeds of Peace reached a low point at the beginning of the intifada, after one of its Israeli Arab stars, Asel Asleh, was killed by Israeli security forces during a demonstration in his Galilee home town of Arrabeh. No Palestinian delegates came to the summer camp of 2001, since the Palestinian Authority refused to select any. The program has since recovered.
The PA is still not officially involved, but prominent Palestinian moderate and Al-Quds University president Sari Nusseibeh helped put together a delegation one summer and now, Palestinian parents from Jenin to Rafah are calling in by themselves, pleading to get their children registered for camp.
Miller puts the popular demand down to the fact that Seeds of Peace offers the children three and a half weeks away from the madness in a healthy, safe atmosphere. Also, through its education program and contacts, Seeds of Peace can help pave the way into American universities, affording good access to prestigious campuses around the United States.
During his recent visit to Israel, Miller also went to Ramallah and sat with PA officials he has come to know so well. Senior figures like Prime Minister Ahmed Qurei (Abu Ala) and Gaza strongman Muhammad Dahlan give their blessing to the Seeds program as well as their protection, while Yasser Arafat is still seen wearing a Seeds pin given to him in 1993.
Miller came to Israel to deliver the annual Jimmy Carter lecture at Tel Aviv University’s Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African studies. It was entitled “The Pursuit of Arab-Israeli Peace 1993-2000: Where Did the U.S. Go Wrong?” and in it, Miller gave an honest appraisal of his and his colleagues’ part in the ultimate failure of Oslo and Camp David, as those that “enabled” Ehud Barak’s high-risk, go-for-broke strategy.
“Boldness,” he said, “should be weighed against chances of success.” And in his view, the chances of reaching an agreement at Camp David in July 2000 were, for a variety of reasons, “remote.” Among other things, he pointed to the asymmetry of power between the Israelis and Palestinians preceding the summit, and to the fact that Washington had been “far too forgiving” of the Palestinians on incitement and terror, and of the Israelis in terms of the settlement building enterprise. There was also much time wasted on the doomed Israeli-Syrian track, a lack of preparation for the summit and “no Plan B” if it didn’t work. It all made for a “perfect storm brewing of misjudgment, misconception and mistake,” in Miller’s words.
With what he calls the “transactional” give-and-take side of the peace process disabled for now, Miller is concentrating, through Seeds of Peace, on the other—”transformational”—side of peace-making. Soon, within the next five to ten years, staffers hope, it will be possible to tell if the Seeds program has indeed succeeded in producing a generation of new leaders in the Israeli, Palestinian and wider Arab arena, whether within their own communities, or in the wider political sphere. So far, with so many summer camp graduates wanting to remain a part of the network into adulthood, the Seeds staff is most encouraged by what it is seeing.
“Personally, it’s about who they are as human beings,” says vice president and camp director Tim Wilson, who has known the seeds since the program’s inception. “I couldn’t be more proud of them as people. They are questioning themselves, and what’s going on in their conflict.”
Adds Sami al-Jundi: “I’m optimistic. On the Israeli side, the majority of leaders have come from the army, so it’s good the seeds are serving. And on the Palestinian side, the majority came out of the universities, including Arafat himself, who started out as a student leader in Cairo.”
As for Kaplan, a confident, articulate young woman with big ideas, she envisions a future with seeds alumni going all the way to the top. “The seeds who want to go into politics want to see a party emerging from among the alumni,” she says. “People are talking the same way on the Palestinian side, and even a Jordanian is saying the same thing.”
She imagines a time when the newly-elected Israeli and Palestinian leadership will “no longer comprise of bloody warriors who risk going out of business if they cease war. Instead, they will be friends and peers from Seeds of Peace who have shared the vision of peace together, and who really wish to put an end to the conflict.”
If that dream were ever to become reality, it would constitute nothing less than genetically-modified generational transformation. That’s quite a Plan B.