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Seeds of Peace dialogue programs between young Israelis and Palestinians produce clear results

Oct 20, 2008 / No Comments

NEW YORK | The San Francisco Chronicle yesterday published an article about the effectiveness of dialogue programs between Israelis and Palestinians in the Middle East (“Few Results Seen from Mideast Teen Peace Camps” by Matthew Kalman). Seeds of Peace was featured prominently in this piece as a leader in youth empowerment and conflict resolution.

Because the article was based on an unpublished report by Pal Vision, a research center in Jerusalem, we remain unable to examine the methodology of the report. However, many of this report’s key findings are not consistent with public, independent studies of Seeds of Peace dialogue programs. Again, because the report is not public and remains unpublished, we are unable to determine which groups were evaluated along with Seeds of Peace.

Unfortunately, Seeds of Peace was not given an opportunity to participate in the article or provide information about our internationally-recognized conflict resolution model and follow-up programs in the Middle East. Below, please find a clarification of the incompleteness and inaccuracies found in the San Francisco Chronicle.

Fact vs. Fiction:

FICTION:  “… the programs have failed to produce a single prominent peace activist on either side [Israeli/Palestinian] …”

FACT:  Seeds of Peace has produced leaders, who we call ‘Seeds,’ in all sectors of society, including medicine, business, nonprofit, media and government. Today, there are nearly 4,000 Seeds around the world. There are currently Seeds working on both the Israeli and Palestinian negotiating teams, clerking at the Israeli Supreme Court, working at prominent Palestinian nongovernmental and political activist organizations, and dozens have returned to Seeds of Peace as professional conflict resolution facilitators. They also hold influential positions in the media and business.

Moreover, our Seeds play important leadership roles as community/grassroots leaders, educators, mentors, friends and family members. Part of our work is to strengthen people-to-people interactions between Israelis and Palestinians so that diplomatic progress can be supported and sustained. Thousands of Seeds make the case for peace and mutual understanding every day in their communities.

The fact is, there are thousands of participants from Seeds of Peace programs making an impact at all levels of society every day.

FICTION: “… Palestinian participants were unrepresentative of a wider society … only 7 percent of participants were refugee camp residents, even though they make up 16 percent of the Palestinian population.”

FACT: This study does not track our Camp program outcomes. Seeds of Peace is committed to balanced representation within all delegations, including the Palestinian delegation. For example, in 2006, 34 percent of Palestinian participants at the Seeds of Peace Camp were from refugee camps (25 out of 74).

Pal Vision Study vs. Independent Studies:

Two highly-respected independent studies evaluate Seeds of Peace programs

The unpublished Pal Vision study reported by the San Francisco Chronicle states that 91 percent of Palestinians are no longer in contact with any Israelis they had met through the program; 93 percent said there was no follow-up to the encounter activity; only 5 percent agreed that the program had helped “promote peace culture and dialogue between participants;” and only 11 percent came away believing that “there is something that unites us with the other party.”

This does not track with outside evaluation of Seeds of Peace programs. An independent study by Social Impact, Inc. in 2005 of Seeds of Peace Camp and follow-up programs gives a much different account of how coexistence programs work, and work well. In this study:

As a result of the Seeds of Peace experience

  • 60% of Seeds felt they have an improved understanding of the other side.
  • 50% gained the ability to “empathize” with the plight of others.
  • 65% have the desire to stay involved with conflict and peace issues.
  • 65% rated the Camp experience as “highly transformative.”
  • 39% continue to use the Seeds of Peace message in their professional work.

Zogby International, a highly reputable independent polling firm, also conducted an evaluation of Seeds of Peace programs in 2004. In this study:

As a result of the Seeds of Peace experience

  • 76% say their view of the “other side” improved during Camp, including 79% of Israelis and 63% of Palestinians
  • 94% of respondents said they forged friendships with campers from other countries
  • There was significant growth in acknowledging the right of the “other side” to a safe and independent state among both Palestinian (up to 62% from 40%) and Israeli (up 79% from 71%) campers

Follow-up Programs in the Middle East

In the Pal Vision study, 93 percent of participants said there were no follow-up activities available for continued interaction with the “other side.” At Seeds of Peace, follow-up activities are available on a daily basis not only to Seeds in the Middle East who have returned from the Camp experience, but also for other members of the community, thereby creating a multiplier effect.

In the Middle East, Seeds of Peace provides a broad menu of following activities through program offices in Amman, Cairo, Jerusalem, Tel-Aviv and Ramallah.

Here are a few examples:

Conflict Management & Mediation Training program: Seeds of Peace has trained dozens of professional conflict resolution facilitators.

Online dialogue continues after Camp: Seeds of Peace uses the Internet to overcome the challenges of physical borders and barriers when it comes to dialogue between two sides of a conflict. Hundreds of Seeds participate in a password protected, secure online forum where they are able to openly discuss relevant issues of the day with other participants from Camp.

Hebrew & Arabic Language courses: Enhancing the ability of Seeds to communicate with “the other side,” Seeds of Peace offers language and cultural courses in Hebrew and Arabic.

Graduate Program: Hundreds of Seeds are now leaders in their respective professions. They stay in touch with each other and to the mission of peace through this program, which offers opportunities to develop cross-border economic partnerships and community service projects. In October 2008, these young peacemakers will convene in Rabat, Morocco to discuss how to launch new joint community service initiatives. This is the second meeting of its kind, and future meetings are in the works.

Seeds Café: In partnership with USAID, Seeds of Peace provides one of the only forums in Jerusalem where Israelis and Palestinians come together for public education and dialogue in a non-political setting. These sessions are organized and led by Seeds themselves, often with guest speakers.

For more on these programs, visit the Middle East programs page ».

Meet two Vietnam vets-turned peace activists who keep campers healthy

Aug 8, 2019 / 2 Comments

We tend to highlight the programmatic aspect of Camp—from dialogue to arts and sports. These are the areas that challenge campers and spark joy, that make them grow in ways they could never imagine.

But there are also the unsung heroes who keep Camp ticking (like the staff working in the Camp office), who keep our campers fed (Chef Mike and his crew), and our medical staff who tend to our Campers physical and emotional well-being. Meet two members of this vital team: Nurse Peggy and Doc Rob.

Peggy Akers is a nurse practitioner from Portland who has been at Camp for the past 10 years. Rob Boudewijn retired last year as an emergency department physician’s assistant, and this is his second summer at Camp.

Seeds of Peace: What do you see here that you think, perhaps, other camp medical staff don’t have to deal with?

Doc Rob: The problems that we see here, medically, are minor. We are always ready for emergencies. That’s what we are here for—those potentials. But, at least in my experience, a majority of them are cuts and bruises or aches and pains. And the majority of campers ask, ‘can I go back?’ Most of them want to get back out in the field and do whatever.

Nurse Peggy: I think it’s dialogue. I think that’s the part, where we see kids who are struggling with dialogue, and they will sometimes come in because it is hard. And they don’t know how to say, ‘I don’t want to go to dialogue.’ We do everything we can to get them to go back to dialogue. It has been so wonderful to have Ella here; it’s really changed things for all of us.

Seeds of Peace: Describe a little bit about who Ella is and her work.

NP: Ella is the social worker who is available to the entire camp. And she is here for us when we have a kid who is struggling. Because we cannot really leave here and go off into the woods and talk for a little bit.

So, Ella is here to really talk to the campers. We have to be pretty creative to figure that out. Because you do not want to discount their headaches; it’s real for some of them. Dialogue is the most important part. The kids do not tell me what they talk about in dialogue. Sometimes they will tell me about an exercise that they did and how hard that was. Some of them do not like dialogue at first. I am just really honest, saying how important it is, and that it is a safe space for them to say anything. And if they do not get that, then I do get Ella. She’s the in between for all of us.

Seeds of Peace: Many kids come into any camp medical infirmary with stomachaches or headaches. It could be what they ate, or dehydration. But you hear about how emotional trauma or stress takes on a physical form. And so that’s probably a real difference here as well.

NP: You know sometimes kids just need to come in here and chill. They just need to lay down in a quiet place, and they need space. Then they wake up and they say, ‘Oh, I feel so much better!’ They know we are checking on them every 15 minutes or so, and we are right here. I guess I feel motherly.

Seeds of Peace: One of the things that I think is fascinating, too, unlike most camps in Maine, especially in the international session, is that the campers are coming from really different backgrounds, cultures, and geographies. It’s different water, food, climate, bugs, and bacteria than they might be used to.

NP: Oh yeah, the bug bites. Some of the kids aren’t used to the bug bites. Each group is always embarrassed, but the biggest problem for this session, as it is every year, is the constipation. And I talk about it the first day. I say ‘there is magic stuff here, all you have to do is come in and ask for it.’ It’s Metamucil.

DR: I was talking to a young man the other day about using the bathrooms, and he said, “I can’t go there—everyone will hear me.” You have no privacy even though the doors are closed. You can hear everything, and for some people, that’s a big issue. Particularly for kids. You can imagine them saying, “I’m not going anywhere,” and then five days later, well …

NP: So they can come over to use our bathrooms any time, and they know that. And then we always have pads for the girls back here, in case they need anything. We try to make it so that it’s an easy, safe place for them. I hope they feel like they can come here for anything.

Seeds of Peace: Are there certain times of day or certain activities that when you look at the schedule you think, “Okay, let me get ready because I’m going to be busy in an hour?”

NP: Ga-Ga! Our philosophy is, we bring everything up there to the Ga-Ga pit. Big bags of ice and all the bandages. And nothing happens. If we sit here and wait for them to bring people, then they bring people. But if we’re right there, no one gets hurt. It’s true!

Seeds of Peace: We talk about Camp being transformational for those who come here. How do you see that play out in your space?

NP: We usually sit here and look out. We see the kids from the first days, where they’re just sort of walking along to dialogue, to where they’re suddenly arm-in-arm. It just happens, and it’s so beautiful to watch. Just laughing and skipping along. Every day just feels lighter for them.

DR: I think it’s important to stress that the main medical part here is the nurse. We’re both there, but I try to keep myself as much on the periphery as possible. I’d love to know more, but also, I think, they’ve got enough stuff going on, they don’t need me getting involved. They just need to know that I’ll be there for them if something happens. But when it comes to people like Peggy, they have much more knowledge of and camaraderie with the campers.

NP: You know, you’re out in the woods here! I mean, you’ve got emergency meds, but still. These are someone else’s kids. Our job is to protect them and keep them safe while they’re here. We take it really seriously.

Seeds of Peace: You started to tell me that the two of you have a really unique story about how you met … how your friendship began.

NP: We didn’t meet in Vietnam, but we met because of Vietnam. We lived in San Francisco; I was going to school there to become a nurse practitioner. I had heard about the Vet Center and I was kind of struggling. I had never told anyone I was even in Vietnam. (I was a nurse in the war.) I wanted to see if there were other nurses that had been there. In Vietnam you don’t go as a group. You get orders and you go. So, it is not like you go together and come back together like they did in World War II. So, I didn’t really know people that had been there. I went to the Vet Center and Rob was there, and we became friends. Then, somehow, we both ended up in Maine, and we have been friends forever.

DR: I worked at the Center for many years after Vietnam. I left Vietnam in 1969, I was a medic there. And at that time, we called it the post-Vietnam syndrome, which is now called Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. During that whole period of time until President Carter came along, the VA wouldn’t acknowledge it. Then, under President Carter, they established the Vet Center and we opened up the first center in San Francisco. I was one of the people that helped set it up, and Peggy was the first woman that we ever had. And at that time, our job was to try to reach out to Vietnam veterans, any vet, but particularly Vietnam veterans struggling with whatever issues: drug addiction, PTSD, a whole variety of things.

NP: One of the things that brought us together as friends, Rob’s been in the peace movement. He walked across the country with other veterans. He started a group called … I can’t remember the name of it anymore.

DR: Veterans for Draft Resistance.

NP: I got very involved in the peace movement in San Francisco.

DR: After Vietnam, she worked in Thailand in refugee camps.

NP: I first came up here to Camp and felt so much hope. Just seeing these kids. And sometimes you can get so discouraged when you are right in the middle of everything. You march for this, march for that, but nothing changes. But Camp for me was such a wonderful place to feel that hope for the world, for these kids. I don’t mean to be laying the heavy burden on them. But when I am here, there is a great possibility that there could be peace and a better climate. You just overhear their conversations and feel just ‘wow.’

DR: This is a story that is not told often enough. Because it is easy to just feel dismal and despair, and particularly when you come to our age. These kids are great. These kids are our future.

NP: They are such special kids really. Sadly, we do not get to know them as much as the counselors do. Because we really only get to know the ones that come in frequently or are not feeling well. Sometimes I will see a kid and think, ‘I have never seen them before and I wish that I had.’ But at the same time, I don’t want them to be here in the infirmary. The day the kids leave, you see the absolute love and compassion between the counselors and the kids. It’s so beautiful. And I just weep. To have those relationships; some of these kids don’t want to leave.

Seeds of Peace: Most are going back home to a reality that is very different than this. Even the campers who are walking back into the most privileged circumstances, they are still walking into a teenagerhood that is not as accepting as it is here.

NP: Absolutely, I see them being goofy and silly. We watched a baseball game yesterday, and the kids were dancing and cheering each other on even though they are on opposite teams and it was just so sweet. To see that these are kids who might not be so goofy in front of other kids at home. It was pretty wonderful.

Our voices: Members of the Seeds of Peace family speak out during Gaza war

Aug 15, 2014 / No Comments

In the midst of this horrific violence, we turn to the voices in our community—Seeds, Educators, counselors, and staff members—who have experienced brutal violence and fear; who are saying enough to the killing and the dehumanization; who are listening to and supporting one another; and who are calling for peace.

Their message is one of hope, but they are also not naive to the violence, injustice, occupation, fear, and hatred, they face. Seeds of Peace is not charged with or capable of negotiating peace treaties or ceasefires that would end the disaster that is this violence, but we exist to stand by and support the Seeds community as they tell their truths. These are their voices.

Ahmad
Adi
Mohammed
Hashem		 Roy
Aly
Danny
Yaala		 Ophir
Rama
Jane
Lior		 Hamutal & Maysoon
Hannah
Voices in the media

 

Ahmad

My dear family,

I am writing to you today because there is seriously no place I’d rather be more than Camp right now.

I find myself helpless, sinking in the sorrow of my people. I have been thinking of you intensely, as I find hope whenever I do. Your messages ignite hope inside me that has been there since the summer of 2012.

The situation takes me back two summers ago. I remember every single detail of the safe zone that took me away from the reality and at the same time made me much more aware of it.

I remember how peace was the only thing we were thinking about. I remember how love filled the place. I must say, I need nothing more than that.

The recent weeks were mind wrecking, but also illuminating. I have come to the realization of how much a human life means, and how easily it can be taken away.

I hope the situation gets better as soon as possible to stop the brutal killing and the unbearable bloodshed. I am now three wars old with more to come, but I swear to you all I will never forget what each and every one of you said in your life giving messages.

This is one of the times that I thank God for being a part of the Seeds of Peace family. I sincerely hope to see you all this summer, even if I know for sure that I won’t.

I won’t lose hope.

With my all love,
your brother Ahmad (Gaza)

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Adi

Last night a rocket was shot at my grandmother’s bed.
The pictures are nothing compared to pictures from Gaza.

Still, a rocket was shot at my grandmother’s bed.

Dialogue in Seeds of Peace has taught me well: We are the oppressors.

Still, a Palestinian rocket was shot at my grandmother’s bed.

I went to protest last night against the war with Jewish and Palestinian friends.
We had so much hope.

Still, a rocket was shot at my grandmother’s bed.

My grandmother is used to it.
She’s been living on the border with Gaza for 65 years.
She’s been going to the shelter every once in a while for the past 10 years.

She left her home two weeks ago when escalation started.
It wasn’t luck that kept her safe.

Still, I seek no revenge. I seek an end.

I want rockets to stop being shot at our grandmothers and their grandmothers’ beds.

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Mohammed

I have spent years working with Seeds because I want peace. In fact, all members of Seeds of Peace in Gaza stay engaged in our programs because they believe in peace. The families huddled dozens to a room—they want peace. But we also want to be treated like human beings.

We often wonder what Israelis think about us. What they think about their government when hundreds of civilians are killed, when thousands of homes are damaged, when hundreds of thousands are without electricity and water.

I live in a poor neighborhood called Shajaiya. Most of the people in my neighborhood are not educated. I was born to a very poor family, and built myself from zero. My father died when I was young. I’ve always worked several jobs to survive.

People ask me all the time why I don’t leave this neighborhood. The fact is, my neighbors need my help. Every Ramadan I used to make food for families in the neighborhood. But the war came during Ramadan this year, and I don’t have anything to give them. They ask me to call the electricity company. They see me as a leader, but I don’t belong to any party or any politician. I am a human being. I am a Gazan.

People look to me because I’m educated. Because I work. Because I have been to the United States. Gaza is where I’ve grown up—it has made me who I am. It’s not easy to be a leader in this situation. It requires me to be responsible. I cannot run away. I have to face it.

My extended family is living here with me. There are 30 of us. I have three brothers. One is dead and I’m responsible for his family. My son’s family, and my other brothers’ families are here. I am responsible for all them. I have to be strong, as a father and as a community leader. It would be shameful for me to leave. The others depend on me.

But I am human. I am scared. The bombs are exploding every minute.

The war is terrible. It’s a dirty, unfair war. Thousands of tons of bombs are hitting Gaza. Thousands of people are without shelter. Nobody can sleep. Hundreds of people have been killed. The power is out and soon food will rot, and we will not have water now since we can’t pump it. Sewage is running in the street. The banks are closed, so there is no money. And sick people cannot go to the hospital. This is going to be a humanitarian crisis. On top of the bombs that are dropping.

Do Israelis want us to spend another 50 years talking about peace? Gaza has been under siege for seven years. We are in a cage. Does anyone care?

The war is unjust, but it’s not my fault. I keep doing my job because I believe in peace.

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Hashem

As a change-maker, these times make me reflect on my mission.

They refocus my compass towards the ultimate goal of reaching justice for my people, and those who strive for it in this world: a justice that is not a privilege, one that is not restricted to a certain people or religion.

With the help of Seeds of Peace, I have a spark of change that’s always vivid. It always reminds me that justice will prevail, and soon.

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Roy

I’ve lost two friends to Israeli-Palestinian violence, and these days remind me that I can always lose more.

Four teenagers were kidnapped and murdered this week in Palestine and Israel because they were Jewish or Palestinian.

Kidnapping is a very fitting brutality in the Middle East, where reality itself is being hijacked: people in power (or aspiring to have it) advocate for a backwards, hostile narrative about the true nature of “Palestinians” and “Jews,” thus occluding the identities of the true polarized sides in this part of the Middle East: “extremists” and “moderates,” kidnappers and abductees not just of lives, but of narratives and agendas.

All of us who want a sane life in this region can only survive by dodging the violent crazies on both sides, the exacerbating effects of slanted mass media coverage, our visionless leaders, and the flattening effects of social media memes and talkback culture that impoverishes the debate about life in this region while giving the illusion that we are somehow informed about what the other side is truly like.

There is a silent majority out there that wants to live peacefully, be respected, and offer respect to anyone else who derives meaning out of life by having their home west of the Jordan river. Unfortunately, we have not yet figured out how to communicate our shared values and goals. By default, we surrender to a false discourse about the futility of trying to live with another people, identifying them erroneously by their nationality or religion rather by their toxic value system.

If we fail at communicating for much longer, our identities will be hijacked to a point of no return. Regardless of who we are as individuals, we will find that being “Israeli” or “Palestinian” will be completely formed and informed by fanatics—Jewish, Christian and Muslim—to justify more violence, more extremism and more death.

Aly

People always ask me how I can simultaneously be both pro-Israel and pro-Palestine.

The truth is, one can have a principled stance on this conflict, and that principle is nonviolence. Gandhi liberated the entire Indian sub-continent from British rule through non-violent means. If it’s good enough for India—a country of over a billion people with 21 languages, eight religions, and hundreds of regional and ethnic groups—then it’s certainly good enough for Israel and Palestine.

We need to start living by his timeless words: “I am prepared to die, but there is no cause for which I am prepared to kill.”

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Danny

This is a very sad moment. People will suffer because of the way our leaders and some (possibly many) of the people in our society chose to address the conflict.

A few people on both sides decided to take matters into their own hands and sparked fires fed by various forces, and we, and the many like us, did not carry our voice clearly and loudly enough.

I know that there are much better ways of addressing our conflict; ways which will respect each other, save lives and sufferings and lead to peace. Yes, we can live together or side by side in peace. Yes, intending peace is the only realistic road to move to a better future for all of us.

We do not need nor wish for more dead or wounded heroes. We need that both societies fully respect each other, that each individual respect every others person’s life. We need an end to the very long suffering of the Palestinian people, and that of Israelis. War, regardless of who wins, will not solve our conflict; only respectful peace will.

The road to peace is one of recognition, understanding, inclusion, and humanity. As Seeds of Peace we try to develop these.

The vast majority of our people know this deep down in their hearts, and want this. We need to help them lead the way. It is sad that people need to fight for their protection, lives, dignity and wish for freedom. Lets change this into a better and more effective future for all of us.

Seeds of Peace builds people and builds communities which know how to live in peace and work out their differences in effective and peaceful ways.

Wishing and working for peace, equality, and societal sovereignty may not be popular when the guns roar. But this, more than ever, is the time for us to talk with people of that which they really want, of that which is possible and of the acceptance of the other.

Yes, I know that when war erupts, people first rush to secure their existence, by all means necessary. And yet I know, that the only real security lies in mutual acceptance. One must first exist to make peace. We must be very aware and very eloquent in expressing our awareness that the promise of a better future for either of us needs the existence of both of us.

Yaala

In light of recent events back home in Israel and Palestine, I have come to yet again reevaluate my experiences at Seeds of Peace.

While I realize that many question the validity of Seeds and organizations similar to it, at the end of the each day like today, the memories I have made and the friendships I have formed there help me cope with the helplessness and powerlessness that I feel.

I am hoping for the safety of all Palestinians and Israelis tonight.

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Ophir

This is for my Palestinian friends.

These are hard times for all of us. While my grandparents, and now me and my family, are living under threat of missiles, you live under direct military control.

And some of you are in Gaza, or have probably have friends or relatives in Gaza, who find themselves trapped with no connection to Hamas actions.

It’s easy for me to look on the suffering and fear that my people experience. It’s the most automatic thing to do. Yet hundreds of thousands of civilians in Gaza, who are born into poverty and hostility, will suffer more than I or my friends ever will.

As an Israeli, it’s natural to me to support the military operation because when someone throws a rocket at my house, I’ll try to stop that man from doing so …

But then I hear the horror in Gaza, and I know that although I believe in my country, some of its actions–like the eternal blockade on Gaza in areas unrelated to security—aren’t justified.

Emotions led me to publicly support the military operation, but now other voices inside of me tell me that something is terribly wrong with us—Israelis and Palestinians. These are things that should not happen.

I ask you now, what do you think should happen? How can we, who met each other in order to come to understanding four or six years ago, keep our sanity and not lose the sense of hope that lead us to speak to one another?

Rama

As a Palestinian from Yarmouk Refugee Camp in Syria and now a refugee in another camp in Gaza, I am again forced to live in the middle of killing and fear.

I’ve been displaced twice so far this war and even the new location we moved to is not safe. I hate this daily fear of losing family members—with every explosion, I look around me to check on them one by one. I was in Shejaeya three days ago. You can’t imagine the massive devastation there. We had a life, a normal life. Now it’s gone. The peace that doesn’t bring me a normal life would never be a just peace. I’m trying to build a career, a future, but I’m not given the chance.

Jane

I am a teacher. I believe in the power of changing a child one at a time. I believe in Seeds as a power to educate and from this education will come a better world.

Maybe they won’t all be news people or politicians; maybe they will be in a classroom. It took John Wallach a long time to be in the right place to have the power to execute his passion as he moved from journalism to Seeds, and I think we are equipping many young adults to follow a similar path and to change their world.

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Lior

I want to share something personal. Throughout this war, in which over 2,000 Palestinians were killed—including nearly 500 children—and 70 Israelis, I have known that another way is possible.

Throughout this war, while my heart was with the citizens of the South and my friends who were drafted, my dearest friend has been a Gazan.

Through this war, we spoke several times a day. She told me about her sister, who sheltered for over six hours in a stairwell with her two children, ages 7 and 9, while heavy bombing shook her home.

She shared with me the lack of water and electricity, and the existential fear that you might be killed at any given moment.

This friendship between us in these difficult times is the proof that another way is possible and that there is hope. I don’t expect us all to become friends, but she is not ‘them’ and she should not be boycotted.

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Hamutal & Maysoon

We completed the Seeds of Peace facilitation course together last month. It was an intense experience, during which we had to face and accept not only “the other,” but mostly ourselves—our deepest conflicts, contradictions and frustrations. As the course ends, it seems as though everything we’ve learned is being thrown in our faces.

It’s hard to understand how we are at a point where we have started kidnapping and killing each other’s children. These terrible incidents evoked something new in our society. A dangerous, evil form of racism that lashes out in the heart of the society, that legitimizes violence. A sickening racism that spurs a young man to follow Maysoon in public, issuing threats and calling her a dirty Arab, after overhearing her speaking Arabic.

We’re scared. Scared to walk in the street, or take the bus. We’re even scared to stay in our homes. But more than anything we’re scared of what is happening to the society that we live in.

And now, a new war on Gaza. It feels like every few years, we go on another “operation” of massacre and destruction hidden behind a literary name provided by the government. We’re in an endless repetitive cycle, where every step of the governments is known in advance, people’s reactions are prewritten, the media’s reaction is known, the conversations we will have about the situation are tired. Citizens are all marionettes of our blind leaders, who have no vision and no compassion.

Alarms, missiles, the news, deaths, hatred, fear, anxiety, desperation. We’ve already seen what this madness looks like, and we’re all running straight into the same scenario, filled with hatred, as we create a new generation of Gaza youth who’ve lost everything and have nothing left to lose.

It’s hard to keep believing that there’s hope. It’s hard to avoid justifying the violence of one side or the other. For Palestinians, it’s easy to justify violence as resistance. It is the obvious relationship between the occupier and the occupied. It is a struggle, believing in non-violent ways to solve the conflict, believing in peace when everyone around you demands war. It is indeed a huge struggle.

But as Mahatma Gandhi said: “you must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is an ocean; if few drops are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty.”

So today, we stand together, and refuse to surrender to fear. Refuse to surrender to the reality that our societies and our governments dictate. The ocean—the sane majority—has to step up and say there is another way. We have to gather all of our strength, to stand strong in front of our own fears, in front of the fears in our societies, in front of racism and violence, and find the courage to look at each other and see the hope, compassion, and love in the eyes of the other.

Hannah

Reading the news lately pains me more than it has in the past.

I’m not sure if it stems simply from a feeling of helplessness or from a feeling that something has changed—that the ability to create peace feels further away than it has in a long long time. And the kind of peace I’m talking about is one where both people’s needs for identity and security are acknowledged and their histories of being victimized are not ignored so that individual and national traumas can be acknowledged.

The level of hatred and loss of humanity—not only literally in the deaths but also in the way we talk about one another—shows a disregard for human life in a way I don’t remember seeing in some time. Whether it’s my Palestinian friends referring to Israelis as Nazis and wanting them to die or my American Jewish friends repeating over and over ‘why are Israelis not allowed to defend themselves like every other country?!’ and truly not understanding why that sounds crazy to some of us or whether it’s the images and the stories of the Palestinian PEOPLE who are suffering such physical and emotional violence and trauma, it seems that we’ve gotten so severely lost.

We are so far off the path of ever being able to see the person in front of us as a person, a human being, with goals and motivations and feelings and pain, that I worry we may never get back on to that path.

VOICES IN THE MEDIA

Peace Camp in US Unites Israeli, Palestinian Teens (July 29 | Associated Press) ››

Viewpoint from the West Bank: ‘We are all humans’ (August 26 | PBS) ››

Interview with Israeli Seed Lior Amihai (July 26 | Ha’aretz) ››

In US, fearful campers eye Middle East conflict (July 18 | Associated Press) ››

In Israel and Palestine, children imagine a world without war (July 16 | MSNBC) ››

In Laden’s Shadow
Mid Day (Mumbai)

May 3, 2011 / No Comments

Even as the world is abuzz about Osama Bin Laden’s death, students from India, Pakistan and Afghanistan get together at a tri-nation conference to promote understanding and debate on various issues

MUMBAI | A bunch of Pakistani students got together with their Indian counterparts as well as with a group of school children from Afghanistan for five days in Mumbai under the ‘Voices of The People’ project organised by Seeds of Peace (SOP), an international Non Governmental Organisation (NGO). The teenagers debated some contentious issues like terrorism and religion. Photography, videography and print media were used by the students to present their ‘research topics’. After working hard for five days in Mumbai, an exhibition was held at Sophia College, Bhulabhai Desai Road, where the students displayed their work.

Connection

Two-and-a-half years ago ten Pakistanis slipped into Mumbai in the dark of night and wrought mayhem, killing more than 170 people. The armed assailants were one face of Pakistan, which is so familiar to the Indians. Last week another face of Pakistan was on show in the city, the one which Indian youth could identify with easily –inquisitive, emancipated and liberal. The organisation, which strives to bring the children of conflict zones together, doesn’t seek mutual agreement on the issues but simply provides a platform to young people to express their points of view. For instance, the students from India and Pakistan may not have agreed on Kashmir, but at least they were able to appreciate each other’s point of view amicably and in the process became friends. Seeds of Peace, which started in 1993, believes the tripartite interaction will help overcome biases and misgivings about each other and promote better understanding. Agrees Noorzadeah Raja (17), a participant from Lahore in Pakistan, “Terrorism is a problem in our country but there is more to Pakistan. And that is the reason we are here. Such camps will help us develop a well rounded perspective concerning issues involving all the three countries.”

Afghanistan

It is Sahar Sekandri’s (from Kabul) first visit to India and she is overwhelmed by the, “warmth displayed by the people here. In Afghanistan, people don’t talk much. Most of them are reticent.”

Sekandri who speaks fluent English says she had taken courses at various language learning centres in Afghanistan. “The medium of instruction in our college is Dari and English is taught as a separate language,” says Sekandri whose family, had migrated to Pakistan after the Taliban regime came to power and had returned to Kabul in 2003. “My father thought that we should return to our own country as the Taliban was not there anymore,” answered Sekandri when asked which other countries she had visited. Talking about the situation in Kabul, she says, “My parents are really concerned when we go out of the house. You don’t know what will happen next . Every day you hear about bomb blasts.”

Unlike Sekandri who was wearing a hijab, Lalen Azadani (14) was in jeans and a t-shirt without a hijab or headscarf. “Even in Afghanistan, I wear t-shirts and jeans at home and my parents don’t mind at all, but outside I have to go fully covered,” says Azadani who studies in a girls school in Kabul. She and her family, originally from Herat, are currently based in Kabul as, “they find Kabul safer than Herat. There is war in our country and the situation is bad but we hope that peace will return soon to Afghanistan. It will not happen in five or six years, it will take time till peace is restored in war-torn Afghanistan. Sooner or later though there will be peace in the country.” On her first impressions about Mumbai, she promptly says, “I like it.” Both the Afghan girls, Azadani and Sekandari want to become lawyers and serve their country. While Sekandari wants to eventually become an ambassador, Azadani just wants to be a good citizen.

Pakistan

Pakistan’s Faraz Saleem Malik (16), who is on his first visit to India, is already a convert to the cause of fostering unity among the three nations. Fed on the 24×7 media rhetoric against India and an overdose of bias back home, Malik feared hostility but he says he was overwhelmed by Indian hospitality. He wonders why the media is disregarding it, “Why don’t we get to hear more about the hospitality that is extended when somebody from Pakistan visits India and vice versa?”

Experience

Organisers say the camp went off extremely well. “The children are so excited with their projects. It has been a wonderful experience to actually see them working together,” says Feruzan Mehta, Director of Programmes, Seeds of Peace, India. “All we gave them was a notepad, a pen and a camera,” says Awista Ayub, Director of South Asia Programme, SOP. A total of 30 participants (most of them in the age group of 14-19) were divided into groups of three, all of them comprising members from all three countries. The members of the team had been assigned to do videos on some of the issues common to all the three countries, such as corruption and cricket. The team led by Malik made a short film on, ‘Cricket’. The task given to the group was to find out if cricket could help bind the three nations together. Malik says the outcome of his project is not surprising, “The response was good. Most of them said yes and some of them said no. Many believed that cricket should be treated just like any other game and not as if two nations are at war over it.”

Religion

Sana Kardar (19), from Lahore in Pakistan, who along with her group members made a short film on religion called, ‘Flipside of religion’. “Intentionally or unintentionally, whenever we talk about religion, we tend to link some form of extremism with it. So, we wanted to portray that there is a lot more to religion,” says Kardar, who is currently pursuing an undergraduate programme at Queen Mary, University of London. Kardar had visited Delhi before but it is her first visit to Mumbai. When asked about her first impressions of the city, Kardar said, “I think Mumbai is similar to Karachi because people live in flats and there is a space crunch. Delhi and Lahore are quite similar. I don’t even have a feeling that I am actually in a different country.”

Love

While Kardar chose religion as her research topic, Sekandari from Kabul in Afghanistan and her group decided to work on something that has a universal appeal. ‘Love’ was what they wanted to research. Their movie shows Sekandari strolling at the Mumbai’s famous Marine Drive promenade. Sekandari carefully observes hordes of lovebirds, who gather there to spend time with each other. The movie explores the subject of arranged marriages versus love marriages in Mumbai. When asked, if love marriages are acceptable in Afghanistan, Sekandri explained, “Mostly it is arranged marriage in my country. Parents decide who you have to marry.”

Bollywood

If there is something that is exciting to all the participants from the three countries, it has to be Bollywood. Ask them about their favourite actors and they rattle off names effortlessly. For Sekandri, her favourite film is ‘Jab We Met’. “My favourite actor is Ranbir Kapoor and favourite actress is Katrina Kaif and I am a big time movie buff,” she admits. For Abdul Shapoor (16), from Afghanistan, it is Govinda’s dance moves that appeal to him. A self-proclaimed break-dancer, Shapoor claims to be a diehard Govinda fan. “I have watched all his movies including Raja Babu. I even try to emulate his moves,” he says. Apart from Bollywood it is cricket too, which brings the three nations together. Says one of the participants from Afghanistan, “Whenever there is a match between India and Pakistan, a few of us support India and some of us support Pakistan. But now, even we are trying to become part of the cricketing world and cricket is very popular in Afghanistan.”

Misconception

Sekandri jokingly says that a lot of people had asked her if she knew Osama? “I told them that he is not my uncle,” she says Strange as it may sound, one of them who had come to see the exhibition says, “All the kids from three different countries look so similar that it is difficult to identify their nationality.” Agrees Kardar who was wearing a black velvet mini skirt, “I was mistaken for a Mumbaikar.” On her country’s image of being very ‘conservative’ Kardar firmly replies, “If my parents don’t have a problem with my attire, why should I bother about somebody else?” Kardar strongly defends her country when questioned about the fact that many perceive Pakistan as a country, which exports terror. “It is not only Pakistan. There are a lot of forces, which are active there. Blaming Pakistan for every terrorist attack that happens anywhere is not fair at all.” While students answered questions on some global issues, they definitely made friends for a lifetime. “Shapoor is more like my brother now,” says Jehan Lalkaka (17) from Mumbai, who had met an Afghani for the first time. “We are all the same, I believe,” he adds.

Concern

More importantly the programme is aimed at making these ‘seeds’, messengers of peace in the future. The concern is palpable in Mumbaikar Teju Jhaveri’s (23) words. “Everytime there is a bomb blast in these regions, you know that somebody you are close to is there. Immediately you make a phone call to ensure that he /she is fine. That is what is important,” says Jhaveri, who has been associated with the programme for nine years now.

About the Programme

‘Seeds of Peace’ was founded by journalist, John Wallach, and is dedicated to “empowering young leaders from regions of conflict with the leadership skills required to advance reconciliation and coexistence.”

In Mumbai

The participants tried to capture the ‘Mumbaikar spirit’ through the lens. They visited places like Haji Ali Dargah and were amazed to see, “how people from different religions visit the Durgah to seek blessings, something that we in Afghanistan and Pakistan cannot even imagine doing,” says one of the participants from Pakistan.

Many spoke to Mumbaikars and asked them, what they thought of religion. A lot of them spoke to youngsters in the city and asked them about corruption and what could be done to eradicate it. The participants also got a chance to visit a few schools meant for underprivileged children.

Many of them wanted to bring out similarities and differences between Indian, Pakistani and Afghani cuisine. A visit to various Peshawari and Mughlai restaurants in the city like-Cafe Noorani near Haji Ali and Delhi Durbar in Colaba helped them to understand more about the food in the city. While some pointed out that there were subtle differences in the way, say a naan was prepared but overall the food in all the three countries was, “pretty much the same”.

Movies made by the participants:

  • Cricket
  • Bonding over Biryani
  • Sujaya (a school for underprivileged children)
  • Corruption
  • Flipside of religion
  • Prince Wales Museum
  • Religious pluralism in Mumbai
  • Mind follower or rebel

Read Sudeshna Chowdhury article at MiD DAY »

Thanksgiving seminar focuses US Seeds on role of American leadership abroad

Nov 26, 2012 / 1 Comment

NEW YORK | After stuffing themselves with food and gratitude on Thanksgiving, 20 American Seeds traveled to New York City to stuff themselves with food for thought.

This year’s Thanksgiving Seminar brought timely and challenging issues to the table. Seeds in attendance heard from a diverse group of older graduate Seeds to get perspectives on the US elections and the current escalation of violence in Gaza and Israel.

American Seed Coordinator Sarah Brajtbord designed the event as a launching point for a new chapter in American Seeds programming.

“Historically, American Seeds programming has focused, rightly so, on what is happening ‘out there’ in regions of conflict,” said Brajtbord, herself an American Seed from 2006. “Now we are taking the next step by pushing Seeds to connect the US to the international and the international to the US, and examine the complexities of US-international relations.”

Brajtbord believes that the event set an exciting tone for the rest of the year in American programming. Topics in current events helped the Seeds discuss deeper, underlying questions about their roles as Americans.

“What do you think America’s role is in the Middle East?” asked one of the graduate Seeds who addressed the group. Bashar, a Palestinian Graduate Seed living in Israel, posed the question to get the Seeds to look inward. It was a question many of the American Seeds had thought about at Camp, without directly addressing as a group.

“The conversation following Bashar’s talk really inspired me to take my role as an American Seed seriously,” said Erica. “It pushed me to define who I want to be in the Seeds community and in my community as well.”

Brajtbord says that the American Seeds’ Camp experience is a dramatically eye-opening experience, and that it is important to help Seeds manifest that experience in their lives back home.

“These are future American leaders, no matter where they go in their lives. We have to localize and ground their experience in the American context while also doing justice to the world-opening experience of Camp.”

The event helped enrich Seeds’ understanding of nuanced issues.

“The seminar added a lot of complexity to my understanding of U.S. foreign policy and what I think we should and should not be doing in other countries,” said Sarah, an American Seed.

Mona, an Egyptian Graduate Seed who covered the Arab Spring for The New York Times, spoke to the Seeds in person about her experiences as a journalist and her views on the US role in the Middle East. She challenged the Seeds to understand that there are always more than two sides to a story—and to a conflict.

From Kabul, Afghan Graduate Seed and journalist Mujib addressed the US elections from an Afghan perspective and shared the local outlook on President Obama’s plans to withdraw from Afghanistan in 2014.

“When I’d talked to the Afghan girls in my bunk about American involvement, they had wanted the US out immediately,” said American Seed Kalyani. “But Mujib said that many citizens didn’t feel their government was stable enough for the U.S. to leave as planned.”

The timing of this year’s seminar meant that violence in Israel and Gaza, as well as its effects in the Seeds community, weighed heavily on Seeds’ hearts and minds. Two Seeds of Peace staff members who run Israeli and Palestinian programs—and who are Seeds themselves—explained how they are adapting their work in light of the violence and how American Seeds can help to support their peers.

“The whole discussion reinforced my image of Seeds as a place where they do not pretend to have all the answers to the issues but are really willing to help you work through the tough problems,” said American Seed Francesca after the event.

Brajtbord was impressed with the way American Seeds focused on current events from international as well as domestic perspectives.

“Rather than just talking about US elections as domestic issues, for example, the conversation focused on intersections between the domestic and the international. Even when the discussion shifted to current events in the Middle East, conversation kept coming back to what the US is and is not doing.”

While they may feel physically distanced from conflicts around the world, American Seeds have a unique opportunity for engagement.

“Even if we do not have the resources to go across the world to Palestine and Israel and help out there, simply being active members of our community in this issue and others will be beneficial to conflicts worldwide,” said American Seed Anour.

A Bit Dazed, a Bit Dazzled, The Peacemakers Celebrate
The Washington Post

Sep 14, 1993 / No Comments

BY MARY ANN FRENCH AND ROXANNE ROBERTS | Salaam and shalom. How simply similar. Likewise the guttural consonants punctuating the Hebrew and Arabic patter that puffed around the room last night at the Hotel Washington.

The people looked stunned, as if not yet at ease with this peace they were making. But they were trying mightily. Four hundred and some of them, current and former big shots of Arab American and Jewish American organizations, many of whom were in the same room for the first time. And now, having made it through an electronic security sweep, here they were breaking bread together and raising toasts. Each side brought a folk singer to sing on the little stage in tones haunted by the same sources, evoking romantic glimpses into joined hands and broke into that standard of the American civil rights struggle, “We Shall Overcome.”

There was something nagging, all night, that had to do with context. Or was it content? At any rate, they kept trying to explain it. And it was as if they were sleepwalking, clumsily feeling their way through new terrain: Arabs and Jews at the Hotel Washington, Americans and Israelis at the Israeli Embassy, and Bill Clinton, George Bush, Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter at a “presidents” dinner at the White House.

“This is not a cease-fire, this is not an administrative agreement,” Nabeel Shaath, the high-level adviser to Yasser Arafat, called out to those crowded around him at the hotel. “This is not just in the paper … No shenanigans … This is a historical conciliation of two people on the same land.”

It’s a “new existentialism” and the end of Israelis “trading on victimhood,” said Henry Siegman, executive director of the American Jewish Congress. Israelis, he said, are “beginning to see things in terms of human faces …”

Does that mean a separate state for Palestinians may be in the offing? Reporters asked Gad Yaacobi, Israeli ambassador to the United Nations.

“That was not concluded,” he replied curtly before rushing off to another engagement. On the subject of Jerusalem, he had no problem saying it would stay “under our sovereignty forever.”

Some things are nonnegotiable.

Which comes as no surprise to Fadi, a 14-year-old Palestinian who was at the reception sponsored by the National Association of Arab Americans and the American Jewish Congress. Wearing a tender smile and the bright green T-shirt of Seeds of Peace, the summer camp that took him and 45 other Arab and Israeli boys to Maine for three weeks of sports and “coexistence seminars,” Fadi said that he has made many friends here and has somewhat changed his opinion of Israelis. On the subject of their state, however, he remained unchanged.

“I don’t refuse the existence of Israel,” he said, “but I also don’t accept the existence of Israel without a Palestinian state.”

At the Israeli Embassy reception, the cake was decorated with doves and olive branches, but this was a cautious affair. “There is no euphoria,” said Israeli Ambassador Itamar Rabinovich. “We know it’s too complex for euphoria.”

Others had watched the signing of the agreement in dazed amazement.

“I thought my hands would turn to salt if I ever applauded Yasser Arafat,” said Sheldon Cohen, former IRS commissioner. “But I did—and they didn’t.”

Like a lot of Jews, Cohen came to the ceremony with doubts but found it unexpectedly moving. “I was crying,” he said. “A lot of people were.”

“Getting a ticket to the signing was as difficult as getting a ticket to a Bruce Springsteen concert,” laughed Leonard Zakim, director of the Anti-Defamation League in Boston.

“Sometimes in the White House we forget how important certain things are,” said presidential counsel Bernie Nussbaum. “Sometimes we even forget we’re making history. Today, we made history.”

And so to close out a day that will be remembered for the rest of their lives, more than 800 guests, from babies to bent gentlemen with yarmulkes in their white hair, crammed into a stifling white tent to bid farewell to Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Foreign Minister Shimon Peres.

Peres was immediately mobbed with hugs, congratulations, kisses. Autograph-seekers thrust programs from the signing ceremony, newspapers or ragged scraps of paper into his hands.

“I told him that it was the most special day to come here and shake his hand,” said Susan Volchok, incoming national chairman of Israel Bonds. “We’ve all said, ‘Is it possible in our lifetime?’ And here we are.”

Violinist Isaac Stern stood in line for the telephone to beep his driver and race back to New York. Not staying for the speeches? “I don’t think so,” he confessed. “I’ve hugged both of them.”

Rabin took the podium. In his thick, deep voice he said, “It was not a simple day.”

Then, like a professor conducting a tutorial, he launched into an impassioned explanation of the historic agreement. “People can ask, ‘Do you trust them?’” he said with a shrug in his voice. “We’ll see.”

Rabin emphasized that though terrorism may remain a risk, the real danger comes from the tanks and missiles of surrounding Arab nations. “Whoever believes Palestine can threaten the very existence of Israel—it’s nonsense! Nonsense!”

Peres reiterated the message, in gentler form, while Rabin looked at his watch. They had arrived in Washington in the middle of the night; it was time to fly home and face the Knesset.

“Please don’t get tired,” Peres told the crowd. “You can rest during Rosh Hashanah. Then again we will march together to make the name of the Jewish people fully recognized in modern times.”

Then it was time for cake.

At the White House, Clinton, three of his predecessors and 50 other guests basked in history’s gratifying glow at a dinner in the Blue Room.

At Clinton’s invitation, former presidents Ford, Carter and Bush, with six past and present secretaries of state, raised their Duckhorn Sauvignon Blanc 1991 (Carter and Clinton opted for ice water) to “peace and progress and the prosperity of the American people.”

Clinton’s worn voice was barely audible as he saluted Carter for his contributions at Camp David 14 years earlier, Bush for starting the peace talks in Madrid two years ago and Ford “for his wise leadership during a pivotal time in the history of the Middle East.”

At tables set with the Truman china sat shuttle diplomacy’s founder Henry Kissinger and those who followed him on the Middle East peace path: George Shultz, Cyrus Vance, James Baker, Larry Eagleburger and Secretary of State Warren Christopher.

The former presidents and their foreign policy aides, representing “a fairly wide array of views about public events,” Clinton said, would join him today in a “formal kickoff” of his administration’s effort to pass the North American Free Trade Agreement.

“I know that will require great effort and bipartisanship,” said Clinton. “But I believe we will succeed because of the stakes for ourselves economically and politically in this hemisphere.”

At her table, First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, wearing a lipstick-red silk dinner suit, carried on an animated conversation with Presidents Ford and Carter. At the president’s table were Rosalynn Carter, Betty Ford and President Bush. Barbara Bush did not attend because she was not feeling well, a White House spokesman said.

The dinner started nearly an hour late because Clinton, in the Bush tradition of personally conducted tours, began the evening in the family quarters before ushering everybody onto the Truman balcony for a one-of-a-kind view of the Washington monument.

The Carters and Bush took the Clintons up on their offer of bed and breakfast. The White House said it was the first time two former presidents have stayed overnight as guests of an incumbent president.

An appropriate ending to a historic day.

Seeds of Peace announces line up for “Stand Up for Peace” Comedy Benefit

Dec 1, 2009 / No Comments

Stand Up for Peace

UPDATE: the Comedy Benefit at Gotham Comedy Club in New York was a fantastic success! »

NEW YORK | The 6th Annual “Stand Up for Peace” Comedy Benefit takes place on November 30. The event will be hosted by Amer Zahr with Tim Young, Dan Nainan, Eman el Husseini, Seth Herzog, Mike Batayeh, Jim Dailakis, and Laura Spaeth.

 
Tim YoungTim Young headlines clubs all over North America, has performed on over 500 colleges campuses as well as comedy festivals in New York, Montreal, and Seattle, and he’s a fixture in the New York City club scene. He’s appeared on NBC’s Last Comic Standing, Comedy Central’s Premium Blend, Tough Crowd, and Shorties, and you may have seen him as a commentator on VH1, MTV,TLC and the E! Channel.

 

 

Dan Nainan

Dan Nainan got his start by taking a comedy class to get over the nervousness of speaking on stage in his job as a demo engineer with Intel Corporation. After leaving Intel to pursue comedy, Dan has toured with Russell Peters. Dan has appeared on network television including “Last Comic Standing” as well as in feature films and radio and television commercials. He just completed a comedy tour of India and is performing at the upcoming TED Conference in Mysore.
 

 

Eman el Husseini

Eman el Husseini started stand-up in NYC in 2006. In her first year she founded and co-produces the monthly show BOOM (best of open mic). In 2008 Eman opened for the Axis of Evil Tour in Ottawa and was invited to be a part of the 5th and 6th NY Arab-American Comedy Festival. In 2009 Eman has been touring the US with 1001 laughs, and was a part of the first ever Arabs Gone Wild tour in Montreal. In December Eman is heading to the Middle-East for the 2nd annual Amman Comedy Festival.

 

Seth Herzog

Seth Herzog was the subject of the short film Zog’s Place. In addition, Seth hosts his weekly show Sweet at the Slipper Room on Tuesday nights. He has also enjoyed roles in such films as Safe Men, The Ten, and The Baxter. Seth has also acted in numerous commercials and on such TV shows as Late Night with Conan O’Brien, Chappelle’s Show and VH1’s Best Week Ever.

 

 

Mike Bateyeh

Mike Batayeh is a native of Detroit who is of Jordanian descent. He currently resides in Los Angeles where he is a working comedian/actor/writer. As a writer he has two screenplays, one of which is in process to be produced. He was also, co-writer of a one-person show, entitled Machomen and The Women That Love Them, which was filmed at the Kodak Theater (home of the Academy Awards) and will soon be released as a television special and DVD.  As an actor he has appeared in many television and film roles. As a comedian he has performed all over the world for all kinds of audiences in such places as Dubai, Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon, and will soon be in Australia. NOW, KNEEL BEFORE ZOD!!!
 

Amer Zahr

Amer Zahr is a Palestinian-American currently living in Michigan. His comedy comes from his experiences and thoughts growing up as an Arab-American. Amer has been performing stand-up for many years and before that was an active pro-Palestinian voice. His activism included dozens of published writings and appearances on TV, including two appearances on ABC’s Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher. He has traveled the world, performing throughout America, as well as in the Middle East, including Jordan and Oman.

 

Jim Dailakis

Jim Dailakis, an Australian Greek actor/writer/comedian and voiceover artist now based in New York City, has been touring the USA for the last 12 years headlining in the major New York comedy clubs including Caroline’s, Standup New York and Broadway. He’s also performed in Las Vegas, The Borgata in Atlantic City, The Cayman Islands and Canada. On stage, Dailakis talks about relationships, love, and mimics movie stars with an uncanny ability of being able to contort his face so he can look like them too. His performances have earned him standing ovations and adoration from audiences across the US. Being an Aussie in America is another part of his act.
 

Laura Spaeth

Laura Spaeth is a stand up comic and an actor living and working in NYC. Her comedy has been referred to as, “Tina Fey minus the cash.” A spirited host and featured act, Laura has performed regularly at The Broadway Comedy Club, New York Comedy Club, Caroline’s, Stand Up New York, Don’t Tell Mama’s Poole Party and Danny Aiello’s, Upstairs at Danny’s in Hoboken New Jersey. She has also participated in Gilda Radner’s Laugh Off. Blunt, acerbic with and uncanny ability for characters and impersonations, Laura is a favorite everywhere she performs.

Sports power couple a hit with campers
Lewiston Sun Journal

Jul 30, 2010 / No Comments

OTISFIELD | They hail from nine countries, mostly geographic neighbors but divided by invisible walls that might as well extend a million miles into the heavens.

Thursday morning they wore the same colors—the green Seeds of Peace camp t-shirt—and spoke the universal languages of sports and music.

One hundred fifty teenagers sang and rapped to Journey, Run-DMC and Sugarhill Gang as their songs, written and performed long before the kids were born, thundered from the sound system.

They whooped, hollered and high-fived as camp director Wil Smith introduced a record-long list of athletic dignitaries.

And somewhere in the back of their minds, they pictured the homelands to which they will return in little more than two weeks, imagining that someday it could be like this.

“To be honest, I don’t know all of them,” Yaara, a girl from Israel, said of the athletes. “It makes the camp special. It brings good vibes into the area, and everybody is excited to see them. Hopefully having those people here will spread our cause and our words of peace.”

The uninitiated would see one of sports’ premier power couples — soccer champion Mia Hamm and former Boston Red Sox shortstop—and wonder why they would sacrifice a day of retirement and parenthood at a remote youth camp in the foothills of Maine.

To paraphrase Hamm and Garciaparra’s reply, why not?

While Hamm interacted easily with a multi-cultural, revolving door of children, sharing the skills that won her Olympic and World Cup gold medals, her husband stood watch, wearing sunglasses and a perpetual smile. When he wasn’t busy tending the couple’s twin girls, Grace and Ava, Garciaparra occasionally interjected himself into the games.

“There are a lot of camps going on, a lot that do good things like keep kids being active, but this takes it to another level for sure,” Garciaparra said. “It’s bringing these kids together with this message and trying to make the world better. I have a lot of free time to do things. Whenever you’re playing, you hear about things like this and go, ‘Man, I’d like to be a part of that and help any way I can.’ Now that I’m retired, I can.”

Hamm, 38, scored 158 goals in an 18-year career with the United States women’s national team.

Perhaps it’s no coincidence that her first appearance at Seeds of Peace unfolded less than a month after the conclusion of a World Cup in South Africa, a nation once divided by racial conflict.

“Sports, like music, unlike anything else can bring people together. You’re out here seeing people with different ethnicities, different religious backgrounds, from different sides of the conflict, just really coming together,“ Hamm said. “They’re teammates and they’re laughing and joking and passing on the field, and that’s the step they’re taking off the field. Those are the lessons they’re going to take home.

“That’s the future of not just here at this camp but the world. Having these young, bright minds be part of it is so huge. I’m learning from them so much more than what I can teach them out here.”

Garciaparra’s agent, Arn Tellem, attended summer camp in Maine as a child and is a longtime friend of Tim Wilson, another of the camp’s directors.

Thanks to Tellem’s NBA connections, Seeds of Peace has welcomed a parade of professional basketball stars to its annual “Play for Peace” day. Free agent forward Brian Scalabrine, most recently with the Boston Celtics, appeared Thursday for the eighth consecutive year. Women’s basketball legend Teresa Edwards and NBA rookies Xavier Henry, Scottie Reynolds and Brian Zoubek joined Scalabrine.

But the double whammy of Hamm and Garciaparra was the first venture away from the basketball court, and probably a natural choice.

“Soccer is the world’s game,” Hamm said. “We just saw all the beauty it can bring in South Africa, how people unite around this great game.”

Hanna, a boy from Palestine, was less smitten with the athletes’ resumes than their willingness to identify with his dream of peace in the Middle East.

“It actually shows how much people support the cause I do. For famous people and people who have money, there’s a million other places they could be,” he said. “But they chose to be here with me, with us. It shows how much support we have from these people and how much they care about the things we do.”

The annual sports clinics are a welcome break at a camp that wields rigorous social and psychological components.

While half the group left the 10 a.m. opening assembly to spend time with the athletes, an equal number retreated to classrooms for their two-hour daily “dialogue” session. It is an often painful process at which the campers address the fear and prejudices they brought with them.

It was their turn to play in the afternoon.

“The dialogue process can get very emotionally exhausting. Those kids did not want to go to dialogue, but that’s what the camp is about. It’s brutal,” said Sid Goldman, 70, of Key West, Fla., a volunteer doctor at the camp. “In the beginning it’s about presenting their arguments. Hopefully at the end they’re listening. So the other activities encourage mutual cooperation.”

There are small delegations of campers from Maine and other parts of the United States.

“The main thing is to show that the enemy has a face,” said Kayla, 17, from Cleveland. “I’m Jewish, I was raised Jewish, went to a Jewish school my whole life. It was a shock to me as well, even being from the United States. The American delegation’s role at Seeds of Peace is a very complicated one. It’s a lot of understanding where you fit in.”

For at least a few hours Thursday, it was easy to blend.

As Smith bellowed names into the microphone, seemingly in ascending order of fame, the scene could have been confused with a rock concert or a religious festival.

“I actually learned that the other side is more than a name,” said Hadas, a 17-year-old girl from Israel. “They have personalities and families. It’s also taught me listening and understanding and an open mind.”

Standing in the background and hearing those words, with the athletes already far from the scene and walking toward their respective fields, Goldman smiled.

“Four thousand kids have come through here since 1993. Now the first kids are 28, 29, 30,” said the doctor. “They’re leaders in their respective countries. Once the parents get to a certain age, they’re beyond our reach. The idea is that these kids aren’t.”

Read Kalle Oake’s article and view Russ Dillingham’s photos at The Lewiston Sun Journal »

Rabin and Arafat Seal Their Accord as Clinton Applauds ‘Brave Gamble’
The New York Times

Sep 13, 1993 / No Comments

“When Mr. Rabin and Mr. Arafat came together, the banal was suddenly breathtaking, and the ordinary was suddenly historic: one person touching another, one person sitting next to another, one person applauding another; President Clinton introducing Mr. Arafat to his daughter, Chelsea; the President, Mr. Rabin and Mr. Arafat holding up their “Seeds of Peace” T-Shirts, like teenagers at a rock concert; Mr. Rabin shaking hands with Arab ambassadors.”

BY MAUREEN DOWD | WASHINGTON The President who loves to stay up late told his aides that he went to bed at 10 P.M. on Sunday, so he could be rested for the historic day.

They did not believe him, of course.

“No way,” said Dee Dee Myers, the White House press secretary. “He got the big hand and the little hand mixed up.”

“It was Jerusalem time,” suggested Mark Gearan, the White House communications director.

But what happened next is not in the contention: The President said he woke up at 3 A.M. and could not go back to sleep. He was worrying about the speech he would make to mark what was sure to be one of the most remarkable events of his Presidency: the moment when the two men who had been bitter enemies for so long, the Israeli Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin, and the Chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, Yasir Arafat, would recognize each other’s existence on the South Lawn of the White House.

With his wife and daughter still asleep, Mr. Clinton put on a blue jogging suit and went into the study in the White House residence. He picked up a Bible. He read the entire Book of Joshua, wanting to review the part about the trumpets in Jericho that toppled walls and making sure he put a reference in his speech contrasting the victory of war and the victory of peace.

In another part of the White House, a team led by Jeremy Rosner, a National Security Council speechwriter, was scrambling to fulfill the President’s last request: Mr. Clinton wanted a passage from the Koran to balance his Biblical allusions. The desperate White House staffers finally called Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi Arabian ambassador, who helped them pick out an appropriately soothing passage: “If the enemy inclines toward peace, do thou also incline toward peace?”

At some point, Mr. Clinton moved from the study to the kitchen to read and drink coffee. He wanted to sit near the window, where he could keep track of when the dawn arrived and what the sky looked like.

The White House staff had worked over three days to compile a 26-page step-by-step log choreographing every movement that the leaders would make, and yet Mr. Clinton knew as well as anyone that, with this most delicate of all diplomatic meetings, a million things could go wrong—a look, a word, a handshake, the weather.

At dawn, as he later told aides, who provided this account, he looked at the sky and reckoned it could be cloudy. So he decided to do something that he could control. He chose a tie, a blue and yellow one with little trumpets on it, to celebrate the crack in the walls everyone thought would never come down.

The Silencing of the Cynics

If it was not the day the Earth stood still, it was close: It was the day Washington was not cynical.

When Mr. Rabin and Mr. Arafat came together, the banal was suddenly breathtaking, and the ordinary was suddenly historic: one person touching another, one person sitting next to another, one person applauding another; President Clinton introducing Mr. Arafat to his daughter, Chelsea; the President, Mr. Rabin and Mr. Arafat holding up their “Seeds of Peace” T-Shirts, like teenagers at a rock concert; Mr. Rabin shaking hands with Arab ambassadors.

The jaded were awed. Even for a New Age Presidency, there were a lot of men in the audience crying. George Stephanopoulos, the Clinton aide, and Rahm Emanuel, the White House adviser who had helped arrange the logistics, were crying.

The Hollywood contingent—Ron Silver and Richard Dreyfuss—were crying, along with Leon Wieseltier, the cultural editor of “The New Republic.”

“Do you believe this?” Mr. Dreyfuss asked Mr. Wieseltier, after the handshake.

“And you’re the guy who saw those aliens land in that movie,” Mr. Wieseltier replied, referring to the actor’s role in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.”

There were strange undercurrents on the South Lawn, of course. The audience was made up of people who had worked their entire lives to ensure that this day did not happen and people who had never quite managed to make it happen.

People who had been sworn enemies until 72 hours before were now sitting side by side. Keffiyahs mingled with yarmulkas. Arab worry beads mingled with Jewish worriers.

Former Presidents and Secretaries of State who tried desperately to make Middle East peace happen on their watch suddenly found themselves relegated to the audience as President Clinton and Warren Christopher stood triumphantly on stage while that magical, unthinkable handshake happened.

For anyone who knew the history of the Byzantine Middle East politics, the mere fact of the event, the play within the play, was more amazing than anything that was said at it or about it.
It was no wonder that the chain smoking Mr. Rabin was fidgeting on stage and acting like he needed a cigarette—bad. He had his lifelong political rival, Shimon Peres, to his right and lifelong military foe, Mr. Arafat, to his left.

In the audience were lawmakers and American Jewish leaders who had built political careers on making sure that Mr. Arafat would never come to the United States. There were Arab-Americans and Arab diplomats who years ago would never be caught dead rubbing elbows in such mixed company. Yet once Mr. Arafat and Mr. Rabin spoke and shook hands, suddenly it all flowed together, leaving the wonder of why it took so long and what it was all about in the first place.

George Bush, who prided himself on being the foreign policy President and who once dismissed Bill Clinton as an ingénue whose expertise was limited to the International House of Pancakes, found himself a spectator as Mr. Clinton reaped the fruits of 25 years of American diplomacy in the Middle East. Joining him in the gallery of wistful would-be peacemakers were James Baker, Jimmy Carter, Henry Kissinger, Cyrus Vance and William Rogers.

Mr. Bush looked in glowing good health, but there was a poignancy to his presence.

“Make a little hole—it’s the President coming through,” ordered an advance man in the White House, trying to push a group of reporters to the side.

As he slid through the crowd, Mr. Bush offered his lopsided grin and corrected: “Ex, Ex, Ex, Ex.”

Out of Sight, Not Out of Mind

Not since Queen Elizabeth II disappeared behind the lectern set up for the much taller President Bush during a May 1991 visit—the British papers dubbed her “The Talking Hat”—has a leader so thoroughly been hidden on a podium as Mr. Arafat was today.

All that could be seen of Mr. Arafat, from straight ahead in the audience, was his black and white keffiyah peeking over the lectern to the right of Mr. Clinton’s shoulder. (The spot usually occupied by Vice President Al Gore.)

Mr. Arafat’s hands could be seen occasionally fiddling with his headdress to get its point photogenically straight—a habit of his.

White House officials had left a riser for the short Palestinian leader, but they were surprised when the taller Mr. Rabin stepped up on it as well, when it was his turn to speak.

Quiet on the Set

The security for the White House ceremony today may have been the tightest in Washington history.

But it was even tighter than the Secret Service knew.

On Sunday, Thomas Donilon, a top State Department official, was heading across Pennsylvania Avenue toward the White House when a security man stopped him and told him the street was blocked off.

Mr. Donilon waited for a while and then got impatient.

Who are you with, he asked the guard.

“The Pelican Brief,” the guard replied, adding that the movie company making the John Grisham novel into a film, starring Denzel Washington and Julia Roberts, had secured to area to film a scene. As far as Hollywood was concerned, history could wait.

Seeds of Peace: The summer of our discontent
Jewish Journal

Jul 6, 2016 / No Comments

At age 15, I had barely interacted with a boy, let alone a Jew.

For a teenager living in Lahore, Pakistan, in 2001, the Middle East was a faraway place of despair and blood, and I knew almost nothing about it. From my father’s BBC fixation, I’d picked up that it was a place where restaurants were sometimes blown up by suicide bombers. At the time, the idea of a war that came to the city streets strapped to the chests of men was terrifying and new.

I was to learn a great deal about the nature of war when my parents allowed me to attend a summer camp called Seeds of Peace in the United States, just a few months before 9/11 transformed the world. Located in Maine, the camp was founded in 1993 by John Wallach — a journalist who had covered the Middle East for decades as foreign editor for Hearst Newspapers and the BBC. His radical idea was to cultivate future leaders from communities divided by conflict, with an initial focus on Israeli, Palestinian and Egyptian teenagers. From only 46 campers in its first year, the program has by now grown to 300 teenagers each summer, including an American delegation every year. Headquartered in New York, the program has offices in Kabul, Afghanistan; Amman, Jordan; Mumbai, India; Lahore and Jerusalem, with more than 6,000 alumni who partake in regular local and international follow-up engagements.

In the summer of 2001, I was a member of the first India-Pakistan delegation to attend the camp; a dozen of us came from Lahore and a dozen from Mumbai — that strange city by the Arabian Sea manufacturing the famed ballads of Bollywood. Our two nations have been at de facto war since 1947, when the decolonized Indian subcontinent was divided into two countries: Muslim majority Pakistan and Hindu majority India. Kashmir — the land of valleys — is the bloody legacy of that partition, with both countries laying claim to the northern state, where 12 million people reside.

Despite rigid brainwashing endorsed by our respective education ministries, we quickly grew to be friends with the Indians. We laughed together in Urdu and Hindi, argued about cricket and spent hours debating our history, within days realizing we had been taught different versions of the same events. On the first morning after our arrival, I hung my head upside down from the top bunk to say hello to the enemy below. Her name was Tulsi Mehta, and, 15 years later, ours continues to be a great friendship.

The first time we saw the Israelis and Palestinians at camp, however, they were intimidating. They held onto a breed of anger separate from ours, they knew too much, they talked too much — on both sides they were the unafraid spokespeople for their states. Though they were the same age as the rest of us, nothing about them made them seem like children. Their war made our war seem like a bit of a farce; a sham skirmish fought through propaganda and by soldiers in faraway mountains we had never seen.

In the years immediately after my summer in America, it was difficult to foresee the extent of the violence that would come to Pakistan, a relatively stable state with an enormous security apparatus. Nobody could have imagined that in only 10 years, the country would be left mutilated by suicide attacks, reeling beneath the weight of the U.S.-led invasion of neighboring Afghanistan, which morphed into domestic terrorism and major military operations in the north. War came marching down our streets, into our playgrounds, schools and bazaars, strapped to the chests of terrible men.

So many years on, what remains of that camp in my memory is a hazy recollection of laughter and bewilderment. There was swimming, rock-climbing, singing and dancing, but also “dialogue sessions,” during which opposing delegations participated in daily three-hour debates. After one, a Palestinian boy ran by our group in tears, then sat on the pier overlooking the lake until the sun nearly set. Two Israeli girls joined him, and I still recall the three small backs bent against the horizon. Sometimes it struck us that we were children hunted and haunted by each other’s people. Most of the time, we forgot.

At that age, we did not comprehend the profound impression the camp would make on our lives, freeing our minds in ways that would affect us as we became adults, parents, professionals and leaders in a world of ever more globalized conflict. I know politicians, writers, activists and soldiers who are Seeds graduates. Many of us have gone on to become journalists, among us Mujib Mashal, now a reporter for The New York Times, who was part of the first Afghan delegation to attend the camp in 2002; and Nergish Sunavala, a reporter for the Times of India, who was at camp with me. I recognize the skinny girl with the gentle voice and bushy hair in the impassioned stories she writes for her country.

Most of the campers who attended Seeds of Peace were chosen by their governments, and we came armed with sacred agendas, in the end surrendering the only truths we knew to the cause of civic discourse. As true of the Palestinian refugees and the Israeli Jews, the Pakistanis and the Indians, Seeds of Peace broke us all. Though it has now been 15 years since I first ate at a table with Jews and Hindus, those lessons guide my hand when I write my stories even today. I have Jewish friends from camp with whom I am still in touch, and knowing them has made it easier for me to challenge the problematic generalizations rampant in Pakistan’s religious and political discourse. Nobody could have anticipated then how much more important this would become for us, that in just a few months, our conflicts would merge and re-create themselves in almost all regions of the earth. This changing world order made the inclusion of a U.S delegation all the more important, with young American campers able to engage without bias in political dialogue with Afghans, Israelis, Jordanians, Palestinians and Pakistanis, to name a few — people they might never otherwise encounter in their lives.

Attacks of terror occur daily around today’s world, like the trio of suicide bombs that went off in Istanbul, in Europe’s third-busiest airport last week, targeting the heart of Turkey’s internationalism. Or, two days later, the horrifying, senseless murder of 13-year-old Hallel Yaffa Ariel as she slept in her Kiryat Arba bedroom.

The hate, racism, corruption and violence of war is now so pervasive that no place is truly safe from it, except for, perhaps, the minds of children, where different ideas may still flourish like they did in ours.

It was a great gesture of grace for our parents to knowingly expose us, their children, to Seeds of Peace — to a narrative that would challenge theirs. For Palestinian and Israeli families, I imagine this act of letting go must be downright traumatic. Still, it leaves me with great hope in the institution of parenting, and the belief that even in cynical and fearful adult hearts, there exists the awareness that there is a better way to win our wars.

Amal Khan, a journalist from Pakistan where she serves as features editor at The Nation, is currently contributing to the Jewish Journal as part of her fellowship with the Daniel Pearl Foundation.

Read Amal Khan’s story at The Jewish Journal ››