Search Results for “SAFe-SASM Test Prep 🩧 Exam SAFe-SASM Braindumps 🏧 SAFe-SASM New Dumps 😝 The page for free download of ⏩ SAFe-SASM âȘ on 《 www.pdfvce.com 》 will open immediately đŸ§ČReliable SAFe-SASM Test Topics”

Virtually Together
Peace Watch (USIP)

Oct 19, 1997 / No Comments

E-mail and the Internet are keeping the hope for peace alive among Israeli and Arab teenagers who became friends through Seeds of Peace, says Institute senior fellow John Wallach

When a suicide bomb was detonated this fall in a Jerusalem shopping mall frequented by teenagers after school, a group of Arab and Israeli teenagers reached out to console each other via the Internet. A Jordanian youth wrote that at first the bombing seemed to threaten the friendships he had made with Israelis his age this past summer at the Seeds of Peace summer camp program in Maine. “I thought that all we did in the camp was gone with the wind,” he wrote. But then an Israeli camper e-mailed him that he knew terrorists were responsible for the tragedy and had urged his Israeli friends “not to blame the whole Palestinian people.”

“The Jordanian youth was reassured. He felt he could trust his new Israeli friend,” says John Wallach, a senior fellow at the U.S. Institute of Peace and founder of the Seeds of Peace program, which brings together Arab and Israeli teenagers to help break the generational cycles of violence that sustain the conflict in the Middle East. “The common theme among the Arab and Israeli campers was that neither community would permit a desperate act of terror to destroy the friendships they had built at Seeds of Peace.”

Dozens of Israeli and Arab youths are determinedly maintaining friendships through e-mail discussions and an online “chat room” that was recently established by an Israeli girl who attended the camp last summer, Wallach says. After several weeks of bonding in the Maine woods, the youths returned to their homes in Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Morocco, Tunisia, and the West Bank and Gaza Strip, with a strong desire to keep the friends they made while playing sports and games, and participating in organized discussions about the Middle East conflict.

“God bless the computer, e-mail, and the Internet ‘chat session,’” says Wallach. “Without them, hundreds of Seeds of Peace youngsters would have no way to maintain the friendships they worked so hard to forge during their five weeks in the United States.” The campers send messages to each other every day, “some filled with pain and anger, others with compassion, reassurance, and encouragement,” says Wallach, award-winning foreign editor for the Hearst newspapers in 1968-94 and co-author of several books on the Middle East. For his work at Seeds of Peace, he received the UNESCO Peace Prize in 1996 and the Legion of Honor of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan from King Hussein in 1997.

While at the Institute, Wallach will be writing a report on the methodology Seeds of Peace has developed to help young people develop the listening skills and empathic abilities that have helped them move from prejudice, misunderstanding, and hatred to understanding and trust. The goal is to share these methods with other organizations doing similar work around the world, he says.

In the last five years, almost 800 Arab and Israeli teenagers have participated in the Seeds of Peace experience. Many of the campers are chosen by their governments, but they come from a broad range of backgrounds, including prominent and refugee families. In daily 90-minute conflict resolution sessions, they learn how to disagree yet remain friends—in short, how to coexist, Wallach says. But when they return home, they confront the same physical barriers they left, closures that prohibit movement not only between Israel and the Palestinian territories but between neighboring Palestinian villages. “Armed troops and police—not to mention fearful parents—are a strong disincentive to venture across these geographic and psychic borders,” Wallach says.

Returning Home from Camp

Thus, the return home poses real challenges for the campers, says Wallach. “After a summer of sharing everything from shaving cream and showers to sports and sing-alongs, ‘reentry’ into hostile societies often is as sobering for them as it must be for astronauts returning from orbit. The life support system is gone. Caring counselors and trained facilitators are nowhere in sight. No longer are they in a ‘safe place.’”

The Seeds of Peace summer camp stretches along Maine’s Pleasant Lake, which takes its name from its remote and tranquil setting. The Palestinian and Israeli youths sharing canoes on the lake live less than a mile apart at home, but in the tormented Middle East those few hundred yards can be an insurmountable distance, Wallach notes. Indeed, their homes can be harsh and dangerous places where buses get blown up and stone-throwing melees often turn into violent bloodbaths.

“And even more intimidating than the physical dangers of going home are the emotional ones, the personal trauma of returning to places where your new friends are still regarded as enemies,” Wallach says. A Jordanian teenager wrote on the Internet that when he and other Jordanian campers got home, “I faced reality. We were rejected everywhere, we were traitors.” A Palestinian wrote than when she returned her refugee camp friends simply couldn’t believe she had bunked with and shared her meals with Israelis “and they didn’t shoot you.” An Israeli complained that his peers blamed the most recent terrorist bombing on “your new friends,” as if he were somehow complicit because he had forged friendships with the people he was supposed to hate.

Online Chat Room

The Israeli girl who organized the chat room wrote that “connecting 
 for the first time was a great honor. People from all over the Middle East 
 showed up [on the Internet] 
 [Everyone was] delighted and anxious to hear what the others had to say 
 Getting into one another’s sayings, experiences, etc. lasted two hours!” The chat room, which has become a weekly event, brings together online campers, counselors, and leaders from Jordan, Egypt, Israel, the Palestinian Authority, and the United States.

The e-mail communication also continues, Wallach says. “Messages are sent daily. Many revolve around the normal, everyday things that kids have to deal with: struggle with schoolwork, feuds with friends and family, romantic flings and inevitable disappointments. But all are full of hope and convey a genuine caring about the Seeds of Peace community.”

Not everyone is yet connected to the World Wide Web. But, notes Wallach, the manifesto of Seeds of Peace is clear in the words of one Jordanian youth, who wrote, “People! We have to communicate, we have to know each other even better, we have to do what our leaders are not doing—and will not do if we don’t push them 
 All of us are so very lucky to be a part of the Seeds of Peace family; please continue fighting for what you believe in.”

Camp makes play for peace
Maine Sunday Telegram

Aug 2, 1998 / No Comments

Summer camp in Maine isn’t so unusual. Unless of course the campers are Middle East ‘rivals’—Israelis and Palestinians—and politics is all part of the program.

BY ABBY ZIMET | OTISFIELD Flags flutter, multi-hued. Clusters of dark-haired kids stand, heads high, voices rising, each singing their ardent anthem before their flag: Israel’s blue and white, Palestine’s red, black and green.

The flag of Israel, notes a grave John Wallach, rests between Jordan and Palestine. “You are neighbors,” he stresses. “Geographically, strategically and most importantly, as human beings.”

The kids proclaim their inchoate dreams: To “live the hope,” to “make one future together,” to “take every day like a jewel.”

Then, arm in arm, they enter the Seeds of Peace camp. Inside, only one flag flies: the green Seeds flag, its three small figures holding hands, burgeoning forth from an olive branch.

“Once you come in,” Wallach says, “we’re a new nation.”

In the face of ancient, grievous hatreds, symbols matter, profoundly. Flags are one part of the intricate methodology of Seeds of Peace, the summer camp Wallach founded in 1993 as an exercise in “the politics of the possible.”

This year, its sixth and perhaps most difficult, Seeds faces new challenges and yet boasts new strengths. With the peace processes in the Middle East at an impasse, the political climate—and the mood of some kids who emerge from it—is charged, even bellicose. At the same time, this year’s kids are veterans of both war and peace, with the staunch skills to prove it.

Here, historic enemies who had once never met “the other guy” will meet again and again, unavoidably, usually amicably, sometimes not. They will play Frisbee, tennis, volleyball. They will swim together, eat together, sleep together. In daily facilitation sessions, they will debate Jerusalem or the West Bank and have to reach dĂ©tente, even if only agreeing to disagree.

They will do all this within Seeds’ painstaking, multi-layered framework, which leaves nothing to chance. Their beds will be staggered: Arab, Israeli, Arab. They will wear T-shirts that make them all look the same. They will play the team-building Color Games, which in most camps is Color Wars.

Slowly, it is hoped, they will come to constitute Wallach’s vision of “a kids’ U.N.—a network of building blocks toward a peaceful future.”

They will come to compromise. To coexist. And, despite centuries of enmity, to hug. Often.

Noa Epstein, an Israeli, is one of many alumni who have made Seeds part of their lives. At home, Noa visits and calls Palestinian friends. They come to her house.

She and her Palestinian friend Abdasallam once went on a sort of pilgrimage in Jerusalem: He took her to the Dome of the Rock, she took him to the Wailing Wall, where they placed a plea for peace in three languages.

“That is what Seeds is about—getting to know a person as a person, not an Israeli or Palestinian,” she says. “It’s building something, unstoppable, for the future.”

This summer, Seeds is hosting delegations from Qatar, Egypt, Morocco, Jordan, Palestine, Israel, the United States and Cyprus. Two thirds of the campers are either Israeli or Palestinian.

While the kids must all speak English and show leadership qualities, they otherwise represent an ethnic and political cross-section. There are Jews from settlements, Palestinians from refugee camps, Israeli Arabs. Families contribute part of the $2,500 tuition. The rest is paid by scholarships.

The summer’s first session was devoted to almost all Seeds alumni and activists.

At home, with the help of a Seeds office in Jerusalem, the kids visit across borders, produce a quarterly newspaper with editors and subscribers in four countries, and have an Internet site. In May they held a week-long Middle East youth summit in Switzerland. Later this month, they will lead a group trip to Jordan, Haifa and Palestine.

The task of bridging centuries-old chasms is a tough one. Notes one camper, “If you want peace, you must forget everything.”

Maine, safe and green, is where they start. After years of roving the state, Seeds has a 10-year lease at the former Powhatan Camp on Pleasant Lake.

It is summer-camp timeless: leafy grounds, stacked canoes, glistening lake. In the screened bunks, shampoo and bug dope sit on window sills. Placid and still, it is what an Israeli boy calls “a utopia that we can make like our lives.”

Seeds, says Noa Epstein, “changed my life.”

Cogent and eloquent, she can argue in her musical English the fine points of the 1993 Oslo peace accord or the Palestinian Intifada.

She has met Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and lit candles at the funeral of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. She has none of the self-consciousness of pubescence; there is no flipping of hair. She seems her age—newly 15—only when a large bug crawls on her, at which point she shrieks.

Ice-skating in Portland the week before, she dislocated a shoulder. Now she sits on her bed in Bunk 10, stuck in a sling. Mona, a Palestinian friend from the West Bank, makes Noa’s ponytail for her.

Back home, Noa had Mona to her birthday party. She also visited a Palestinian friend in Aroub, one of the gritty refugee camps that have given rise to the most radical Palestinian elements. Noa’s father, who fought in the Yom Kippur War, couldn’t bear to go. “Every person has their own limits,” she says mildly. Her mother took her.

“I owed it to myself and my friend,” she explains. “I don’t have the right to talk about the refugees if I haven’t seen what’s going on. Otherwise, how am I gonna make her life better, and my life better?”

Before Seeds, had she ever met a Palestinian, a regular kid, like her?

“None,” she says with passion. “Never. No. No way.”

Camp forces coexistence

Utopia begins here with smalltime all-American pleasures; baseball, Ping Pong, swimming, street hockey. With cross-cultural e-mail in mind, there is also a computer lab with eight computers and two in-house computer gurus.

Each day the kids have six activity periods and one facilitation session, says Jerry Smith, head counselor, “though I prefer to think of it all as facilitation.” Smith is the kind of intricate mix common among staff: a burly, drawling, good old boy and thoughtful, tough-talking lawyer. His pediatrician wife is camp doctor.

Says Smith flatly, “Everything, including the table where they sit, is planned. It forces them to coexist, whether they like it or not.”

He runs a tight ship: He put the boys to bed early the night before for “too much horseplay.” When he walked the bunks, he heard them talking—not of girls, but of occupied territories. He left them to it. They had work to do.

“This year we’re asking them to go to another level,” he explains. “It was feeling like, ‘I know where you stand, you know where I stand. Let’s leave it at that and play soccer all summer.’ But they are not just here for the country club. We have to convince them they can make a difference in their own lives. That’s the truth of Seeds. If we can make one Israeli and one Palestinian not hate each other, it’s a start.”

Andy Arsham, 25, echoes the take-what-you-can-get approach: “Even if they’re yelling, it’s good, as long as they’re listening.”

A graduate student in genetics, Arsham heads the baseball staff, which is him and two other happy guys in baseball caps. One is Michael Gaies, a Harvard Medical School student, who notes that the kids are savvy, but still kids.

“You forget they’re 15-year-old kids who get homesick because they’re half a world away from home,” he says. “They’re well-versed in politics, but they’re still normal teenagers who put shaving cream on sleeping bags and get goofy with the opposite sex.”

Nearby, girls string beads at a long table, swaying, Jew and Arab alike, to Palestinian music. They bend over their unsober work, intent. They also paint each other’s faces with markers, squealing: “Oh this is so cool!” Are the markers washable? One shrugs, laughs: “We take risks at Seeds of Peace.”

Sara Al-Jabari strings tiny red, blue and purple beads. A 15-year-old Palestinian who lives in Hebron, she knew no Jews until she came here last summer: “Before, I only see soldiers. Then I meet the people from Seeds. Now I love the Israelis. Noa is the best.”

Sara’s father ran a “petrol station” that the Israelis closed because it was near a mosque that was bombed. Her mother teaches. When Noa asked Sara to her house, Sara’s father, uneasy, insisted Noa would have to visit first.

Noa made the hour’s drive to Hebron. She brought Sara flowers, saw her room, met her parents.

Then Sara went to Noa’s birthday party in Jerusalem. At first, she was afraid: “Israeli house, Jewish people.” But it was great. She runs to get snapshots: she and Noa, two teenage girls, hugging, grinning, full of joy.

“It was a very good step,” she smiles. “It feels like I did something for my country. It was saying we have to do this with each other.”

Learning to compromise

The beads are a break from more rigorous, collaborative art projects—this year, a tough task. In one, kids had to draw a 360-degree landscape, relying on the vision of those on either side of them.

In another, they assembled group books portraying their hopes. Suzy Sureck, a New York City sculptor who runs the art program, says consensus has been so hard to achieve that one group of Israelis and Palestinians made four books: Book of Love and Friendship, Book of Reality and Dreams, Book of Dreams Coming True, Book of Future and Forgiveness.

This year, says Sureck, there is “more attitude 
 the hard truth of the difficulty of compromise.

“They come and it’s all peace and love and you’re my friend,” she says. “And then it’s hard, it’s you killed my father and my people have suffered more than yours and the Holocaust and lots of tears. Then, hopefully, they come together.”

Before lunch, they come together for lineup and announcements: soccer, baseball, dance rehearsal. The sea of green T-shirts flows to the packed dining room. They pause for a carefully inclusive grace: “For friendship, health, love and opportunity, we are thankful.” Lunch is a raucous, sandwich-scarfing, table-pounding affair, with kids veering and bouncing.

Noa, a vegetarian, attacks a mountain of salad. Next to her sits her thick biography of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, background reading for an ongoing debate with her friend Abdasallam.

This year, says Noa, the process of conciliation feels arduous, “like another step on a staircase.” She knows it is not simple, this complex weighing of outrage and faithful hope. She is full of hard-headed reality.

On life in Israel: “It’s a small country—you always know someone who’s been killed.” On a recent bombing in Jerusalem that killed three girls her age: “It’s so scary but you can’t stop living because you’re afraid.”

After the bombing, her Palestinian friends phoned her “all day, ALL DAY.” She and Sara talk in Arabic, which Noa is learning. She still wants to visit Gaza, hotbed of Palestinian discontent. All of it, she insists, can bring change.

“If two people from camp become leaders of their country,” she says, “imagine what that could do
”

Building on experience

To forget about the past and build a future, camp organizers teach kids to say “I” not “we,” to argue from experience, not history. It is sound advice for born-to-war children of opposing sides who at some point, says one, “realized we both had studied history in order to hate.”

The undoing of history is not always weighty. Near the ping-pong tables, rock’n’roll wafts from WSOP, a Seeds radio station that Palestinian Mohammed Yanez has set up. It offers profiles of peacemakers and historic analyses as well as shows on Rod Stewart, Billy Holiday and a range of rockers.

More music drifts under the trees, where women practice a cappella. They are working on a song Noa wrote: “A watchful eye, a listening ear, and a loving heart/ Are what makes two people come together, not drift apart
”

Then they practice “The Rose,” their sweet voices floating: “I say love, it is a flower, and you it’s only seed.” They struggle to pull the harmony together.

“Remember,” says one, “we are one voice.”

At home, says Sara Al-Jabari, whenever she has to do a school project, she does it about Seeds. She talks to Noa “every week, always.” But it is sometimes difficult to explain to Palestinian friends that she has Israeli friends.

They have not, after all, experienced Seeds: “They are living the reality, I don’t blame them.”

It is inevitable, Sara says, that she and Noa sometimes shout at each other in political arguments. But when they say goodbye at the airport, tears flow.

“Sometimes I feel like Noa is my sister,” she says. “If you are at Seeds, you change your thinking about the other side.”

Making dreams come true

Before supper, another lineup. The sweaty soccer players rush to jump in the lake. The rest of the kids surge toward supper. More slam-bang table-thumping.

The evening coexistence session is a circle of chairs in an empty bunk. Four Israelis, two Palestinians. Sara moves her chair across to Noa, who puts her arm around her. They are all asked to share their goals.

To try not to shout, says one. To agree about something, says one. They decide to discuss Jerusalem, a thorny issue. An Israeli boy wants to divide it. With a wall? With soldiers? They poke at the idea.

“Jerusalem is one city,” Noa protests. “It’s where I grew up. It’s a place of beauty, created for peace.”

Tremulous, Sara tells of visiting a mosque where a bomb had killed her uncle, and how frightened she was: “This is a dream, but that was the reality.” Noa, her arm still around Sara, speaks sharply to her.

“It’s your job to make it a reality,” she says. “You have to work at it.”

For an hour, the tension ebbs and flows. They decide to set up committees and issue a report. They end, agreeing it was a good session.

“I feel like everything inside me goes off,” says Sara. “I opened my heart.”

She and Noa drift off to the evening concert. Arm in arm, chattering, a fervent, newborn world unto themselves.

We lost our childhood. We lost our homes and families. The only thing we have left is hope
Parade

Apr 26, 1996 / No Comments

BY LYNN MINTON | A unique event took place last year, when the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity brought to Venice, Italy, teenage leaders from strife-torn areas of the world and the U.S. to meet with each other and world leaders. It was hoped that by sharing their experiences, feelings and ideas, the future generation of leaders would have a better chance to understand each other and to reduce conflict in the world.

What follows came from several conversations that took place during the course of a week.

Where is my Family

Whether they came from the former Yugoslavia or the Middle East, Northern Ireland or Africa, these young people had similar experiences to share: Living in fear of what may happen to them, losing family and friends, having their world disrupted. Many spoke of the pain and suffering in their lives.

“The Serbs occupied our town when I was 16,” said Goran Mesarek, 19, a Croatian. “They arrest me and put me in a camp. When I come out, I find out my parents and little sister are gone. I ask some Serbian friends, ‘Where is my family?’ But they say they don’t know. But no one will tell me. Some people say they are dead. Some say they are in some camp in Serbia. A couple of my good friends and their families have also just disappeared.

“I want to know, are my parents alive or no? It’s driving me crazy. I was pretty desperate for a while—you think about suicide.”

“There was a period when it seemed as if every day a soldier was stabbed or a bomb went off,” said Meital Cohen, 15, of Jerusalem. “It was so terrible, every day, to turn on the television. You knew that something bad had happened, and you just waited to hear it.”

“Until 1991, I didn’t know what nationality I am,” said Jelena Postic, 18, who lived in Croatia. “Then, one day in school, they asked me. I didn’t know, so they called and asked my mother. She said, ‘Serb.’ Later one, these men came to our apartment. Croatian soldiers. They took all our belongings. Everything. Even my pictures I had since I was 3. What did they want with my pictures? After that, we moved to Poland.”

“The soldiers came to my house when I was sleeping and made me feel afraid,” said Ruba Musleh, 16, a Palestinian from Jericho. “I want to help everybody not to feel like I felt, because it was very bad.”

“I had a friend who was with me in school from first grade to seventh grade,” said Haris Hadzic, 16, a Bosnian displaced to Croatia. “Then, suddenly, he left us. Just disappeared. Then we see on television, his father on an armored tank, shouting and laughing. That broke our hearts. All we knew then is that my friend is in Belgrade, and his father is in Bosnia in the Serbs’ army.”

The Cycle of Anger

These young people also spoke of the cycle of aggression and revenge, blame and recrimination—going on for years, decades or even longer—that fueled these deadly conflicts and sometimes seemed impossible to stop. “In Israel, for many years we tried to do to the Palestinians what they did to us,” said Yehoyada (“Yoyo”) Mande’el, 16. “If they made a terror attack, we went inside Gaza, we went inside the territories. We took people, and we put them in jail. We still do. We went inside their houses and harassed them. I really believe that we did it as a must. It was a security risk.

“The Palestinians see it differently. It doesn’t matter how I see it. They see it differently. Because of the revenge they saw we did to them, they revenged more. There was another terror attack. It was like ping-pong, and every time 20 people died or were captured.”

“Four years of our lives have been destroyed,” said Goran Mesarek. “We feel desperate. We want to be safe. I’m not an animal to hate someone. But I can’t live with the people who killed my parents. I can’t live with them anymore.”

“My granddad and my dad’s oldest brother were killed by the white man,” said Kim Muhota, 20, of Kenya. “And my dad’s second brother was put in prison for life. This kind of story happened to many families. If you told someone like that, ‘Let’s forgive the white man for what he did, let’s leave that in the past,’ that wouldn’t really be practical. Because there’s a lot of anger there.”

“You cannot say that we don’t know who bombed Bosnia-Herzegovina first,” said Tarja Krahic, 19, who was born in Bosnia-Herzegovina but displaced to Croatia. “In my city we were living peacefully. My dad is Muslim. My mom is Croatian. My best friend was a Serbian girl. Suddenly, one morning, my city was occupied.”

All Sides Are Victims

Still, many of these young people realized that peace will only be possible if notions of revenge are put aside.

“In a conflict situation, everybody must bear some responsibility,” said Keith Jacques, 20, of Belfast, Northern Ireland.

“From my experience—and I’m active for peace in Israel—it’s not so important, the past,” said Yoyo Mande’el. “If I was there before or the Palestinians were there before—right now, for me, it doesn’t matter. Because my family and friends are hurt, and I knew people who were killed in wars of terror attacks. And if we argue about who was in Israel before, it won’t solve the problem. We have to say, ‘What is going on right now? We should try to compromise. We should try to speak with each other, to see each other as a person. Maybe we can work for a better future.’”

“We all suffer,” said Laith Arafeh, 16, a Palestinian from East Jerusalem. “And we all are very eager to find a solution to our suffering, because we can’t take it anymore.”

“All sides are involved in the war,” noted Aleksandra Cvijanovic, 17, a Serb, “and all sides are victims, mostly the children.”

“Most of us have been hurt, one way or another,” said Omar Hassan, 15, of Cairo. “And I think the only way we can accomplish peace in the Middle East is if Israel helps the Arabs solve their hurt, and the Arabs help Israel solve their hurt. But if each country keeps making accusations, that only makes the wounds that much bigger.”

For the American teenagers, these conflicts were at times difficult to understand.

“The thing I find discouraging is that, with each of these conflicts, it’s almost like people have to die,” commented Daryl Bernstein, 19, of Scottsdale, Ariz. “And then, after a period of time, everybody gets tired of the fighting and dying, and they eventually come together and make peace. And it’s almost like these lives were lost for no reason at all. If only the people had just sat down in the beginning and said, ‘Let’s imagine what it would be like to have our friends and our families die, and let’s make peace now.’”

“Regardless of who started a war, people are dying,” said Ron Fox, 20, of San Francisco. “Forget about how it started and why it started and solve it.”

“But how do you eliminate the anger and bitterness?” asked Anil Soni, 19, of Northbrook, Ill.

VIDEO: Seeds of Peace recognizes US Diplomat Richard Holbrooke, Carlson corporation

May 18, 2011 / No Comments

NEW YORK | Richard Holbrooke, late US Special Envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, was awarded the 2011 John P. Wallach Peacemaker Award on May 18.

Seeds of Peace also honored Carlson, whose chairman was presented with the 2011 Corporate Peacemaker Award.

Kati Marton Holbrooke accepted the award on behalf of her late husband, saying “I cannot tell you how much it means to me that Richard is being honored by an organization that really embodied his core values throughout his diplomatic career.”

Several hundred philanthropists, dignitaries and community leaders attended the event at the Plaza Hotel, which raised over $1.1M for Seeds of Peace programs.

Carlson Chairman Marilyn Carlson Nelson accepted the Corporate Peacemaker Award.

“Marilyn Carlson Nelson and Carlson Wagonlit Travel are our dedicated travel partners,” said Seeds of Peace Executive Director Leslie Adelson Lewin. “They make connections possible, ensure the safe passage of our Seeds at all times despite challenging political circumstances and whose team can get you from Kabul to Maine—not your most commonly-traveled route—with ease.”

“We cannot overstate the importance of the work Seeds of Peace is doing by training young people from areas of conflict who will go back into their regions and model paths to peace,” she said.

 

Four Seeds of Peace graduates from regions of international conflict shared their personal stories and how their experiences with Seeds of Peace shaped perspectives of their “enemies.”

“At Camp, we acknowledge that conflicts are personal, that humans—naturally—are emotionally vested in conflicts,” said Mujib, a Seed from Afghanistan. “We don’t rule that out. But what we also realize and try to understand is that there is always another side to the conflict—there’s always a larger picture that we cannot ignore but should try to understand.”

“Ambassador Holbrooke believed in this principal of speaking to the other side and trying to understand the other side,” he said.

Kati Marton Holbrooke, a journalist and author, said that her husband believed “that at the heart of diplomacy were human beings not bureaucrats.”

“Like you, Seeds, he was a bridge builder,” she said. “Shortly after he was named Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, he insisted that both leaders—Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan and Asif Ali Zardari of Pakistan—come to Washington together. He would not let them come separately and he insisted that all Cabinet level meetings take place with them together.”

“He felt, as you Seeds feel, that once you know your adversary, that once you have sat across the table from him, it’s much tougher to de-humanize him.”

“That is the core of Seeds values and Richard Holbrooke’s.”
 
EVENT PHOTOS

Seas of Peace preparing for second summer on the Atlantic with 18 Seeds

Jan 26, 2012 / 4 Comments

NEW YORK | The Seas of Peace program, a part of the Seeds of Peace Camp in Maine, will be launching its second summer beginning on June 24 and running through July 18.

This sailing program brings together 18 Israeli, Palestinian, and American youth with the common goal of conflict resolution. The curriculum includes two 90-minute sessions of facilitated leadership dialogue a day. The leadership dialogue is based on three leadership frameworks developed at Harvard University–Dignity, Immunity to Change, and Adaptive Leadership. When not participating in dialogue, Seeds continuously partake in collaborative work and community life.

Participating teens have spent at least one summer at the Camp in Maine. Opening the program to a group who are already involved in Seeds of Peace ensures that all participants are committed to the Seeds of Peace mission and allows for more advanced discussions that build off of a previously developed understanding of the conflict.

Seeds must be willing to put aside differences and work with one another in order to operate the ship.

“On a 110-foot schooner, you’ve got to trust that while you’re sleeping, somebody else is running the boat in a safe manner, keeping watch,” says Seas of Peace Co-Founder David Nutt. “You’ve got to trust that the cooking is going to get done, that the cleaning is going to get done. And if anybody isn’t a member of that big team the whole thing is going to fall apart.”

Nutt and fellow Co-Founder Monica Balanoff worked at Seeds of Peace as counselors and grew up sailing. Both completed circumnavigations of the globe at early ages, Nutt with his family, and Balanoff with the high school semester at sea program Class Afloat. The Class Afloat program shares many of the same goals and values as Seas of Peace including the development of leadership skills and encouragement of intellectual curiosity.

Seeds will arrive in Portland on June 24, where they will live in dormitories at a local community college. Using the facilities of SailMaine in Portland Harbor, they will learn the basics of sailing, acquiring knowledge such as rigging a boat, tacking, and steering. During their stay, they will also meet with local religious communities and volunteer at Catherine’s Cupboard, a food pantry run by St. Joseph’s College.

Following the 10 days of preparation, Seeds will set sail from Portland, Maine, aboard Spirit of Massachusetts. They will reach New York City on July 8 or 9, depending on weather conditions, where they will get to see many prominent landmarks including the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building, and the UN Headquarters. The ship will dock for two days in New York City before sailing up to Boston, which they will reach in mid-July.

In New York City and Boston, media are invited to see the Seeds in action. Water taxis are a great way to accompany the Seeds as they sail into and away from the dock and provide an opportunity to capture footage in front of New York skyline.

This summer follows the highly successful pilot program in 2011, from which participating Seeds came away with a renewed hope of peace, which was especially significant given developments in the Middle East last spring. Nutt and Balanoff hope to eventually transition to a full academic semester program, which would be the first at-sea semester program dedicated to providing youth from conflict regions with leadership and peacemaking skills.

Viewpoint from the West Bank: ‘We are all humans’
PBS Newshour

Aug 26, 2014 / No Comments

Alma is a 19-year-old Palestinian living in the West Bank while studying to be a journalist. She and her friends enjoy traveling and camping around the West Bank. Alma is interested in becoming a political reporter, and in the West Bank where she lives, “everyone is interested in politics,” she said.

Alma attended the Seeds of Peace summer camp, where both Israelis and Palestinians gather to find a common bond. It was an experience that changed her understanding of the conflict.

Alma

My journey with politics started a long time ago when I was a kid. My parents would take me for peace camps that include both Israelis and Palestinians. I had to talk about politics since I was young.

I’m kind of a peace activist. I’m not pro-any violence. I see what is happening here, and I see many people suffering, including myself. I have suffered from the occupation since I first opened my eyes to this world.

We used to have clashes behind my house when I was young. We lived near a settlement and there was a small mountain behind us where some teenagers clashed with settlers.

When the Israeli occupation or Israeli soldiers came to break up the fights, we used to hide in another apartment downstairs. We had two apartments, one for our ordinary life and another for when the occupation gets in the city. We used to move a lot from one apartment to another because of the clashes that happened in the area.

My parents just worried about our safety. They didn’t care about my political awareness, they just cared for my safety and they tried their best to cover us during the hard times.

I have a lot of friends in Gaza. We always keep in touch with them. They always post statuses and what they’re going through on Facebook or Twitter. We always check on them or talk to them about the situation. Thankfully, they are all safe so far. If we didn’t have Facebook or Twitter it would be really hard to contact them because the electricity sometimes cuts off in Gaza and the connection is really bad so we can’t talk to them on the phone most of the time.

I want people to know that violence won’t solve anything because we’re not equal sides. The Israelis and the Palestinians are never equal sides. They have power. They have support from all over the world. We don’t have power, we don’t have anything. All these resistance movements, what they do, I think is a waste of other victims’ lives. Most of the people who died are civilians; they had nothing to do with the conflict. Ordinary people are the ones who are paying the price.

When I first arrived at camp I was such a closed-minded person. I used to that think violence was the only way to get back our rights. I used to just ignore what the other side said. I didn’t hear anything. I had beliefs that were in my mind since I was young and I couldn’t accept the other side.

But my eyes have been opened recently. I was such a closed-minded person. I didn’t accept the other side. I didn’t accept peace. I thought it was just stupid to have peace with people who wanted to kill us.

But then I realized that they have peaceful people just like us. They were born there. They didn’t choose to be Israelis. And we also were born here, and we didn’t choose to be Palestinians. I believe that at the end of the day we are all humans. We deserve dignity, rights and equal lives, so I don’t care if you’re Israeli or Jewish, I care about what you think, and I care about your humanity.

I just want to let people in the United States and in other countries know that Palestinians are also people who love to live. We’re not terrorists. We’re just looking for a way to have a better future. I’m just looking to have a simple life, like yours and anyone else in the United States.

Read Corinne Segal’s interview at PBS.org â€șâ€ș

Senator Mitchell lauds peace camp at Falmouth fundraiser
The Forecaster (Maine)

Jul 16, 1998 / No Comments

BY HARRIET B. SCHULTZ | FALMOUTH “I can’t think of anyone who makes us prouder to be Mainers. He’s a man of decency, integrity and patience,” said Merle Nelson last week from the porch of her waterfront Falmouth Foreside home as she introduced former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell to a group of 200 people.

They came to hear Mitchell talk about a six-year-old camp in Otisfield that is appropriately called Seeds of Peace. Nelson invited them to her home in hopes that some of them might make financial contributions to the camp.

Mitchell, who has devoted much of his post-Senate years to peace efforts, recalled asking a mayor in a war-torn Bosnian town in 1992 when he thought the opposing factions that had destroyed the town would live there together peacefully.

“We will repair our structures long before we rebuild our souls,” the mayor told him.

“I learned the truth of that statement in Northern Ireland,” said Mitchell, who was instrumental in negotiating what has now become a tenuous peace among Ireland’s Protestants and Catholics.

“What’s more important is what’s in the hearts and minds of the people. We must look to the young people for a real and durable peace,” he said.

Gathered in green T-shirts behind Mitchell on the balmy summer afternoon were Israeli and Arab teenagers, along with Turks and Greeks from the divided island nation of Cyprus.

They had come to Maine for three weeks to “send a message that the next generation wants the violence to stop,” said Seeds of Peace founder John Wallach, a former White House correspondent, and foreign editor for the Hearst newspapers.

Three hundred youngsters, along with an adult delegation, are at the camp during two sessions this summer, learning about each other and forming deep bonds of friendship that they will take back with them to their native lands.

More than 1,000 teens from the Middle East, Bosnia, Cyprus and American inner cities have worked on resolving their conflicts at the camp.

Bushra Jawabri, 17, a Palestinian, and Shira Kaplan, 15, an Israeli, confidently and in fluent English, spoke to the crowd, their arms around each other’s shoulders. The two dark-haired girls, now friends, would have had little to do with each other before coming to Maine.

“I came filled with fear,” said Bushra. “But I feel safe here and can say my ideas freely.”

“This utopia is the reality that we can make,” said Shira. A repeat camper, Shira told a story about asking her father to take her to Jordan last year to visit a friend from camp. The two rode a bus from Israel for seven hours, stayed with her friend for two days and then returned home, something that would have been unthinkable before camp.

“This is what real peace is for me,” she said.

Mitchell beamed as he listened to the teenagers.

“This camp is as important as anything being done by statesmen or politicians,” declared Mitchell, “because it creates hope.

“Without that understanding—that love—conflict is created.”

Wallach presented Mitchell with a Seeds of Peace necktie depicting three youngsters holding an olive branch. Wallach said that King Hussein of Jordan wears the tie as well.

“If it’s good enough for a king, it’s good enough for me,” quipped Mitchell.

Hussein and Queen Noor were honored for their support of the Seeds of Peace program at a dinner in New York last year at which Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said, “No one has a greater stake in the Middle East’s future than the young, and it is by the young that the choice between conflict and reconciliation will ultimately be made.”

In the three and a half years Mitchell spent in negotiations in Ireland, he learned “that there’s no such thing as a conflict that can’t be resolved,” although he admitted that “it’s easy to become discouraged.”

He found in Ireland, as in other parts of the world where there is long-standing animosity, “people come to accept conflict as an inevitable part of their lives.”

But by bringing together young people from opposing factions, who will grow up to be the future leaders of their countries, Mitchell continued, there is more of a chance for a lasting peace.

“I believe with my heart and soul that there will be a resolution of the conflict in the Middle East,” said Mitchell. “It is important to not despair and always, always to hope.”

Maine Seeds participate in World Affairs Council summit on Citizen Diplomacy

Apr 11, 2014 / No Comments

PORTLAND, MAINE | On April 11, Maine Seeds joined the World Affairs Council (WAC) of Maine’s Summit on Citizen Diplomacy. The topic of this year’s summit was “Citizen Diplomacy through Education: Promoting Awareness, Networking, and Partnerships.” The event was a great opportunity for Seeds to share the work they do in the context of Seeds of Peace, and to network with other people invested in the field.

The Summit, which took place at the University of Southern Maine, was focused on four goals:

1. To increase awareness and understanding in Maine of citizen diplomacy and why it is important to individuals, institutions, and communities, as well as to increase understanding of education as an instrument of citizen diplomacy;
2. To generate enthusiasm for citizen diplomacy through education, thereby advancing global citizenship;
3. To build the capacity of Maine’s schools and international educational institutions to become more globally engaged, and to encourage partnerships, networking and cooperation among them; and
4. To showcase local initiatives in global education.

Seeds heard from the President of the World Affairs Council of Maine, Clifford Gilpin; from Harold Pachious, former Chairman of the United States Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy; and from Ed Gragert, Director of the Global Campaign for Education in the U.S.

Also presenting were representatives two citizen diplomacy grassroots non-profit organizations, Africa School House and Safe Passage, who spoke about founding, organizing, and implementing grassroots non-profits in rural Tanzania and urban Guatemala.

For Seeds, the opportunity to hear about the challenges and successes within these organizations and to ask questions was exceptional.

The second part of the day was focused on citizen diplomacy specifically as it relates to youth and student exchange. Students learned about cultural exchange programs in Maine and how schools are working towards building global perspectives in their classrooms.

Lisa Cronin, a participant in the Seeds of Peace Educators Course, and a teacher at Dexter Regional High School where she uses technology to connect her students to classrooms around the world, also presented to the group. She spoke about how Seeds of Peace opened doors for her students to engage in citizen diplomacy, as they connect to other Seeds of Peace educators and their classrooms worldwide.

Maine Seeds Program Director Tim Wilson was invited to speak regarding local initiatives in global education. He addressed what Seeds of Peace means in the context of Maine and the local community issues Seeds deal with. Speaking proudly, he shared how he’s seen schools transform as Seeds became more actively involved in the community.

As they networked with professional citizen-to-citizen diplomacy practitioners, Seeds came away from the day was insight into how to engage with the world, not just learn about it.

Behind the camera, a grandmother to 7,300 sees the possibilities

Sep 17, 2019 / No Comments

There are few septuagenarians who could inspire the sort of rock-star status among a gaggle of teenagers that Bobbie Gottschalk does at the Seeds of Peace Camp in Maine.

Sightings of the diminutive, gray-haired grandmother—always adorned with a baseball cap and a camera around her neck—are often met with squeals of delight, and requests for hugs and photos with and by Bobbie. And she gladly obliges; each photograph is another chance to connect with campers, to hear how they’re feeling, what’s bringing them joy, what’s causing them concern.

In more than a few ways, her camera is a natural extension of what she does best: She sees people.

Whether it was seeing the potential in John Wallach’s idea to create a camp that brought together kids from the Middle East, or the reason one camper might be standoffish in group activities, or the heights that young Seeds and staff could reach if given the chance, for nearly three decades Bobbie has seen people not just for who they are, but for who they could become.

“Bobbie gave me the most important opportunities in my professional life and supported me through many of the most challenging moments we faced in building the Middle East regional program and keeping its spirit alive through profoundly difficult times,” said Ned Lazarus, a former counselor at Camp and Middle East Program Director. “I owe my entire career, and much of what I’m proud to have done in my life, to her faith in me and my ability to contribute to this community.”

Since her days as the first executive director of Seeds of Peace, she’s been a steady source of hope, encouragement, and guidance for Seeds of Peace staff and alumni alike. And while she could spend her golden years in the comfort of her family’s vacation home, every summer since 1993 she has faithfully returned to her small cabin at Camp—among the mosquitos, ticks, rain, and heat—where she’s embraced a new purpose: documenting the daily ins and outs of Camp, using her personal social media accounts to keep the organization’s alumni connected, and embracing the role of the loving-but-firm grandmother for campers, counselors, and 7,300 alumni.

“In so many ways Bobbie is all of the things that we as an organization strive to embody,” said Leslie Lewin, executive director of Seeds of Peace. “To say that Bobbie is the connective tissue of Seeds of Peace is an understatement; her impact on the organization and thousands of Seeds is immeasurable.”

AT HOME WHILE AWAY

The walls of Bobbie’s neatly-appointed cabin at Camp are a patchwork quilt of memories, adorned with photographs of her with Seeds and various staff from over the years, and, of course, turtles. Bobbie has long had a tradition of giving a necklace with a turtle charm to second-year campers, known as Paradigm Shifters, or P.S.s. It’s a small reminder that Seeds of Peace is the home that the campers will always carry with them, just as everywhere a turtle goes it carries its home.

But perhaps the most important item in her makeshift museum might be a single sheet of paper hanging over the desk where she uploads photographs (sometimes an all-night process, due to a shaky wifi signal) and writes the daily Camp Reports.

Dated April 1, 1993, it’s the cover letter that she sent along with her resume to John Wallach, the founder of Seeds of Peace. He and his wife, Janet—who remains an active member of the Seeds of Peace Board of Directors today—had attended a meeting of Bobbie’s book club the previous night to discuss the book they had co-authored, “The New Palestinians.” There, he mentioned that he was also looking for an executive director for a camp he was planning to start that summer.

Whether or not you believe in fate, it was truly exceptional timing.

“I had been looking to start something from scratch for children, possibly a camp in Maine—where I had grown up going to dance camp—and he needed someone with foundational and fundraising experience,” she said. “It was a perfect match.”

Further, the idea of a Camp that allowed historic enemies to meaningfully engage with one another, to see each other as human beings, deeply resonated with Bobbie. Her grandparents had been smuggled out of the former Soviet Union in the early 1900s to escape persecution for being Jewish, and she said she grew up very focused on peace. Her mother worked for the Red Cross and eventually became a teacher, and Bobbie attended a college established by Quakers. It was there that, during the height of the Cold War, she and a few other students from her Russian literature class had the opportunity to visit Russia.

“I had been warned that my being Jewish could make me a target,” Bobbie recalled. “This stern warning, and the emotional baggage from my grandmother, put me on constant alert. Not surprisingly, I had my first asthma attack there.”

In spite of this emotional and physical tension, she dove headfirst into her program, learning, most importantly, that the Russian students weren’t so different from herself and the other American students.

“They were afraid of us, just as we were wary of them. They would take us out on rowboats and grill us about our lives in the U.S.A. They would beg us to give them a pair of our jeans,” she said. “I learned that people have a lot in common, even enemies. And none of the people we spoke with wanted to wipe us off the face of the earth, like our political leaders claimed.”

It was a formative experience for Bobbie, and was undoubtedly a key reason why John’s idea for Seeds of Peace deeply resonated with her.

Those first few years were filled with triumphs and “I can’t believe we’re pulling this off” type moments: donated air tickets and services, foreign ministries agreeing to send kids to America to meet with the “enemy,” landing a front-row seat to the signing of the Oslo Accord, and numerous features from international press, including a national broadcasting crew that followed the first five days of the very first session of Camp.

“It was terrifying!” she said of having a camera crew present. “John was determined to have the media involved from the get-go, and I never would have invited the outside world for the first five days of Camp, but the feedback was really great. I think the idea that the next generation would not have to live through what the current generation was living through really resonated with a lot of people.”

From that first session of 46 boys, the Camp and Seeds of Peace grew quickly, soon including female campers and evolving the dialogue program. In 1998, Bobbie started SeedsNet, an online list serve for Seeds that would become her first foray into serving as a digital social connector.

But even as Seeds of Peace was growing and thriving, there was no denying that things would soon be very different. John was dying, and in the summer of 2002, he finally succumbed to non-smokers lung cancer.

“When we told the Camp, I think it really scared a lot of the campers,” she recalled. “They thought, ‘Well, this is the end of Seeds of Peace.’ So we had to mourn him and deal with our own grief, but we also had to give the campers hope that this was too good to die with John.”

The next few years were extremely difficult for Bobbie and Seeds of Peace. Out of respect for John, the staff had made few preparations for a future without him as president, and it took time to find the right successor.

“It was a very hard few years, probably a textbook case of what happens when the founder, especially one who is so magnetic and the face of the organization, dies or leaves and there hasn’t been any real preparation made beforehand,” she said. “People were very reluctant to try to fill his shoes and it was very difficult.”

One of John’s successors stripped Bobbie of the majority of her duties, and many friends and family members urged her to quit.

“But I couldn’t abandon this place,” she said. “When leaders leave, it feels like the end, and I felt I would be letting the kids down.”

She did eventually step down from her staff role in 2004 and became a member of the Board of Directors. But she was still only in her early 60s and wanted to stay actively involved, so as one chapter of her life closed, she recalled advice from her mother.

“She told me that the hardest thing about getting old is losing your purpose. You have to replace it with some other purpose,” she said. “I had always wanted to have a role at Camp, and we didn’t have a photographer, so I picked up a camera.”

BEHIND THE LENS

She’s mostly self taught when it comes to taking pictures, but some of the best advice she ever received came from a sports photographer: Stand still, the action will come to you.

It usually takes about a week for the campers to stop requesting so many photos and to become accustomed to seeing Bobbie snapping photos while they canoe, climb the ropes courses, dance, or play sports.

This familiarity not only makes for better photographs, but through the camera’s lens, the former social worker is able to observe the campers’ transformations in ways she wouldn’t so easily be able to do otherwise.

“You don’t just stare at people, but with a camera, they can’t see where my eyes are. And, I feel like I am able to capture the change that comes over their faces,” she said. “They start off withdrawn, maybe hiding under a sweatshirt or physically closing themselves off, but as they began to buy into it, to see that they are safe and an enemy can become something so much more, they completely change. Sometimes I have pictures of the same person from the beginning of Camp to the end of the first week and I can’t tell that they’re the same person.”

Taking hundreds of thousands of photographs has allowed her to observe a few universal and time-tested truths when it comes to being a teenager at Camp: “Winning trumps everything,” she said with a laugh. “Many of the kids are competitive to begin with, and even if they have a fight earlier in the day, once they’re on the same team for an activity, they’re going to work together because they want to win.”

7,300 REASONS TO HOPE

Her days at Camp begin when everyone else’s does—waking up with the morning bell, lineup by the lake, breakfast, then on to activities. She rarely leaves the grounds while Camp is in session, save for Friday evenings when she makes the 80-minute drive to see her family and do laundry before returning to Camp the next morning. Since 1993 she’s only missed a handful of Camp days, and those were for family emergencies or funerals.

When she’s not at Camp, she lives with her husband, Tom, in Washington, D.C., gives lectures about Seeds of Peace at college campuses several times a year as a Woodrow Wilson Visiting Fellow, and serves on the board of several nonprofits and educational institutions.

But among her many contributions, connecting Seeds with opportunities might be among those that she most values. She’s helped countless Seeds get scholarships, apply to colleges, and launch their careers over the years, and you don’t have to look far to find stories from Seeds about how her encouragement, mentorship, and care has had an immeasurable impact on their lives.

One was Tamer, a camper from Egypt who attended the very first session of Camp.

“As a kid away from home and family for the first time, I remember finding such comfort and warmth in Bobbie as a de facto godmother,” he said. “Bobbie encouraged me to pursue my dream of studying in the United States and helped me get to college. During school holidays, Bobbie welcomed me into her home instead of letting me spend it away from family on campus. Years later, it was also Bobbie who helped me get to and through law school. It is hard to imagine what my life would have looked like without Bobbie’s constant and ongoing support, but Bobbie is also an enthusiastic advocate for each of us. Even a quick scroll through her Facebook feed would show how she beams with pride as she promotes and celebrates each Seed’s achievements.”

With 4,957 friends on Facebook—a list that she has to occasionally cull, since the site limits individual accounts to 5,000 friends—she has taken on the unofficial role of connecting and celebrating Seeds on the social media channel. Sending a birthday message (sometimes as many as 30 a day) is one of her favorite ways to stay up to date with alumni.

“I’m just so pleased with what they’re doing, I never could have predicted so many of the things,” she said. “It’s like watching a garden bloom—but imagine if you planted that garden without having a picture or knowing what the seeds were going to look like.”

Of course, the flip side of being immersed online is that she also has a front-row seat to the negative sides of social media—the ugly exchanges that can play out online, or the constant bombardment of violence and social unrest around the world.

And while there is plenty happening in the world that disappoints her, she said none of it ever discourages her. The Seeds who have come before and are working to make the world better, as well as the ones who are just beginning their journey, are reason enough to keep up hope—and for her to keep coming back.

Sitting among the pine trees beside Pleasant Lake, a soft breeze picked up when asked if, after all these years, there was anything about Camp that still took her breath away.

“I can feel all 7,000 Seeds when I’m here,” she said without hesitation. “I can see the old ones on the lake, I can hear John and Wil Smith, and I know they would still be coming here today if they could. And as long as I’m able to, so will I.”

53 Israeli, Palestinian Seeds
examine impact of ongoing violence

Nov 24, 2014 / No Comments

USAID

JERUSALEM | In the wake of the horrific bloodshed in and around Gaza and recent clashes in Jerusalem and the West Bank, 53 Israeli and Palestinian Seeds spent three days in late November examining their individual emotional reactions to the violence.

The “I for an Eye” seminar provided participants with an avenue to better understand conflict and the forces that perpetuate violence, hate, and injustice—from occupation and religion to media and politics.

“We created a safe space to address and process the emotional impact this summer had on all of us, and to better comprehend our own strengths, weaknesses and mechanisms we develop to cope with the aftermath, both individually and collectively,” said one organizer.

In a powerful moment, the participants came together to support a fellow Seed whose friend had been shot and killed near his refugee camp, and then held a moment of silence for all of the innocent Palestinian and Israeli lives lost this year.

“This seminar was one which helped validate my Seeds experience,” said the Seed. “I learned about new things, but more importantly, I felt the support of my Seeds family which helped me to overcome one of the worst times I have ever had.”

“In this, I realized the importance of listening, understanding and respecting others before we talk and judge them.”

The seminar took place from November 20-22 near Jerusalem at the only intentional Arab-Jewish community in Israel.

In addition to workshops on media, the construction of narrative, and self-expression, the Seeds engaged in facilitated dialogue sessions—their first since the summer.