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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 détente, 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.

Seeds of Peace plants hopes for the future
The Boston Sunday Globe

Dec 31, 2000 / No Comments

Group brings Mideast kids together in USA

BY BARBARA HALL | This is the season of peace and yet there is conflict, most unsettlingly perhaps, in the Holy Land.

Against this backdrop, an international organization, Seeds of Peace, stands out for its message of hope. Founded in 1993, it is a not-for-profit endeavor dedicated to teaching the art of peacemaking to some 2,000 young people representing 20 nations.

With headquarters in New York City, Seeds of Peace is best known for summer sessions at a camp in Maine. There, as its literature explains, pioneering efforts in people-to-people diplomacy, the cornerstone of lasting peace, occur in bucolic setting.

In addition, the organization in 1999 opened its Center for Coexistence in Jerusalem. At the center, teenagers can find a safe haven where art and drama workshops and peacemaking skills are taught. Also, young people can communicate via the Internet and they produce a publication, The Olive Branch.

Leen Al-Alami, a freshman at Harvard University, is a Seed—an activist with the organization. A Palestinian, she was born and raised in Jordan where strife has been a given.

“Jordan was allied with Iraq during the Gulf War,” says Al-Alami.

“There was a lot of controversy then,” she says. “We just wanted things to be peaceful.”

And that same feeling among Jordanians extends to the Middle East War today.

“… I heard about Seeds of Peace through a family friend,” she says. “I got involved in 1996 and then again in 1997. It really helped me grow. It changed my view of things. Sometimes it was hard, especially in the beginning. It was the most moving experience for me because I had never really encountered an Israeli civilian. My idea of an Israeli was the one I’d typically see on TV, usually a soldier. I was very scared at first, but you have to learn how to distinguish between someone’s nationality and someone’s individuality. Once you learn how to do that, you can talk.”

Al-Alami attributes failures in peace efforts to a lack of a personal knowledge of each other.

“Once you learn about other people’s cultures, their points of view, you really can reach a compromise,” she says. “That’s what I’ve learned from Seeds of Peace. What the Arabs learn from their history books is very different from what Israelis have learned in theirs, so it’s useless to discuss the past. What we need to do is discuss the present and, from there, go on to the future. We need a peace that belongs to the people. After all, the people who are really suffering are the civilians, the children.”

Al-Alami says she has called on her knowledge of peacemaking often at school, from soothing relations with her roommates to contributing in courses that focus on world events.

“A skill I have acquired is that of listening, which has helped me at Harvard because there’s so much diversity here,” she says. “I use it every day.”

John Wallach created Seeds of Peace to address conditions he had witnessed during a 30-year career in journalism. Wallach was a syndicated writer for The New York Times News service and a reporter for Hearst newspapers. His prize-winning work included assignments on the Middle East peace negotiations in the 1960s and 1970s.

Wallach describes the group’s start: “In 1993, I was at a dinner party in Washington with Shimon Peres, who was then Israeli foreign minister; with the Egyptian ambassador; and a representative of the Palestinian Liberation Organization. I asked if I could make a toast, so I stood up and said I thought it was high time that the next generation should be given a chance to break the cycles of violence; and, if I found a place, would they be willing to ask their governments to send 15 or 20 kids to a summer camp in the US where they could live together and learn about conflict resolution? They all said yes. So, the next day, without waiting for them to backtrack or change their minds, I announced it publicly. I put out a press release saying that the Palestinians, the Israelis, and the Egyptians had agreed to send youngsters to a summer camp in the US for the cause of peace.”

“Those first 45 young participants who gathered in Washington had a surprise in store,” says Wallach. While on a private White House tour arranged by then-Senator Howard Metzenbaum of Ohio, the group met Hillary Rodham Clinton.

“It was on a Friday,” Wallach says. “She met them and listened to some of their stories. We’ve always had kids who’ve lost fathers or brothers fighting, as we do now. Mrs. Clinton was very moved. She excused herself and said, ‘I’ll be back in 5 or 10 minutes.’

We later found out that she’d called her husband, who was on an Air Force One flights over San Antonio, Texas,” Wallach says.

“She’d said something like, ‘Bill, I’ve just met the most amazing bunch of kids. They should be honored front and center in a ceremony on Monday.’ She came back and said, ‘Can you all stay until Monday, because we want you to be our honored guests at the signing of the Oslo Peace Accord [the Israeli Palestinian declaration of principles signed by Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin].”

“It all worked out well. And, our kids were really the stars of the event, because they are the future.”

A decade from now, Wallach says, young people like Al-Alami will assume decision-making positions around the globe.

“Our dream,” he says, “is that our kids will be in leadership positions. The whole point of Seeds of Peace is to try to educate a new generation to break that cycle of violence.”

Peace Camp’s Sense of Hope Unshaken
Associated Press

Aug 7, 2006 / No Comments

OTISFIELD, MAINE | The Seeds of Peace camp that brings together teenagers from warring countries and cultures is accustomed to disruptions stemming from events thousands of miles away.

This summer, however, camp has been especially tense.

Pakistani and Indian teenagers were attending the opening session when terrorists bombed trains in Bombay, killing more than 200 people. Then Israel responded to border raids by Hezbollah by launching its offensive into Lebanon.

Discussions were heated. Many campers said they wanted to leave camp and catch the first plane home.

While the bloodshed is discouraging, counselors say it underscores the importance of the camp.

“What are you going to do? Nothing?” asked Tomer Perry, an Israeli counselor who came to Seeds of Peace in 1996. “There’s always hope.”

Created in 1993, Seeds of Peace camp is dedicated to bringing together Israeli and Arab teenagers in hopes of moving them beyond deep-rooted hatreds. Removed from the region of conflict, the teens are startled to find themselves sharing meals, bunkhouses and the same sports teams as their “enemy.”

The 67-acre camp nestled in the woods on Pleasant Lake has expanded its reach over the years, grouping teenagers from other trouble spots such as Afghanistan, the Balkans, Cyprus, Iraq, India and Pakistan.

Protected by state troopers, the camp provides a safe haven for the teens, some of whom have had friends and family killed or jailed. But the conflicts in the campers’ homelands are never far from their minds.

Last week, camp director Tim Wilson didn’t like what he was seeing as campers became increasingly anguished by daily news reports about Hezbollah rockets hitting Israel in record numbers and Israeli soldiers pushing deeper and deeper into Lebanon.

By Wednesday, Wilson decided he had had enough of the shouting and finger pointing. He told the campers he had had enough of their self-pity and anger.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been exacerbated by outsiders using it for their own gain, he said. Peel those layers away, and you get to the heart of the conflict. “You can yell and scream and holler, but what are you going to do to change this?” he said afterward.

Wilson reflected on the moment as he patrolled the camp in his golf cart.

“I get tired of people being victims,” said Wilson, a floppy denim hat perched on his head to block the blazing sun. “My father said you can wallow in it and figure somebody owes you something, or you can get off your behind and do something.”

As Wilson drove, the camp around him was abuzz with activity. Teenagers worked on a ropes course that teaches trust. Others danced in a circle. Some paddled on the lake in red kayaks.

During a game called “steal the bacon,” a Palestinian girl grabbed the “bacon,” a tennis ball, but slipped and fell down as she was tagged by an Israeli girl. The Israeli girl stopped to make sure the Palestinian was OK.

On the lake, Israeli and Palestinian teens cheered each other as they attempted to water ski under the supervision of counselor Burgess LePage.

Respect, trust and communication are critical elements, Wilson noted. If all three are present, strange and extraordinary things can happen. Lasting friendships are built. Campers will go back home with a new understanding of the “enemy.”

Everything at camp is geared toward those three components. Even when the campers don’t realize it, they’re gently being moved in the direction.

This week, the camp will be divided into two teams—blue and green—for three intense days of “color games.” Along the way, students will learn teamwork. They’ll also learn how easy it is to accept labels foisted upon them.

Overall, the three-week camp is a roller coaster ride in which they go from playing games to joining in intensive, closed-door discussions. When they depart, they’ll be expected to share what they’ve learned in their communities.

“When you go back home, you have to influence the people around you. That’s pretty much your duty,” said Israeli camper Ido Zahavi, who’s 16.

But it isn’t easy. Rasha Abbas, 17, who’s from Ramallah, said many of those outside her immediate family are distrusting of Seeds of Peace. Some say the campers have been brainwashed.

“I always feel that I have to defend myself,” Abbas said.

Counselor Zagloub Said, a Palestinian who grew up on the West Bank, has heard it all before.

“People say we create an unrealistic bubble. Sometimes, I say you have to take people out of the mess to show them what life could be,” he said.

Whether that translates to peace in these campers’ lifetime, no one knows. Said doesn’t sugarcoat the difficulty the campers face when they return home.

“I will never lie to the kids and tell them, ‘Eventually everything will be fine,'” he said. “I want the people to be optimistic about their future, but I want to them to be realistic.”

The late John Wallach, founder of the camp, envisioned the day when Seeds of Peace campers would become political leaders and bring about a lasting peace. But he never believed it would be easy.

“Making peace is much harder than making war,” he once said.

Read David Sharp’s Associated Press article »

Jerusalem, local youth choirs promote peace
Philadelphia Tribune

Jul 8, 2015 / No Comments

The power of music and its ability to unify was on full display when the YMCA Jerusalem Youth Chorus visited Philadelphia recently.

“Our teens can be agents of change,” said Steve Fisher, artistic and managing director of the Commonwealth Youthchoirs which is based in Germantown.

During a concert held in the Kimmel Center’s Perelman Theater late last month, Fisher affirmed the audience “through singing and music we can connect with one another regardless of our religion, color or gender. We can create a wonderful legacy of peace through singing. The doors of opportunity are open wide.”

Twenty-nine high school aged students from Jerusalem visited with the Keystone State Boychoir and Pennsylvania Girlchoir, the Commonwealth Youthchoirs, as part of the YMCA Jerusalem Youth Chorus’ (JYC) two-week U.S. Tour.

Billed as “A Song for Peace EVERYWHERE,” the choirs performed renditions of an African-American spiritual, Israeli and Arabic classics, popular culture tunes and originally composed works.

“We changed the title of the concert because of what recently took place in Charleston, S.C., and wanted to honor those that lost their lives,” Fisher said.

The engagement at the Kimmel was originally billed as “A Song for Peace in the Middle East.”

“We planned to take a trip to Jerusalem later this year, but in light of a few instances of violence that impacted youth in Israel, we decided to invite their choir to visit with us,” Fisher said.
The church massacre in Charleston, S.C., occurred on the first performance date of JYC’s tour. In light of the political, social, religious and cultural issues the students in Jerusalem face, Fisher felt obligated to determine how to enhance the experience for all of the students.

“One of the compelling components of the JYC is that they bring together youth that come from backgrounds and communities where it’s not popular to interact with others from certain backgrounds. Israeli and Palestinian kids are interacting with one another through singing and dialogue, it’s a beautiful thing,” he said.

Fisher met the founder and director of the JYC, Micah Hendler, about eighteen months ago and was intrigued by something Hendler incorporated into his program.

“Every rehearsal they dialogue to get their frustrations out and discuss the challenges they’re facing as teenagers,” he said. “The music brings them together to have these challenging conversations and to address issues that are difficult to speak about.”

Hendler, a native of Maryland, started the chorus three years ago, inspired by his time as a music counselor with Seeds of Peace International Camp for Coexistence. The Sidwell Friends and Yale graduate combines his “passions for youth singing and Middle East peacemaking in a creative approach to conflict transformation,” which he believes can have a significant impact.

“The music creates the safe space and feeling of community and the feeling of working together for something,” Hendler said. “You can challenge and be real with each other and really get at some hard issues.”
The JYC holds weekly rehearsals for three-and-a-half hours, singing first before having a dialogue session then finishing off with another singing session. Through the co-creation of music and the sharing of stories, the chorus has empowered its singers to become leaders in their communities.

First year JYC member Zoey Tabak is one of the chorus’ members poised to be a leader of change Hendler will proudly speak of in the future. Born in Highland Park, N.J., the engaging 17-year-old student said she enjoyed her time in Philadelphia.

While sitting at a table occupied by students from JYC and the Commonwealth Choirs, on the campus of The Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill, Tabak spoke about her tour experience.
“It’s been exhausting but really good. We went to the mall earlier and I’ve spent a lot of money on make-up and other accessories that are expensive back home,” Tabak said pointing to Sofia Anastasia’s newly purchased bracelets.

Anastasia, 16, has been with the chorus for two years and enjoyed her first time in the U.S.

“It’s amazing! We’ve gone to many places and every city and state we’ve been in is different,” she said. “None of my classmates have been here so I’m going to go back and tell them ‘I’ve been to America,’” she shared while sitting with members of the Commonwealth Choirs.

Abington High School classmates Michael Deshield and Calvin Wamser enjoyed their time engaging with Tabak and Anastasia. Deshield and Wamser, both 15 years old, have been with the Keystone State Boychoir (KSB) since 2010.

“I think I’ll see things from a different perspective as a result of interacting with the members of the Jerusalem choir,” Deshield said.

Wamser, who is well-traveled as a result of being on the KSB, attributes his development as a person to opportunities like engaging with JYC.

“I’ve been to Norway, Australia and New Zealand. A lot of my friends aren’t as well-traveled and I feel I am lucky to have that experience to see and interact with other cultures and make great music,” Wamser said.

Making great music and transforming lives in the process is clearly Fisher’s mission.

The collaboration between the Commonwealth Choirs and the JYC was more than a concert and kids awkwardly being forced to address issues of conflict that adults believe they should shoulder.

“Our experience in Philly, and in general, has been overwhelmingly positive,” Hendler said. “We would be delighted to come back. In the meantime there’s a lot we can take back to Israel. With any exchange it goes both ways, performance and personal exchanges. We can teach the music we create and the message we bring. We can learn that the struggles we deal with are not as unique or only ours. We strive for excellence, but ultimately what makes our music powerful is that we create space for our students to create opportunities for themselves, regardless of their political views or what community they come from.”

All children, no matter their circumstances, are transformed by seeing the world, according to Fisher.

“It is the most effective way to teach tolerance and understanding of cultures of other people,” he said. “It is in that spirit and inspired by that courage that we are determined to take our students to Jerusalem in 2016.”

Read Louis Bolling’s article in The Philadelphia Tribune ››

Youth From Nations in Conflict Bond on the Maine Seas
Maine Public Radio

Jul 12, 2011 / No Comments

BY TOM PORTER | Although they live less than 40 miles from each other, May and Milena would probably not get to hang out together back at home. That’s because 18-year-old May is an Israeli living near Tel Aviv, while Milena, who’s 16, is a Palestinian from Arab East Jerusalem. Every day this month, however, they’re going sailing together off the Maine coast, as a part of a newly-established peace camp for teenagers.

“Here it’s like I’m talking to a normal friend, not like an Israeli,” Milena says. As a Palestinian, Melina says her day-to-day encounters with Israelis are more likely to be at security checkpoints than at sailing clubs.

Melina’s Israeli friend May can’t wait to get afloat. “I’m excited, I’m glad. It’s a whole new experience—I’ve never sailed in my life,” May says.

The two girls are part of a group of 15 teenagers—a mixture of Israeli, Palestinian and American youths—learning how to sail at the first ever Seas of Peace camp. It’s a new program modeled on the successful Seeds of Peace summer camp, where youths from the world’s conflict zones come together to learn leadership skills and engage in discussions about how to work for peace back home.

But rather than being camped in the Maine woods, these teenagers are in the Atlantic Ocean. They were chosen from a pool of some 50 applicants, all of whom have already completed the Seeds of Peace summer camp.

Before they leave dry land, they have to learn a few basics of nautical knowledge: what a halyard is, what a capstan is, and most importantly, how to steer.

“We’re in the boat, and suddenly I see a rock in up front of me. I do not want to hit the rock, or the boat or anything else, so we’ve got to get out of the way,” instructs program director and co-founder David Nutt of Boothbay, a former counselor at the Seeds of Peace camp, and a highly qualified yachtsman.

“Seas of Peace is for second-year campers to come back to the U.S. to continue some of the conversations that they began when they were first year campers at Seeds of Peace,” Nutt says. “And these kids have shown great potential back in their home countries, deserved another chance to continue meeting together, talking together and that the sailing environment would be a great place for them to do so.”

The first 10 days of the camp are based in Portland, where students split up into groups of five and learn how to sail small boats in Casco Bay. After that it’s onto the 140-foot schooner, Spirit of South Carolina. Under the guidance of counselors, this diverse crew will sail down tha coast to Mount Desert Island, and back, going past Portland and onto Boston.

Nutt, who as a teenager spent six years sailing around the world with his family, says during this stage of the camp, especially, the youths will have to rely on each other.

“On the bigger sailboat you’ve to trust that while you’re sleeping, somebody else is running the boat in a safe manner, keeping watch; 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.”

Against this backdrop, students hold two 90-minute dialog sessions a day talking about who they are, and where they come from. They’ll also learn about chart-plotting and celestial navigation. First though, they need to be able to hoist a sail, and know how to change direction in a 15-foot sailing dinghy.

Sailors sing: “Haul away your halyard lines, set forth for calmer seas. We’re sailing for a better world with room for you and me. Come sail away, come sail away, come sail away with me.”

Less than an hour into their first session on the water, and this crew of two Israelis, one Palestinian and two Americans has become a team.

“It’s an amazing camp, Seas of Peace,” says Gabby, left, who is from the Israeli community of Ashkelon, next to the Gaza Strip.

After completing the Seeds of Peace camp last year, Gabby says it was difficult taking the camp’s message of peace and toleration back to his home neighborhood, which had been under frequent rocket attack from militias inside the Gaza Strip. “It’s hard because they said, ‘Oh you go to the other side, you passed to the other side and now you support them and not us.'”

“It’s easy to say we’re all the same, we all want peace, but what that actually means in operation is a completely different thing,” says Carrie O’Neill, a professional educator and one of the two facilitators at the camp charged with overseeing the dialogue sessions.

“So I think that as we go, we’re really going to be challenging notions of sameness, of having the same ideology as people from your own community, and really encouraging them to talk to each other from personal experience, as opposed to the Israeli or Palestinian experience.”

Since these teenagers were last in Maine, monumental events have overtaken much of the Arab world, with popular uprisings Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and many other countries. Sixteen-year-old Palestinian Milena says she’s both excited and apprehensive following the “Arab Spring.”

“A lot of changes are happening, so we’re all, like, we want to know what’s going to happen next, like what happened in Egypt and Libya and all that,” says May from Tel Aviv. “So we’re just excited to know what’s happening next.”

May says the events of the Arab Spring have left many Israelis fearful, especially over the future of the 32-year-old peace treaty with Egypt. But she says she’s determined to remain optimistic. “It makes more sense to be hopeful because it gives you nothing to be concerned,” she says.

These kids will go their separate ways when they return home next month. May is due to join the Israeli army in October for her compulsory two years of military service. She says she relishes the challenge of serving her country in uniform while at the same time being an ambassador for peace.

The Peace of the Process
The Julliard Journal

May 19, 1997 / No Comments

BY ELIZABETH WOLFF | Last August I was asked to participate in a very special summer camp project that involved teenagers from Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Morocco, Palestine, and the United States. The camp, called Seeds of Peace, is now in its fifth year of what is a heroic effort to achieve peaceful coexistence through continual dialogue. The participants are all 14-year-olds who are carefully chosen for their enthusiastic and energetic desire to spread harmony among their Mideast countries.

Located in Maine and founded and directed by journalist John Wallach, the camp is truly an amazing “seed” for what could make for strong roots of lasting peace. All 150 campers learn to eat together, play together, and live together. They also learn to respectfully observe and/or participate in each others’ weekly and daily religious rituals. What for me was most amazing is that, with the supervision of trained facilitators, they learn how to talk openly and safely about personally sensitive issues as well as about their larger, more complex national—and historically volatile—feelings and thoughts.

My reason for participating at Seeds of Peace was to initiate a music program as adjunct to the sports and arts programs. As a pianist who spends most of my own life in virtual isolation with so much solo repertoire, as well as with years of one-on-one teaching, this was a very real challenge. Hopefully I was able to rise to it, but I have a feeling that I learned more from the campers than the other way around. I learned about being in a group: about assertion, compromise, empathy, patience and acceptance. And by extension, I also learned how truly isolated my life had been. For when I was not involved in an activity, when I was no longer useful or being used, I felt alone, frightened, abandoned. That was ten months ago and still, today, I can practically touch the fear of those scary, structureless times. But in remembering the very dichotomy of feeling safe among 150 youth one minute and feeling real terror in being alone the next, I have been given insightful direction on behalf of the practicing pianist … or, at least, this pianist.

The life of the musician has always been somewhat of a solitary one, but it seems the pianist has even more tallied isolation time than other re-creative musicians. Practicing many hours alone in relation to his instrumental colleagues; finding himself alone on stage performing what I call the “QE2,” or again alone backstage trying to remember the feel of that particular QE2 in hand, head, and heart; or alone with a master score of a chamber piece; or financially alone with no union or other means to help clarify and verify legitimate earning needs … and the list could go on and on. All increase the very real isolation and subsequent feelings of festering self doubt. And this quickly turns into very generic, larger-than-life fear. With little input and reassurance of inherent worth, the psyche can indeed shut down.

The youth at Seeds of Peace were learning peaceful coexistence through dialogue. DIALOGUE is the operative word. We pianists can actually learn a pervasive fear simply because we have such minimal dialogue. “How am I doing?” is asked to the wall, if at all, and our fragile egos can quickly answer: “Not well enough.” Where are OUR facilitators to tell us otherwise? Nowhere to be found. So we do what we think will be the antidote: We practice longer and harder. And the longer we go without a human voice, the more we take comfort in our sounds of music. Unfortunately, this antidote of more practice can produce real and harmful isolation, as well as a deceptively comfortable substitute for necessary human contact. Here is the ultimate irony! We practice to communicate, but we end up frozen in self-contained monologue. This immobilizing fear may even lead to substance addictions—the bleakest type of isolation, since isolation is exactly what addictions mask.

What has changed since my experience at Seeds of Peace? I know, at least, that I am learning to let go of the monologue, and of the insidious fear that it produces. I can now accept solitude, but not isolation. I accept aloneness, not loneliness. I accept and seek out colleagues for meaningful dialogue (as was demonstrated so beautifully by the Seeds of Peace campers and staff). And I understand the importance of living in, and with, balance. Balance is not yet natural or comfortable—but seeking it is bringing me peace because it allows the process, not the self, to be the champion.

Pianist Elizabeth Wolff (MS ’67) is director of Music at Lake Willoughby, a summer chamber music festival in Vermont.

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.

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.

From tolerance to appreciation: Inside the Indian Interfaith Camp

Apr 4, 2019 / No Comments

Every year, we host a program in India that brings the Seeds of Peace Camp experience to those who may otherwise never set foot in Maine.

For six days, 50 young leaders from different religious and cultural backgrounds build relationships with one another, engage in facilitated dialogue, and form alliances beyond traditional identities at our annual Interfaith Camp, located 150 miles outside of Mumbai.

At the core of the camp is a deepening of one’s self-awareness about their faith. It provides a space where teens can ask themselves a range of questions: What does my faith mean to me? How much of my faith is mine, and how much of it is imposed or borrowed? How much does it defines me? How much is it expressed in my actions? When am I in conflict with my religious identity? What are my prejudices against other religions?

Early in the week, we did a dialogue activity that brought up a well of emotions. Like dominos, each participant’s guard fell one after another, yielding to vulnerability and deep sharing. You could see the release of tension in their bodies—it was physically therapeutic for them. The kind of trust that was built by the bonding they experienced in just one hour was magical.

During this activity, one girl who started weeping said it was the first time she had shed tears in over four years. For so long, she told us, she had this toxic idea that to be “strong” meant burying her emotions, telling herself, “I won’t cry, I won’t cry, I won’t cry.” Until that moment, she had not even processed how much she had closed herself off to life—of how little faith she had in her inner strength, or in the richness and complexity of her own feelings.

At first, she thought she was crying out of a feeling of helplessness. But as she continued to share and explore over the course of the camp, she realized she was feeling overwhelmed by the fact that she felt more comfortable and safe crying in front of people she had met only six days before than with some of her closest friends back home. She had never expected to be able to trust and become so attached to people that she had just met.

To me, this reinforced the need for empathetic spaces where young people can share bravely, and the special power that they hold. There’s such a lack of these spaces in society, places where people can go deeper and explore their identities in ways they can’t elsewhere, without fear of judgment or shame.

If there is just one thing that these incredible teens take away from the camp, I hope it’s a widening of their understanding of the term “faith.” When they arrive, participants think faith is interchangeable with religion. But while religion is cultural and shared, faith is uniquely personal. You can express yourself and your faith in a sport that you play, in the skills you have, in the life choices you make, the clothes you wear, the food that you eat. To explore the totality of your faith is to explore the totality of yourself.

I also hope participants leave with an understanding of the asks each person has of other faiths. If I practice Jainism, for example, rather than try to impose my belief or lifestyle on a meat-eater, I can learn to appreciate that what works for me, works for me. Rather than being mad at someone else for eating meat, I recognize that we are different people, with unique histories, religions, experiences. There are reasons why people have a certain kind of diet different from mine.

In that sense, the entire camp is about moving from tolerance to appreciation: appreciating why a diversity of beliefs is needed to create a strong, engaged community of changemakers, and celebrating that diversity even if you don’t agree with every part of another’s beliefs.

I will always be grateful that, through my role in the Interfaith Camp, I can provide this much-needed space for growth and reflection.