BY ANN S. KIM | OTISFIELD, MAINE On a Friday evening early in a Seeds of Peace camp session, a Palestinian boy learned his cousin died from injuries sustained in a clash with an Israeli soldier months earlier. The news spread quickly and anger was palpable as the Israeli delegation emerged from Shabbat services. Counselors separated the Arab and Israeli campers into different buildings.
Organizers worried how the situation would affect their ability to bring together children from opposite sides of the Mideast conflict. When John Wallach, the program’s co-founder, went to see the Arab campers, he found they had removed their Seeds of Peace T-shirts and left them piled on the floor.
The campers told him they were going home. Wallach took off his camp T-shirt, fell to the ground and wept. The sincerity of Wallach’s reaction touched the campers, including the boy whose cousin had died.
“He reached into the pile, put on his shirt and said, ‘I’m staying,'” said Bobbie Gottschalk, co-founder of Seeds of Peace, as she recounted the 2000 event during a meeting for camp staff last week.
That spirit has helped Seeds of Peace continue and grow since its founding 15 years ago. The first campers—46 Egyptian, Israeli and Palestinian boys—attended camp in 1993. In all, the program has brought together 4,000 children from various conflicts through both hope and hard times.
The early campers’ journey to adulthood has taken them through the optimism of the Oslo Accords; the difficulties of the second Palestinian intifada, or uprising; the death of Asel Asleh, an Arab-Israeli Seed killed by Israeli soldiers during a rock-throwing protest in 2000; and the loss of Wallach, who died of nonsmoker’s lung cancer in 2002.
The early campers are grown and working or studying in different fields around the world, carrying with them the message of Seeds of Peace.
“We have Seeds clerking in the supreme court of Israel, Seeds who are anchors on news programs. Also, we have Seeds running businesses that are interacting with businesses on the other side of the conflict,” Gottschalk said. “They don’t want to wait until two of them are running their countries. They want to prepare their societies for living in peace.”
Welcome to camp
On Tuesday, the camp begins the first session of the summer as it welcomes young Egyptians, Israelis, Jordanians, Palestinians, Indians and Pakistanis.
Campers will bunk, eat and play together and participate in often-emotional, facilitated discussions about regional conflicts. The three-week sessions culminate with “color games”—a wide-ranging series of competitions where campers are organized into multinational teams.
Campers may arrive with ideas about rhetorical points they plan to make to the other side, but end up learning to listen to one another, said Amgad Naguib, an Egyptian who was one of the 1993 campers. He learned he had more in common with moderates, regardless of nationality, than with extremists from his own country.
“I think the fundamental thing about Seeds of Peace is it changes the way you think about people you would have had preconceived notions about,” said Naguib, who is now 29 and working in a Washington, D.C., public relations firm.
Camp is designed to help the youngsters get to know the human face of their enemies. The goal is to get them to truly consider the other side when they contemplate solutions for their regions.
“We believe that has more lasting power than a win-lose situation or a lose-lose more situation,” Gottschalk said.
Wallach, a former foreign correspondent, wanted to do more than report on conflicts. He wanted to bring together future generations of leaders and found a partner in Gottschalk. Wallach’s idea for a camp resonated with Gottschalk, who got to know Soviets at the height of the Cold War even as she wondered whether their ancestors had wiped out her grandmother’s family in the pogroms of the early 1900s.
The Seeds of Peace experiment truly began at a dinner party in Washington, D.C. Wallach got Middle Eastern officials, including Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres, to commit before other guests that they would send children to his camp. The next day, Wallach announced the news at a press conference.
Summer was only a few months away, and nothing had been arranged. But that summer, the first 46 campers arrived in Maine. Girls started attending the next year and delegations from other areas–the Balkans, Cyprus, South Asia among them–have also participated.
Some early Seeds are in school and some are working in government, business or other fields. Many are part of a wide network of Seeds and some are still active with the organization, whether working on the staff, participating in fundraisers or attending reunions.
Rona Harari first went to camp in 1994, the first year girls attended. Now 27 and finishing her master’s degree in biology in Tel Aviv, she said while she enjoyed that session she was probably too young to fully appreciate all it had to offer.
As her military service approached, she returned as a program leader with a better sense of what she wanted to achieve in Maine.
“I wanted to come out with a clear perspective of what I think of the situation and what I believe and what I don’t believe,” said Harari, who served 21 months and worked in intelligence.
Harari said she would probably be a similar person to who she is today without Seeds of Peace, but her experiences with the organization strengthened her convictions.
“I think my way of interpreting the news and the conflict is different than a person who hasn’t interacted with Palestinians,” she said.
Political futures
Tamer Nagy Mahmoud, an Egyptian, and Yehoyada Mandeel, an Israeli, were among the original campers from 1993. Both are now involved in the law–Mahmoud as a international corporate lawyer in Washington, D.C., and Mandeel as a law student who will be clerking for a justice on the Israeli supreme court—and both want to be involved in politics.
Their relationship was on hiatus while Mandeel, who goes by the nickname “Yo-Yo,” served in the Israeli army.
Two years before he entered, Mandeel stopped associating with Seeds of Peace because he worried about leaning too far left on the political spectrum during his service.
That was difficult for Mahmoud, who had hoped they would reconnect but wasn’t certain. When Mandeel left the military, he and Gottschalk visited Mahmoud in Indiana, where he was attending Earlham College. Mahmoud described it as a “weird and interesting and great experience.”
After about a half-hour, the initial awkwardness was gone and they were back to arguing politics like old times, said Mahmoud, who is now 28.
“When we crossed that hurdle, we realized, this is real,” Mahmoud said.
Mandeel, who’s 29, worked at the organization’s Jerusalem coexistence center after he got out of the military.
Just as he was worried about being too far left before the military, he didn’t want to be too far to the right afterward. Reconnecting with Seeds, he said, helped bring him back to the center where he wanted to be. Mandeel feels that some Palestinian Seeds didn’t have the same ability to hold on to their personal relationships and put aside their differences. Some former campers told Mandeel they could understand if he had served only the three years of military service required of Israeli men, but not the additional four plus his service as an officer—an experience Mandeel enjoyed and believes was necessary for his political career. He still believes his experience as a Seed, hearing from Palestinians about the essence of their identify, is something he’ll always carry with him.
“There is a very good group, people who take the Seeds of Peace experience in a positive way,” he said, “and I’m sure we will meet again in the future in leadership positions.”