Burlington has sister cities all over the world. We explore Burlington’s relationship with two of its sisters: Bethlehem, in the West Bank, and Arad, in Israel.
Seeds of Peace
Talia Manning: I was really excited.
Josh Crane: This is Talia Manning. She grew up in Essex, Vermont. And she remembers the moment she was invited to attend a summer camp called Seeds of Peace.
Talia Manning: I was really excited to be asked to participate and to learn that Americans, you know, could be involved in that way.
Josh Crane: Seeds of Peace is an international nonprofit based in the United States. It was founded around bringing American kids together with kids from the Middle East at summer camp, so they could better understand the Israel-Palestine conflict, and each other. It was established in the ’90s, around the same time as the Burlington-Bethlehem-Arad sister city relationship. And both programs share a similar ethos: emphasizing person-to-person connection, and trying to move beyond the geographical and political boundaries that separate people.
That’s why in the late ’90s, Mousa Ishaq and other leaders of the sister city program wanted to sponsor a Vermonter to attend camp at Seeds of Peace. Talia, then age 15, was an obvious fit.
She’s Jewish, and her family has roots in the Middle East. It started with her great-grandfather, who was living in Germany in the 1930s.
Talia Manning: And the night that Hitler was elected, he said, “This is not going to be good, we need to leave.” And so they left Germany that night.
Josh Crane: After leaving Germany, Talia’s great-grandfather moved to Jerusalem. This was the 1930s, before Israel was created and when the city was still under British mandate. Even so, Talia says she’s always felt a connection to Israel, and what it represents for the Jewish people.
Talia Manning: And so for my family, Israel was the safe place that he was able to go and that he found refuge and was able to grow up.
Josh Crane: Talia learned about Seeds of Peace in social studies class in middle school. And the idea of meeting kids from the Middle East at summer camp — it was exciting. So, her rabbi recommended her for the program, and in 1999, she packed her bags for a special session of Seeds of Peace highlighting sister city relationships.
Talia met kids from Burlington’s sister cities in Bethlehem and Arad, specifically. Like Hilly Hirt.
Hilly Hirt: Usually Seeds of Peace didn’t come to the periphery. It would take people from Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Haifa, you know, main cities.
Josh Crane: Hilly grew up in Arad. She says it was a tight-knit, progressive community when she was growing up. Lots of artists, like Bethlehem and Burlington. And she says it was not a common location for Seeds of Peace to find campers. It was beautiful — views of the Dead Sea, nice sunsets — but also, kinda out of the way, and very much the desert.
Hilly Hirt: And at night, porcupines, like the huge ones, just cross your, you know, kind of like your garden and it’s full of scorpions that bite you in the tush.
Josh Crane: While attending Seeds of Peace, Hilly met Talia.
Hilly Hirt: She was such an extrovert. You see her and you definitely automatically want to be her friend.
Talia Manning: This is a picture of Hilly. Hilly played piano. Well, here she is in black and white with with the song that she wrote.
Josh Crane: Seeds of Peace had all the normal summer camp activities: sing-alongs, campfires, talent shows. And there was also programming more specific to the Seeds of Peace model. Cultural shows, where campers got to present something important to their heritage. Which, for Talia …
Talia Manning: This is me, I dressed up in overalls and cow flannels to represent Vermont.
Josh Crane: Talia brought a few photo albums to our interview. And she’s pointing to a photo of herself on a stage in full “Vermont” regalia, holding a sign.
Talia Manning: The sign says, “Vermont, the Green Mountain State and home of Ben and Jerry.”
Josh Crane: In addition to these cultural displays, campers also participated in two hours of “coexistence sessions” each day. During this time, they would gather in small groups to discuss the state of the conflict, sharing their experiences and their family histories.
Talia says it worked, and that the difference in campers’ comfort level at the beginning versus the end of the summer was palpable.
Talia Manning: On the first day, people would say they were afraid to go to sleep, because they were worried that the enemy was sleeping right in the bed next to them, and what would they do to them that day?
By the end, we, you know, we had the strength and bond of anyone who has attended summer camp and just, you know, falls in love with their bunk mates and their, their friends there.
Josh Crane: Hilly Hirt, from Arad, remembers her time at camp like this:
Hilly Hirt: For the first week, I probably cried that I wanted home. And then by the second week, all I was thinking was crying that I didn’t want to go home.
The older you get, the more of the complexities you understand. But the simple truth of “We’re people who want to get along” stays as the base value of any complexity that comes along.
Like, I think everything that I believe today, all my understandings, the values, are due to the fact that as a child, a 12-year-old kid, I was like, “Hey, I have a crush on this Jordanian Arab named Eyad. And he’s gorgeous and sweet and a person.” And, forever, every Jordanian will be somebody who wants peace for me.
Josh Crane: One of the people Talia remembers most from her camp experience was a boy named Asel Asleh.
Talia Manning: We referred to him as the boy with the 1,000-watt smile, because he was always beaming. He just had a joy and a character. And in this photo here, he’s leading, like, one of the chants.
Josh Crane: Talia’s pointing to a photo of Asel in full camp mode — mouth open, leading some sort of song as his fellow campers swarm around him. They stayed in touch even after Talia returned to Vermont and Asel returned to Israel.
Talia Manning: And he actually was my first instant message on AOL. It was just so cool to be able to talk with him, you know, across the world, just spontaneously like that.
Josh Crane: They talked a lot about identity: Talia, a Jewish-American; Asel, an Arab-Israeli — ethnically Palestinian, but a citizen of Israel.
Talia Manning: And he talked a lot about how he felt like he didn’t fit anywhere. Because he was a proud Palestinian. He also felt a strong connection to Israel, which was his home.
Josh Crane: Around this time, Talia also started participating more actively in the Burlington, Bethlehem and Arad Sister City Program. She helped Mousa and other program leaders make a push for Bethlehem and Arad to formalize a sister city pact with each other. To that point, both cities only had direct agreements with Burlington.
Talia Manning: This is the speech that I gave—
Josh Crane: As we talk, she points to a copy of a speech she made in 1999, in Burlington. It’s a joint statement from Talia, a camper from Bethlehem and Hilly, the camper from Arad.
Talia Manning: “We hope that the direct contact between the mayors and eventually the citizens of our sister cities — Bethlehem, Arad and Burlington — will have the same wonderful results that we experienced at camp.”
Josh Crane: The direct agreement between Bethlehem and Arad never came to pass. As best anyone can remember, politics got in the way. But, Talia remained involved by attending meetings for the sister city program.
Talia Manning: I think we had monthly meetings at the Burlington police station.
Josh Crane: In the backdrop of those conversations, as well as the conversations Talia and Asel were having over AOL Instant Messenger, tensions in the Middle East were starting to rise again. The year 2000 marked the beginning of the Second Intifada, or Palestinian uprising.
And then she got a call from a Seeds of Peace friend who lived in that area.
Talia Manning: And, um, he just, you know, he just said, “Asel is dead.”
Josh Crane: Asel was killed by Israeli police.
Talia Manning: When he was killed, he was wearing his Seeds of Peace t-shirt. And the reporting is that he was there observing the protest in his town. And that he was chased and beaten and shot at point-blank range in the neck by the Israeli police, who were there responding to the protest.
Josh Crane: Asel was one of 13 Arab citizens of Israel killed at that protest.
Josh Crane: How did you react?
Talia Manning: Um, I think I was in shock for a little while. I remember just kind of getting off the phone. I was up in my room, I went downstairs. And I told my mom, and my mom started crying. And I remember that sort of — it scared me, because she doesn’t normally cry. She’s not a crier.
I think for a while I questioned a lot of my love of Israel, and my support of Israel, because it had been Israeli police officers who brutally killed my friend. And the death of Asel was a catalyst for me to becoming more of an activist and more outspoken.
Josh Crane: Talia says that camp alumni rallied together in the years after Asel’s death. They even protested Israel’s Ministry of Justice after it announced that none of the police officers involved in the fatal shootings of Asel or the 12 other Palestinian citizens of Israel would face criminal indictment.
Talia’s been holding onto these experiences since Oct. 7, and the beginning of the latest Israel-Hamas war. Though she says the bonds of summer camp, and their shared experiences, haven’t been enough recently to hold the Seeds of Peace community together.
Talia Manning: And in this latest outbreak, that has also been really hard to watch. I think everyone is being pushed to take a side and I feel like you are either expected to stand with Israel or to free Palestine. And I have trouble with that limited view.
Josh Crane: She says that even some of the group chats and other lines of communication with her fellow Seeds of Peace alumni have felt challenging and unproductive. Some have been put on hiatus entirely.
So, in thinking about our guiding question with this episode: What relationships are possible right now?
Well, Talia and Hilly attended Seeds of Peace in the ’90s. It was a time of optimism and momentum for building consensus, and finding peace in the Middle East. That’s certainly something Hilly felt coming out of camp.
Hilly Hirt: I remember coming out and saying, “This is going to be my future career. Like, this is what I’m going to do. I am going to be in the peace-making business forever.”
Josh Crane: Hilly hasn’t lived in Arad, or been involved with Seeds of Peace, for a long time. She’s still grateful for the role camp had in her life for the three summers she attended.
But these days, she says it’s much harder to be optimistic.
Hilly Hirt: I’d say the situation today is the opposite. On all sides. You talk to Jordanians, and you talk to Egyptians and to Palestinians. There is a — what’s the word for “kituv” in English? A polarization.
Josh Crane: And so, do those same programs that were created in this moment that felt completely different, do they still seem useful to you now?
Hilly Hirt: Um, that’s kind of like asking Xerox if their camera is still relevant in the digital age. The answer is yes. But, but it’s, it’s really contingent on how innovative you are.
Josh Crane: She says she needed more support from Seeds of Peace in the years after she was a camper, like when she started her mandatory military service.
Hilly Hirt: When it comes to continuing the connection with Palestinians and the Arab world when I’m a grown-up, with what happens when we’re at war, when what happens when there is conflict … and I felt that when things got tough, they weren’t there enough for me.
Josh Crane: Talia goes back to Asel, and one of his favorite passages, in times like these. It’s from the 13th century poet Rumi, and it goes like this:
“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
There is a field. I’ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
The world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase “each other”
Doesn’t make any sense.”
Talia Manning: And so Asel always said, “I’ll meet you there in that field.”
Listen to Josh Crane’s interview atVermont Public ››