BY VERENA DOBNIK | Julia Frazier has an indelible memory of summer camp—standing on a large seesaw, 10 people at each end, balancing so a glass of water in the middle didn’t spill. The exercise was meant to show the teenagers, who came from around the world, what it takes to negotiate peace between warring factions.
“If everyone took even a tiny step, it would upset the balance. We had to choose one person to take that step, support that person and balance as a team. Every person matters—big or small,” said Frazier, a 17-year-old high school senior who attends the Masters School in this Hudson River community north of New York City.
The seesaw test was staged in the woods of Otisfield, Maine, as part of a summer camp run by Seeds of Peace, a private, nonprofit organization founded by the late author and journalist John Wallach. Since 1993, Seeds has brought together about 2,000 youths from warring lands—Israelis and Palestinians, Indians and Pakistanis, Cypriot Turks and Greeks, Bosnian Muslims and Serbs, and tribal members from Afghanistan.
Two events this month reinforce its international reputation. Aaron David Miller, the U.S. State Department’s senior adviser for Arab-Israeli negotiations, was named president of the New York- based group. “Seeds of Peace reflects the type of effort so desperately needed in the Middle East,” Secretary of State Colin Powell said in announcing Miller’s departure.
Comedian Janeane Garofalo was the host of a benefit auction in Manhattan, where former President Bill Clinton noted that there have been 120 Middle East suicide bombings in the past two years. The Canadian pop band Barenaked Ladies was given the first MTV Seeds of Peace Award.
Seeds members have been touched directly by both war and peace. Asel Asleh, a 17-year-old Palestinian, was wearing a Seeds of Peace T-shirt when killed by Israeli soldiers during a rock- throwing protest in Israel two years ago. Similar shirts were worn by Seeds members invited to the White House in 1993, when Clinton hosted the signing of a Middle East peace accord between Israel’s then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO leader Yasser Arafat—a pact that did not endure.
John Wallach, a son of Holocaust survivors, founded Seeds after years as a foreign correspondent covering the strife and failed diplomacy of the Middle East, hoping the camp could help bright young people from the region find the keys to peace. Seeds alumni “go home very, very different from when they arrive. I think they now know the enemy. . . The enemy is now human,” Wallach said before his death last July.