NEW YORK | John Wallach, a former journalist who went on to create an internationally renowned peace camp, died of cancer Wednesday afternoon. He was 59.
Wallach founded the Seeds of Peace Camp in 1993 to bring together teenagers from Middle Eastern countries that would normally never meet or talk to each other back home.
The co-ed teens—Arab and Israeli, Muslim and Jew—live together in bunks, share meals in a common dining hall, play sports, and engage in stereotype-breaking, group rap sessions about their political conflict moderated by adult counselors.
“Seeds of Peace is not some left wing, ‘make love, not war,’ sing a song, plant a tree, call it peace,” Wallach said in a 2000 interview with CNN.
“Seeds of Peace exists in the real world. It exists among people who’ve been taught to hate each other, and it’s finding some basis for them to coexist with one another.”
Since 1993 more than 2,000 young adults have attended the privately-funded summer camp in Otisfield, Maine, about an hour from Portland, which now brings together youths from 22 different countries.
“Living in the same bunk can be one of the most difficult adjustments because you are sleeping with the enemy,” Wallach said.
“I remember in our first or second year, we had an Israeli who was walking outside the bunk at 2 o’clock in the morning. We said, ‘Why aren’t you sleeping?’ He said, ‘I can’t fall asleep because I am afraid the Palestinian kid in my bunk is gonna knife me,” Wallach recalled.
Wallach, from Scarsdale, New York, was a correspondent for Hearst newspapers for many years and later a foreign editor in the chain’s Washington bureau, his son David Allen said.
Wallach and his wife of 24 years, Janet, co-authored two books—a biography of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, “Arafat in the Eyes of the Beholder” (1991), and profiles of Israelis and Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza, “Still Small Voices” (1988).
In the mid-1980s, Wallach founded an exchange program which brought together high-ranking U.S. and Soviet policy makers and arts leaders to the Chautauqua Institute in New York. Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev awarded him a freedom medal.
Wallach was entered into the Jordanian legion of honor by the late King Hussein and was also the recipient of the UNESCO Peace Prize in 2001.
He was diagnosed with nonsmoker’s lung cancer two years ago and brain cancer last month, his son said. He had been undergoing radiation treatment and last Saturday checked into Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, where he died.
In addition to his wife and son, he is survived by another son, Michael, a granddaughter, Jordan, and a sister, Susan Gordon.
Read Phil Hirschkorn’s article on CNN »