LONDON | On December 2, Seeds of Peace UK and the International Community Committee Film Club at the American School in London (ASL) screened the film “SEEDS”. The showing was followed by a panel of three Seeds, Patrick Cirenza (ASL ’11, Camp ’07, ’09), Sarah Khatib, (Jordanian, Camp ’00-’02) and Vivek Jois (ASL ’11, Camp ’09).
Following the powerful film, the Seeds who spoke of how Camp had changed their lives. As Patrick said, “Seeds of Peace is truly unique. I don’t know of a single other place in the world where teenagers of so many nationalities can have such a free exchange of ideas and culture. I believe to my core that Seeds of Peace changed me, changed the others who went to Camp, and is going to change the world.”
Vivek Jois spoke about his background: “As a British citizen, of Indian origin and educated at an American international school, Seeds of Peace provided the perfect way to express my internationalism. I feel indebted to Seeds of Peace because I truly believe that there is no other cause as big, no other experience as difficult, and no other place that can make people follow the true calling of their hearts over their blind loyalties.”
Remarks by Seeds
Patrick Cirenza
Patrick attended the Seeds of Peace Camp in 2009 and is currently enrolled at the American School in London.
When I knew I was going to Seeds of Peace I decided I was going to very prepared for the dialogue sessions. I read numerous books, read my news from Al-Jazeera English, and even learned a few phrases in Hebrew and Arabic.
I thought I was ready.
I wasn’t.
On the first day of orientation Tim Wilson, one of the founders of the Camp, talked to the American delegation in one of his famously to-the-point speeches.
He looked us all in the eye and said, “You know nothing, but you sure as hell will learn quick.”
Shaken, but resolved I began Camp.
My Israeli-Palestinian dialogue sessions are some of my most vivid memories of Camp. The first week was uncomfortable, to say the least. Trying to get a room full of unacquainted teenagers to discuss their personal beliefs and experiences in any situation is near impossible. Decades of conflict certainly didn’t help. I still wonder to this day how the facilitators got us talking. But when we did, the fireworks began to go off. Once they began, there was no stopping them.
Everything I had so carefully learned over the past couple months went straight out the window. All I could do was sit there and listen as they argued. I simply wasn’t able to relate to anything they talked about. I was completely out of my depth.
A girl from Sderot, “I didn’t go to school for two months because Kassam rockets were hitting my school and my bus route.”
I remember sitting there thinking, closest experience I have to that is a snow day.
A Palestinian boy said, “I was sitting in my basement with my family when my house was bulldozed on top of us.”
My jaw just dropped. My mind was blank.
The story I will remember the most, the one I will probably never forget is that of Janan. She was an older girl in the dialogue and usually quite quiet but responded to the question “What does the Occupation mean to you?”
She began her story by looking at the floor “I was sitting in class one day chatting with my best friend when an Israeli soldier burst into the room and opened fire. My best friend was hit and she died in my arms. There had been an IDF raid on school, which was suspected of hiding a cache of weapons. There were no weapons.”
Then she looked the Israelis right in the eye and said “this is what the Occupation means to me.”
While her story is tragic what was even more so was the manner in which she told it. She was numb, devoid of emotion. The conflict was a part of her life. She was born in it and, as she told me later with much conviction, she was going to die in it.
Stories like hers were just a currency at Seeds of Peace to exchange in dialogue in order to prove who had suffered more.
But it wasn’t always tense at Camp. Cultural boundaries were often stripped down in oddest of fashions, often in manners that would never occur in a dialogue room.
We attended a baseball game; as resident American I was expected to explain the rules to this truly bizarre game. After about 15 minutes of trying to expound the virtues of baseball and comparing it to every other sport on the planet. Israelis, Palestinians, Indians, and Pakistanis were united in telling me just how stupid they thought it was.
I made the mistake of insulting hummous one meal. Israeli and Palestinian alike leapt to defend the cause of one of their favorite foods. I never did it again.
I remember one American girl burst into tears when an innocently curious Pakistani boy asked, “Aren’t all Americans supposed to be fat?” a sentiment to which many other non-Americans seemed to concur with.
Seeds of Peace is a truly unique in that sense. I don’t know of a single other place in the world where teenagers of so many nationalities can have such a free exchange of ideas and culture. I know I walked out of that camp both vowing that I would return and with an entirely new view of my life and the world.
Since Seeds of Peace, I have taken up Arabic, attempted to start a youth interfaith council and raised money for organization by doing everything from growing my beard to racing in a triathlon.
The only reason I am sitting before you today is because I believe to my core that Seeds of Peace changed me, changed the others who went to Camp, and is going to change the world.
Vivek Jois
Vivek attended the Seeds of Peace Camp in 2009 and is currently enrolled at the American School in London.
I’m going to start today by telling you a little more about myself. I was born in London, a British citizen by birth. When I was 4, my parents, both admirers of the American education system, decided to send me to The American School in London, and I’ve remained here for the last 13 years.
To me, London is something special—it’s what I like to call, “the gateway of the world.” We’ve got America to the left, and the Middle East and Asia to the right.
I’ve watched the world change over the past 16 years of my life, and I’ve watched the international affairs brew, from the Kargil War between India and Pakistan to the Second Intifada, to the United States’ invasion of Iraq.
I’ve been the perfect outsider, as one might say: I’ve seen different societies interact with each other, in sometimes both positive and negative ways. But it wasn’t until this past summer that I asked myself the question: Who Am I? Because, clearly, I’m British by birth, American by education, and Indian by heritage. There’s no way I’m escaping my tri-national background—it follows me around everywhere.
But the real question to be asked here is, “Does it matter?”
The answer, realistically, in any case, is no. I, not being a citizen of the US, was a part of the American Delegation this summer, and it didn’t matter. Sure, I have an American accent so you might think I would fit in with everyone else in the delegation, but really, that’s not the case. The general concept of a delegation is one based on regional connections—which are why you have the Israeli, Palestinian, Indian, Pakistani, and other regional delegations at Camp.
But the American Delegation is not founded on regional ties—this year, we had one girl from an international school in Morocco, and Patrick and I from London. The American Delegation is founded based on common systematic thought—the Western upbringing, for students in westernized education systems, like all of you students here. In fact, it would be incredible if there were more Seeds from the UK—we could add so much more from our experience of being at the center of all the major world societies.
Let me just sum it up: anyone can apply for Seeds of Peace. It doesn’t matter who you are or where you come from when you arrive at Camp—all that matters is who you become after those three incredible weeks in Maine.
To go into my next point, I would just like to say how much I enjoyed Camp this summer. It was an enlightening experience, in which I got to spend three weeks in the middle of the scenic New England forest, isolated from the world outside. It definitely changed me—but when I returned, and soon as I left the gates of Camp, I had to face reality once again.
I received a lot of interrogation from my friends and teachers upon returning to London. All of them had tons of questions as to what I did, what I saw, what I learnt at Camp.
But what I found is that every few people I talked to asked me the same question, “Isn’t Seeds of Peace a Jewish organization?” That is, to say, is Seeds of Peace intended towards students of a Jewish background?
I personally feel that this stigma is incorrect. Yes, half of the American Delegation happened to be from a Jewish background, and the Israeli Delegation was the biggest at Camp, but what does that say about the organization’s tendency towards one group or another? Nothing. The conflict facing Israel is so current that it is only natural that people who feel a tie to one of the countries involved would want to do this in search of the truth in the matters pertaining to the “other side.”
Let me assure you, that no matter how many Seeds were from a Jewish background, there was equal representation from other delegations and points of view across the globe.
We had students from Palestinian backgrounds in the American Delegation, as well as others like myself from different and mixed cultural compositions.
I would like to conclude today by telling you about one day at Camp. It was during our daily two-hour dialogue session, and I was in a dialogue group of Middle Eastern kids. Our facilitators split us into two groups at random, not based on where we’re from or whatever. We then went to separate parts of the room. One facilitator came over to my group, and we were told to assume that we have a dying mother in hospital, and in order to survive, she needs the juice of a certain orange. Okay, easy enough, no one had difficulty imagining that.
Then, we were told that this certain orange was in the hands of the other group, across the room. What went through my mind in that instant was: Oh no. The other side needs the orange juice too. This is going to be difficult. Then we were each paired up with one person from the other group, and were told to negotiate the orange for ourselves.
So I sat down opposite Laila, the girl I was paired up with, knowing this was going to be hard if she needed that orange juice for her own reasons, as I had been told. But as we talked about it, she informed me about what her group had been told to assume: they needed the rind of the orange.
It was a key moment in my experience, because it highlighted the point of the Seeds of Peace: if you don’t talk to your supposed enemy, you make assumptions about their demands and needs, much like I assumed that Laila needed the orange’s juice as well. But it is only through talking to the other side, talking to the person who has been made your enemy by society, that you finally gain an understanding of what they have been told, and can thus make an honest decision on the peaceable outcome of a situation. This is the only way that our ultimate goal can be achieved.
The orange is what generations on either side of a conflict have called their Promised Land; when in fact, they have not realized yet that they can coexist if they were to just understand people from the other side—the people that their society terms as “the enemy.”
This is fully what the Seeds of Peace has taught me, and I hope, with the induction of many more future Seeds, we will be able to continue this process for the goodwill of our global community.
Sarah Khatib
Sarah attended the Seeds of Peace Camp in 2000-2002 as a member of the Jordanian Delegation. She is currently completing a Masters of Law at SOAS.
It is easy to manipulate nations into hating their enemies. It not at all easy to give the enemy a face, but this is what Seeds of Peace did for me and many others, and it continues to do so till this very day. The term “enemy” was not only toned down into “the other side,” but for me now the enemy has a face and a name; be it Elad, Rita, Hagar, Khen or Rony and whoever else I have met at Camp.
Seeds of Peace is a revolution against this manipulation. It is an international revolution for which I can find no counterpart. Tell me where else in the world could I have gone at the age of thirteen not only to familiarize myself with Israelis, Americans, and Greeks, etc., but give them a face after unmasking them every day at Camp.
In my personal statement for my master’s application I wrote “in the summers of 2000, 2001, 2002 I was one of the participants sharing space and dining with Israelis, Palestinians, Cypriot and Turkish teenagers, some of whom became my close friends. During camp time, we all took part in co–existence sessions. We all, at a very early age, sat down and talked about real life conflict issues and tried—hard—to reach common grounds, something only ten years prior to that my father was doing at Wadi Araba where the Israeli–Jordanian peace talks were concluded.” I do not think that any of us who participated in Seeds of Peace would have become the individuals we are now and who we will be tomorrow if the transitional force brought about by Seeds of Peace was absent.
Even at the peak of conflicts, I learned to narrow down my anger and frustration. During the horrific events in Gaza last year, it was common to hear people saying “the Israelis are ruthless, they have no hearts.” I was saying, but the Israeli government is ruthless and irrational, thinking that this is the way to deal with the conflict. It is not by any means easy to talk about peace in a time of war, of course it seems easier and inevitable for me to give up on my convictions; then I look at my Camp pictures and say “what a minute, but peace did happen, it happens every summer in Maine.” I have seen it with my own eyes, I felt it, and I lived it.
Ten years later, I need to admit that some things do as a matter of fact change. In one of my classes the tutor asked “what is the difference between a dispute and a conflict”? I said well it’s quite clear, your course is titled “dispute resolution and conflict management,” and therefore, disputes can be resolved, where conflicts can only be managed. The tutor nodded and smiled as if I made a point that was too clear, but was one that she failed to notice. It was then and there that I realized how far I have come from my time at Camp; now a bit more cynical but with a sense of realism. I know that I have not given up on my principles, I merely modified them.
Seeds of Peace rooted in me this notion of “selflessness”. We all develop our own narratives, and one of my own narratives is the idea of “transferability,” as in how transferable are the things that I learn? I think to myself why do not the parties of the conflict submit to arbitration or go to court to have their differences dealt with by a neutral third party? I know such ideas some ridiculous to many, but this is how I want to apply my area of specialization to conflicts; this is the selflessness that Seeds of Peace taught me, how could what I learn and posses help others? I really believe that at some point I will be able to pay Seeds of Peace back, if not in a strict sense then to assist in the concrete realization of our hopes and aspirations.
For so many years I was hoping that I would get the chance to talk about my experience at Camp and with Seeds of Peace. Now that I have this chance, I thought for a long time about the things I could talk about, but all my lawyering skills cannot come into play. Seeds of Peace raised me up; it taught me to differentiate between the right and wrong, between the moral and the immoral, between the norm and the exception, regardless of how blurred the lines between such can be. This is a virtue that I value, for it is one that makes Seeds all over the world stand out in their communities and countries, and it is one that makes as all as Seeds stand out in the world.