No Place for Socrates: Seeds of Peace, Hannah Arendt, and the Importance of Thinking
“We were a nation in thrall to our own stupidity. What passed for politics now was just dramaturgy. Sow conflict, promise consequence. Perhaps Plato wasn’t wrong to warn us about a city overrun with storytellers” (Ayad Akhtar, Homeland Elegies).
“With the theatricality, the entertainment value, the marketing of life is complete, we will find ourselves living not in a nation but in a consortium of industries, and wholly unintelligible to ourselves except for what we see as through a screen darkly” (Toni Morrison, quoted in Homeland Elegies).
I
In the midst of disorienting conflicts and social breakdown around the world, including the United States of America, it’s difficult to find language for what’s happening or practical ideas for what to do if we want something different. I’ve written what follows as a sketch in the hopes of being at least a bit helpful in this regard.
From the summer of 2004 until May of 2021, I worked with an organization, Seeds of Peace, that was built around the promise of “dialogue.” During these last years, the organization has struggled again with ruptures and radical transitions. Many who put their heart into the organization, like me, have left. Multiple reasons exist for such turbulence. But at least one is resoundingly relevant beyond the story of a single relatively small non-profit and the dedicated, hard working, individuals who tried to navigate the conflicts that engulfed us. To put it simply, Seeds of Peace, though dedicated to dialogue, faltered in its commitment to, and capacity for, dialogue. Such failure is understandable — and worth delving into as similar underlying forces wreak havoc at a larger, far more dangerous scale.i
What I’ve written here is my effort to make sense of my own experiences. At the same time, I’ve tried to capture a set of larger perspectives and experiences for the institutional memory of Seeds of Peace and for “the record.” The people I worked with on the ground have no heirs within the organization: the roots have been cut. Finally, though I have no illusions about the challenge of getting people to read a relatively long piece such as this, I’ve written to reach a broader audience for whom, unfortunately, the story I recount might resonate. I do not claim to have the full story — only part of it. You, the reader, will see that I have strong emotions to express, so it’s worth emphasizing that though I harbor no expectations, I hope to encourage dialogue — which I know would be difficult and can only happen when the moment is right.
In all of this, I find myself turning to Hannah Arendt. A German Jewish refugee, Arendt’s experience of The Eichmann trial in Jerusalem led to her writing on thinking which she left unfinished at her death. For me, in her thinking about thinking Arendt illuminates the critical role of dialogue and what is at stake when opportunities to practice dialogue — to practice thinking — collapse.ii
II
Seeds of Peace got its start in the summer of 1993, just before the signing of The Oslo Peace Accords. In September of that year, the Palestinians, Israelis, Jordanians, and Americans from the first Seeds of Peace Camp — high school students and accompanying educators — were present on The White House Lawn for the actual signing. As a poster child for the peace process, the organization embodied hopes for a new Middle East.
The Seeds of Peace Camp on the shores of Pleasant Lake in Otisfield, Maine, was amazing for the unusual range of human beings who made the place their temporary home. On the first day of each camp session, after she asked everybody to call her by her first name, Bobbie Gottschalk, the organization’s beloved co-founder, put it beautifully. Camp, she would say, is a chance “to experience life the way it could be.” From arrival day when disoriented Seeds and the “Delegation Leaders” (“DL’s”), got off the buses to a raucous musical welcome, they inhabited an all encompassing micro-community of possibilities that appeared briefly before vanishing, only to appear again after a regular interval of time.
At camp you could find people who in their everyday lives inhabited worlds separated by both physical and metaphorical walls: Palestinians and Israelis who had lost loved ones in “the conflict;” Palestinians who had spent years as political prisoners of the Israelis and their relatives, along with Israelis who had been prison guards; people from West Bank settlements, from nearby refugee camps, from suburban Tel Aviv, from the American School of Gaza where the elite of Gaza sent their children, and from Shijaeya, an impoverished and religiously conservative Gaza neighborhood. You could find Jewish Israelis with roots in Egypt, Morocco, and Iraq, those whose grandparents escaped Europe, and those who traced themselves back 10 generations in Jerusalem. You could find Palestinians whose ancestors came from Sicily with the Crusades, others with roots in Arabia, in Lebanon, or Sub-Saharan Africa, in the Balkans, or even India, and others who traced long lines of ancestors going back to the Greek, Jewish, and Canaanite past; Bedouin and Druze Israelis whose fathers served in the Israeli army; Afghan girls who were not allowed to play sports at home; a range of Indian and Pakistani Seeds and educators that barely touched the rich diversity of the subcontinent; American born children of refugees from Somalia, Rwanda and South Sudan; teenagers from small towns in rural Maine, and teenagers of privilege from The Upper East Side. You could find kids and educators who vacationed at ski resorts in Switzerland and those who, until the trip to camp, had never been on an airplane; Black Lives Matter activists and former police officers; Egyptian supporters of the Mubarak regime, and people who took to the streets of Cairo to bring that regime down.
To make camp happen, Seeds of Peace had to earn and keep the trust of an unusually wide range of parents, educators, and communities. The camp, and the organization as a whole, was like an oasis in the desert where people from warring tribes could meet. It was constantly in danger of being destroyed. Adults back home worried at multiple levels about safety — about “brainwashing,” that the organization was pro-Zionist or Left wing pro-Palestinian, or that it was imposing what parents and educators from more traditional communities considered unsavory, immoral, American ways.
To address such concerns, Seeds of Peace established relationships at the highest levels of official authority. While allied organizations worked at the grassroots level with relatively narrow elements of society, Seeds of Peace gained access to the mainstream. In those early years, the organization partnered with the Israeli and Palestinian Ministries of Education, which selected their respective delegations and prepared “their” Seeds. In Egypt, the organization established a relationship with the Mubareks along with a network of private schools; in Jordan, it was members of The Royal Family and a network of private schools. In the United States, it was the Clintons and everything they represented — a business friendly center left of elites from “the best schools” adapted for the afterglow of Ronald Reagan, when government was in retreat and “neo-liberalism,” “globalization,” “the market,” reigned supreme.
John Wallach was a man inclined to an emphatic yes. When Palestinian and Israeli Seeds requested follow-up programs “in the region,” people such as Ned Lazarus, a former counselor living in Jerusalem at the time, took the initiative.iii When funding became available to expand into North Africa or selected Gulf States, to establish new programs in The Balkans, Cyprus, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, or Maine, or later, in the aftermath of 9/11, for Americans and Arabs from selected countries, the organization embraced such opportunities.
As the organization grew, camp remained central. Whether Seeds came to camp as part of an official delegation or one more informally arranged, it was the “Delegation Leaders,” the “DL’s” who did the work of selection, preparation, and care for the kids to and from camp. When the organization started, they arrived as chaperones. Barbara Zasloff, a psychologist from suburban Philadelphia, saw the potential in a parallel dialogue based experiential program for adults, which is what she created. Later she hired me.
I first heard about Seeds of Peace while standing on line outside of the pantomime theater in Yerevan, Armenia, after I interrupted the couple in front of me because I found their conversation fascinating. One of them, Bella, had been the arts and crafts counselor at camp. At the time, I was a “Civic Education Project Fellow” teaching history and American studies at two universities in Yerevan. But the work that moved me most turned out to be bringing together university students and young academics from Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, and other newly independent republics, across the lines of conflict that had emerged with the break-up of the Soviet Union. After moving back to the States in September of 2002 to teach social theory at Harvard University, I contacted Seeds of Peace. In the summer of 2004, I started working at camp with the “Delegation Leaders.” While the Seeds were featured as embodiments of an inspiring future in promotional literature and at fundraising events, the DL’s and the educators they reached in their communities were already in positions of influence. If Seeds of Peace were a greenhouse for public spheres, the DL’s were in positions to cultivate environments for seeds — not just “the Seeds” — to flourish even in the midst of terrible storms.
On arrival day, while most of the camp staff focused on the Seeds, our small team of facilitators and coordinators welcomed the new group of dazed DL’s to their temporary home. We sat with them while Bobbie gave her welcoming speech. We transported the luggage in golf carts and guided the DL’s to their respective cabins with screened in porches facing the lake. We pointed out the fire pit, where smoking was permitted and adults gathered to talk, tell stories, and sing. We invited them inside “The DL Hut” — a long one room white cottage with plywood walls and floors, art projects covering the walls and doors and hanging from the ceiling, further from the lake, facing the main road that ran through camp, that served as the center of life for us.
The newcomers often used their profession to deflect attention from themselves. “We want tools to teach skills to our students,” they would insist. “We’re here for the kids.” My team members and I would say, first, take a breath; then we invite you to have your own direct experiences with “those people” who celebrate as heroes those you consider villains, who call day what you call night. Be human beings first. You cannot teach dialogue without first experiencing it.
When I hear that older people cannot change, I shake my head for I’ve experienced, to my core, what can happen when adults who live their lives carrying the responsibilities of work and family suddenly have a chance to take a breath, to sit by the lake and listen, when they find the bandwidth for themselves. I’ve experienced what happens when wildly different human beings are thrown together and provided structured ways to express themselves and build community — what can spontaneously happen when they are offered a chance to play.
At our best, we created the possibility for people to truly get to know one another and share of themselves; for surprising new human relationship; for a reinvigorated sense of possibility, belonging and trust, usually accompanied, in a variety of different ways, by a desire to continue what had started to grow.
At our best, we practiced and, as much as possible, embodied, “kindness” and “imagination.” I’m talking about “the sociological imagination” that enables people to better understand the context in which they live and the social forces acting upon them in order to strengthen the capacities to shape their individual and common lives. I’m talking about “the moral imagination,” which, as the peace builder John Paul Lederach put it, “requires the capacity to imagine ourselves in a web of relationships that includes our enemies; the ability to sustain a paradoxical curiosity that embraces complexity without reliance on dualistic polarity; the fundamental belief in and pursuit of the creative act; and the acceptance of the inherent risk of stepping into the mystery of the unknown that lies beyond the far too familiar landscape of violence.”iv
At the center of the camp, a few steps from the large bell that rang between activities, there was a place by the garden that contained sacred memories. Among the stone benches was one with words from a favorite song of John Wallach’s, “last night I had the strangest dream. I dreamed the world had all agreed to put an end to war.” There was a stone bench for the victims of 9/11. And there was a stone bench in honor of Asel, a Palestinian-Israeli/Palestinian citizen of Israel/Arab-Israeli Seed who was killed by Israeli police while wearing his green Seeds of Peace shirt. On Asel’s bench were etched words by the poet Rumi:
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and right doing,
there is a field. I’ll meet you there.
If you stand by this stone bench and look out, with “The Big Hall” to the left and the lake to the right, you can see painted in bold letters on the side of a building: “This Is the Field.”
III
But Rabin was assassinated. The ebullience of the Oslo Peace Process faded. The Second Intifada started in September of 2000. The attacks on 9/11 killed thousands and shook Americans out of our complacency, at least briefly. John Wallach died of cancer in July of 2002.
My first summer with Seeds of Peace, 2004, coincided with organizational turmoil in the wake of Wallach’s death. After working at camp for three summers, in the fall of 2006, I went full-time to be the point person for a set of USAID funded projects and moved to Jerusalem. The organizational turmoil continued, along with multiple leadership turn-overs within the space of a few years. Already, I noticed a pattern. People placed in power fired dedicated long-time staff members or made it impossible for them to stay. The leadership of the organization, executive staff and board, did not listen well. People who loved the organization often ended up alienated from it. There was little trust or consistency. To do my work, I turned to a small but growing network of colleagues and friends: DL’s whom I had gotten to know at camp, educators, artists, and other people with light in their eyes, human beings who just showed up. They worked on part-time contracts or as volunteers. They came back year after year. What united us was that we were human to one another and that we did things with all our full hearts.
After I moved to Jerusalem, I was constantly on the move. DL’s invited me into their homes, their schools and community centers; they introduced me to their families, friends, and colleagues. I would walk from a meeting over Arabic coffee with Palestinian colleagues in Bethlehem through the checkpoint to a meeting over coffee “afukh” with Israeli colleagues on Emek Refaim (the main thorough fare of West Jerusalem’s “German Colony”). One afternoon, I could be sitting in a home in a Palestinian refugee camp on the way to Hebron or at an art workshop with Palestinian educators at a community center in Tulkarem. The next day, I could be at a workshop for Israeli educators in Netanya, at a school in Sderot, on the border with Gaza, with informal educators at the Israeli Ministry of Education offices in Petah Tikvah,” at a Shabbat meal with observant Jewish family or friends, or at an event for musicians and other artists in Jaffa. Less regularly, you could find me in Amman, Cairo, or Mumbai, in Dexter, Maine, in Portland, Maine, in New York City, at a cross-border workshop in Wadi Rum, or on the shores of the Dead Sea.
In Israel/Palestine, the physical barriers and the emotional geography combine to generate a labyrinth of human realities that seldom touch. Instead of “the conflict,” there is a spectrum of conflicts. Through the work, I developed a sense of the disparate needs. I realized that instead of moving directly to the conflicts that grab headlines, it was most helpful to start closer to home. Through the years, I learned that though the realities of Israel/Palestine operate at a heightened intensity, similar dynamics exist everywhere.
Everywhere I went, it was educators, artists,and community leaders who opened the doors: I saw the potential that could grow by building trust with them, by cultivating ecosystems of community. But these social contexts and their potential were difficult to see at camp with the inspiring teenagers in their green t-shirts.
Once I was sitting at the Jerusalem Hotel, around the corner from Damascus Gate in Jerusalem with my friend Mohammed and a group of high school students he had accompanied from Gaza. Most of the kids were from The American School of Gaza, a private school, and most of the girls from that school were “uncovered” (they did not wear a hijab). But one boy, who went to a different school, was from an impoverished strictly devout Muslim family. To show me, Mohammed covered his face with his hands, leaving only his eyes visible. “His mom,” he explained, “is like this.”
Although he didn’t use these specific words, Mohammed explained that the boy was freaking out. He had never been in the company of unrelated girls of his own age and the fact that they were not wearing hijab made him intensely uncomfortable and judgmental. “I’m trying to explain to him that everybody is different, that God people made everybody different, and that that’s okay. It’s important to accept that people are different.”
When we brought together Palestinian educators from Gaza, the West Bank and Jerusalem for a workshop in Jericho or in the hills outside of Bethlehem, it was usually the first time that participants in their twenties, thirties, even forties, had ever met counterparts from other parts of Palestine. The joy of such meetings is difficult to convey.
Israelis don’t face the same barriers and constraints that Palestinians do. They can drive easily from the north to the south of the country (though the country itself is like an island surrounded by a hostile sea). But they suffer difficulties of a different kind. They live as members of separate “tribes” distinguished by religion, ethnic identity, religious observance, politics, and geography. The barriers between these tribes are reinforced by the educational systems. External threats help to keep a fractious society together. But the situation is precarious and often volatile.
Most Jewish Israelis know very little about the Palestinians over whom they rule. Israeli law forbids Israeli citizens from entering areas designated as “Area A” of the West Bank, which includes where most Palestinians live. Once an Israeli peace activist at a workshop held at a resort on the Israeli coast said to me: “you know, I don’t come to these Seeds of Peace events to meet Palestinians. I have many Palestinian friends and I drive all the time to meet them in the West Bank — in Area A. I come to your events to meet the Israeli mainstream, the Jewish Israelis who won’t go where I go because they are afraid or don’t want to break the law. I want to talk to these people because they don’t know what is being done in their name.”
A Palestinian DL from a village outside of Bethlehem who had spent years as a political prisoner in an Israeli prison once explained to a Board member that to create a more peaceful and just future it was not enough to bring together a small group of selected Palestinians and Israelis. He emphasized that we had to turn our attention inside communities and deepen the work with educators and community leaders. The board member, articulating the common board perspective, said no: we support the Seeds and do cross-border work.
The end of that initial USAID funding coincided with the Great Recession of 2008. For several years, I went “part-time” and scraped by in Jerusalem. Then money for programming returned in drips from government sources and philanthropic gifts even as the situation between Israelis and Palestinians kept getting worse.
For a growing number of Palestinians and their supporters, dialogue was a counterproductive distraction that drew attention away from resistance. Dialogue was part of “normalization,” the idea that by interacting with members of the oppressing group who are not in explicit solidarity resisting Occupation, Palestinians strengthen a brutal status quo. As the situation deteriorated, Seeds of Peace became one of the most visible embodiments of “normalization.” My close colleagues and I argued that engaging in dialogue is not normal — and is a powerful way to resist the status quo. But this kind of argument was increasingly rejected, even by Palestinians who went out of their way to shop at Israeli shopping malls and box stores.
The summer of 2014 was a turning point. I was in Jerusalem when Palestinians affiliated with Hamas kidnapped three Jewish Israeli teenagers in Gush Etzion, a settlement bloc in the south of the West Bank. Soon after, while at a regional summer camp for Palestinian children in Jenin, Israeli military forces entered The Occupied Territories. As Israel and Hamas fell back into their cruelly disproportionate dance, I was on the phone regularly with Mohammed, who was home in Shijaeya, Gaza, where the bombs were falling hard. There was tear gas in the air at the Qalandia checkpoint between Jerusalem and Ramallah. On the outskirts of Jerusalem, we passed missiles from Gaza on fire on the side of the road. When the sirens went off, I huddled in bomb shelters with my Israeli neighbors and sat around Shabbat tables with despondent family and friends.
That summer, the entire Palestinian delegation arrived at camp wearing black t-shirts. Two of the Palestinian DL’s, including the head DL, both of whom I knew well, took me aside to explain.
After difficult conversations in Ramallah with the Palestinian Seeds of Peace community, they had decided to go to camp — but with conditions. First, they would wear the black t-shirts instead of the usual Seeds of Peace shirts. Second, they were at camp to resist Occupation. They wanted to eliminate “fun” activities, anything that smacked of “normalization,” and focus on dialogue. Third, they insisted on a camp wide event commemorating the people of Gaza who had died and honoring those who were suffering, particularly the Seeds and DL’s from Gaza who had not been able to make it to camp.
I called Wil Smith, the beloved associate camp director, who drove his golf cart to where the two Palestinian DL’s and I were standing by the camp store on the main road that went through camp. Wil listened carefully. He and the Palestinian DL’s agreed on enough for the Palestinian DL’s to move forward with the session. Later, in DL dialogue, the other DL’s, most notably, the Israelis, worked actively to listen. In the following weeks, I witnessed small acts of courage that went unnoticed by the larger organization but which made a significant difference for the overall success of that gut wrenching summer.
The way I saw it, this was the time to turn to our friends, colleagues, and allies in the communities — to support them in the ways they needed, dedicate resources for them, and work together. But instead, the organization put its energy into GATHER, a new high profile initiative originally concentrated on “social entrepreneurship” that was launched with lavish events by the Dead Sea in Jordan, in Jericho, and in Tel Aviv. These events, along with the fellowships they were part of, singled out a handful of people for the limelight, while creating an illusion of resources that did not exist for the people on the ground where the flames were burning away whatever remained of hope.v
During my first years in Jerusalem, the USAID Cooperative Agreement that I managed supported monthly “Seed Cafes” in Jerusalem that drew audiences of hundreds of Palestinians, Israelis, and internationals. We regularly organized cross-border workshops in Jordan with substantial groups of Palestinian, Jordanian, Egyptian, Israeli, and American educators. By the time I moved back to the States in 2017, memories of such events had become bittersweet figments of a bygone time (with the exception of one incredible artists’ retreat in the desert). Meanwhile, as the flames of conflict in America kept climbing, the organization dramatically expanded American programs where a community based multi-generational model existed, thanks to Tim Wilson, founding camp director and guiding spirit in Maine (the anomalous success of Seeds of Peace Maine was possible because of Tim’s strong presence over decades and because for so long Maine was considered a low priority largely misunderstood and ignored by decision makers in New York; Maine’s success was not replicated).
In my experience, during those last years leading up to the Global Pandemic, before Seeds of Peace imploded, regionally based staff members who disagreed with one another on fundamental issues avoided dialogue while doing what they could to achieve their goals through favored access to those at the New York headquarters who possessed greater authority. People with rank who spoke loudest against oppression used their power to silence those with whom they disagreed. By controlling information flows and structures of conversation, they lifted up selected voices while excluding others in ways that distorted the decision making process. The most privileged individuals from oppressed groups — for example, young, well-travelled, “cosmopolitan,” Palestinians with Israeli citizenship or Jerusalem identity cards — excluded those more harshly oppressed, for example older Palestinian educators and community leaders from Gaza and the north and south of the West Bank with Palestinian ID’s who, in general, are more religious, traditional, and socially conservative, more representative of their societies, and less sure of themselves in English or fluent in “progressive” discourse. Board members exhibited the unreflective hubris that often accompanies great wealth, relied on incomplete and distorted information, and just did not pay attention. Board members and staff leadership failed over the course of many years to recognize the importance of relationships on the ground in the communities where we worked, to listen, to build and maintain trust, to follow through or support those who were nurturing such trust. A lack of shared agreement around vision among staff members, board members, and the constituents we served, along with consistent failure to create the conditions for meaningful dialogue, created an impossible situation. Things came to a head in January 2020, just before lockdown. I stayed for another year and a half, through the first part of the Global Pandemic, until I became convinced, contrary to my fondest hope, that there wouldn’t be significant efforts to mend relationships or rebuild anytime soon.
IV
Jess Rohan, the author of an article about Seeds of Peace that appeared recently in The Jewish Currents, was a counselor at camp in the summer of 2014. The people whom she relied upon as sources are former counselors and summer facilitators, former or current full-time staff members, who are often also older Seeds themselves. Their voices matter. But what they say is part of a larger conversation that also requires the voices of people whom they excluded.
Rohan writes about Seeds of Peace staff members who wanted to move from what they called “co-existence” to what they called “co-resistance.” She quotes Greg Barker, a lead facilitator for the Seeds, on “building solidarity” in oppressed groups and on power and oppression; she quotes him naming the problem between Israelis and Palestinians as a problem of “settler colonialism.” All of this is part of a larger argument that the organization must reconfigure dialogue as a definite precursor to specific forms of “action,” and that this “action,” and “co-resistance” is what really counts.vi
Towards the end of the article, though, Rohan leads the reader to a surprising place — and puts her finger on the heart of a predicament that has vital consequences. In closing, she writes: “yet even some alumni calling for structural change at Seeds of Peace said they’re grappling with the paradox that the camp was a catalyst for developing their understanding of power structures in the first place. The alumnus who criticized the program for making Israeli campers complacent acknowledged the difficulty of her position. ‘I was introduced to this whole culture at Seeds,’ she said. ‘My best friends in the world are from there.” A bit earlier in the piece Rohan quotes an older American Seed saying: “‘The fundamental question is, how can you do co-resistance work while also bringing people to the table who aren’t already on board?’”vii
Yes. Here is the rub.
I admired the passion and youthful energy of my action oriented former colleagues. But as they assumed authority in the organization, I became concerned. At staff meetings and retreats, they dominated conversations and displayed limited patience when it came to people with substantially different points of view. And they ignored people on the ground — particularly the DL’s and other educators. They did not show interest in engaging across lines of difference with people in their own communities. They displayed limited attention or interest in dialogue.
Palestinian DL’s from the West Bank and Gaza — people who had put their hearts into Seeds of Peace — often called to ask me what was going on. They spoke about “the Jerusalem office” as if it were a foreign entity. When I asked if the Palestinian staff members were in touch with them, the DL’s consistently said no.
On the Israeli side, this dynamic was reflected in the 2018 organizational decision to break with the Israeli Ministry of Education. What struck me was not the decision itself, but its implementation — which was transactional, exclusionary, and disrespectful. I was the only staff member to meet with the key Israeli DL’s — many of whom had put their hearts into the organization since the 1990’s.
Not long after, in that last summer of 2019, the organizational leadership asked me to invite key DL’s from across the network for a special “design” session to outline how they envisioned the role of educators in relationship to Seeds of Peace. For three-weeks we worked day and night. The DL’s articulated a set of requests and invitations addressed to the organizational leadership. But the organizational leadership didn’t respond or show any indication of authentic engagement. This took place as the staff members whom Rohan relies upon were advocating for “a world without oppression.” viii
I couldn’t help noticing the contrast between a vision of “a world without oppression” and an invitation to metaphorically walk together. I don’t think that my former colleagues stopped to consider that for many devout people from a variety of religious backgrounds to talk as if human beings can end all oppression on our own is hubris of the most dangerous kind — that framing the mission of the organization in such a way shuts down dialogue. It assumes (or imposes) a given that is not shared.
For the most vocal “action oriented” staff members, this vision “of a world without oppression” also meant that the organization — which exists through the financial support of capitalists — had to become explicitly anti-capitalist. When an impressive young African-American social entrepreneur applied for The GATHER Fellowship, one of my former colleagues argued that as a capitalist, this applicant was an agent of “oppression” and thus should not be considered.
Instead of creating a welcoming environment for a broad range of people and an open-ended educational experience, my action oriented former colleagues seemed to approach dialogue with teenagers as if they were working with a group of committed left-wing organizers. Instead of encouraging participants to “suspend conclusions,” they rushed to judgment. Instead of encouraging participants to exercise their imaginations, they advocated for a comprehensive framework.ix
At camp orientations and staff retreats, I empathized with the feelings they expressed. But I was put off how scripted the conversations often felt; by the tight boundaries around what was considered acceptable; by an over-sensitivity that made it difficult to be honest; by how the identity of a person often mattered more than what they had to say.
There was a sameness of language, an inflexibility, a righteousness, an unthinkingness, that felt too close to indoctrination. My action oriented former colleagues named things, categorized reality, shaped the content of dialogue, in ways that from my perspective, even when I was in silent agreement with specific points, stifled real difference and got in the way of the kind of thinking that I’m talking about.
What a contrast there was between my action oriented former colleagues and my former colleagues on the admin/finance team. During visits to the New York office, I used to love visiting my admin/finance team colleagues in their back room. A diverse group of people from all over the world, they were filled with questions and ideas about the work we were doing and about life, and always open to talk.
I am not making a blanket argument here against the rising discourse of race and gender, for religion, or for capitalism, or against Barker’s claim regarding “settler colonialism” as the root of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. I agree that talk alone is not enough. What I’m arguing against is how my action oriented former colleagues treated other people, how they approached learning, and how they conflated what I view as a core distinction and thus did violence to values that I care deeply about.
I agree that at a certain level all education is political. I would never claim that dialogue based experiential learning replaces the need for political action. I believe deeply in political action — participation in the electoral process, organizing in and across communities, demonstrating in the street, even, if necessary, taking to the barricades.
But I believe that it is also critical to distinguish between education into a democratic ethos, an ethos of imagination, social awareness, critical thinking, empathy, kindness and respect, and advocacy for specific political agendas. It matters how individual human beings in a society with democratic aspirations are educated and prepared. The capacity to listen matters. What and whom citizens turn to for authority matters. How we engage with difference matters. How we engage with evidence, how we form opinions — how we make up and how we change own own minds — matters. Whom we care about and how we treat others matters, too.x
The best antidote to tyranny and disinformation is a healthy citizenry composed of virtuous individuals who think for themselves while staying true to a set of common values regarding human rights and human flourishing. When people don’t get enough practice as autonomous thinkers, they will be easily manipulated. When people are atomized and frustrated, they will turn to demagogues and dangerous myths. They will “escape from freedom” to authoritarian and totalitarian alternatives that offer easily digested answers along with convenient “others” to fear and hate.
Different approaches to social transformation will resonate with different people at different moments. Alongside the tension between “co-resistance” and enlarging the circle, dialogue opportunities and action in solidarity with a particular cause or people can be complementary. Although dialogue alone is not enough, people need opportunities to step back, to think, to reflect, to learn. The success of any form of “co-resistance” depends upon enlarging the circle — on reaching the crowds.
There is a rich spectrum of possible dialogue, multiple strategies available for distinct audiences and various moments in time. What made the Seeds of Peace work so well was that we brought together such an unusual range of people and offered them direct experience of what life could be: this included an unusual abundance of focused time to build relationships and trust.
In contrast, in action oriented partisan spaces, there is often a pervasive sense of scarcity. There are never enough resources or enough time. Ideological commitments are often accompanied by a thinning out of perspectives and opinions. It can become difficult for individuals to ask questions or dissent. Lack of engagement with intellectual diversity can lead to the atrophy of what enables people to fundamentally disagree — and grow.
In their certainty about being right, my action oriented former colleagues trampled on that field beyond right and wrong. They violated an epistemological humility essential for dialogue across lines of conflict as well as education for self-government in a diverse society. Context matters. Audience matters. Pacing matters. The unconvinced are far less likely to participate in something offered by committed partisans of any one side. It’s difficult to engage in dialogue while holding up the tent. In my experience, the large tents for the broadest range of partisans, the curious, the unconvinced, the skeptical, are best tended by those who live by Rumi’s words instead of the urge for immediate “co-resistance.”
By closing the circle, my action oriented former colleagues lost sight of the critical role that Seeds of Peace had been playing in a larger ecology. By combining things that require separate care, they limited the potential for future allies. By imposing a discourse, particularly, but not exclusively, on high school students, and by conflating opportunities for dialogue with totalizing action against all oppression, they intervened in complex learning processes and relationships that require more flexibility and nuance, more attention to the audience, more discipline, more patience, and more time. In their impatience, my action oriented former colleagues severely damaged the very thing that did so much to make them who they are.
V
To be clear, I don’t believe that my youthful action oriented former colleagues possess ultimate responsibility for what happened to Seeds of Peace. At critical moments, Seeds of Peace offered (and probably still does) precious opportunities for human connection, affirmation, self-reflection, self-expression, exploration, and growth. But in the end it is directed behind closed doors by a small group of individuals with power and money within a context of enormous concentrations of wealth, vast inequalities, and the assumptions and social conditioning prevalent at Davos or on The Upper East Side.xi Throughout my time with the organization, decision makers regularly imposed decisions from above based on very limited understanding. Distracted by what was shiny and well packaged, they often snuffed out promising work. Too often, they treated relationships as purely transactional. Like oblivious gardeners, they regularly cut roots and did damage to intricate networks of life.xii
Throughout my time with the organization, I experienced waves of new organizational charts, strategic processes, and protocols imposed from above. As I was leaving, though the characters were different, the pattern remained uncomfortably familiar. To the constant rhetoric of “empowerment” was added “community,” even as the organization continued to disempower constituents, break trust, neglect relationships, and leave unresolved conflicts and tensions to fester. xiii
In saying this, I don’t intend to say anything surprising or controversial. Seeds of Peace reflects what is true at a larger scale. Americans still enjoy the inherited benefits of institutions, laws, values, and practices, that are part of a democratic experiment unprecedented in the history of humankind (which I cherish). But trust in American institutions, public and private, have eroded for good reason. Institutions and systems have been corrupted by moneyed interests, as has science itself. Opportunities for meaningful interaction with fellow citizens, for meaningful participation in our work lives, our government, our communities, have been hollowed out over generations before our eyes.
As a general rule, schools prepare students for a status quo of drastic inequalities and social realities that have overwhelmed human scale. This is a world of relentless monitoring and evaluation in order to predict, control, and standardize outcomes. This is a world of algorithms, rotating buzzwords, public relations, marketing, and bureaucratic forms. In pursuit of funding, dedicated staff members of non-profits such as Seeds of Peace, like Amazon employees, medical professionals and scientists, are forced to navigate mind numbing systems with demands for relentless reporting that sap the imagination and drain away energy and attention from the human core of the work. Although I believe that teachers do the sacred work of preparing the next generation, today they, too, are regularly treated like cogs in a machine. Those of us alive on this planet today inhabit systems flooded by data and corrupted by money where wisdom and the moral imagination are in short supply.xiv
By extrapolating from my experiences with Seeds of Peace, I get a sense of why the United States failed so miserably in Iraq and Afghanistan. Both Seeds of Peace and the American government pay lip service to the same set of inspiring ideals. The distance between such ideals and the realities only make for a harder fall.
I dedicated myself to Seeds of Peace because I believed we were creating a small counter-culture of human relationships, of imagination, of thinking, in the midst of the systemic brutality of modern life where bureaucratic thoughtlessness dominates. In a different way, I too, was naïve. I am proud of the work that I was able to do with my wonderful friends and colleagues on the ground. I have deep love and appreciation for them and how they took (and take) time out of their busy lives to make a difference. I mourn how things at Seeds of Peace turned out for so many of us. As I look forward, I’m left with questions. What can we learn that might prepare us for what lies ahead? How might Seeds of Peace live up to its potential? How do we, in our various different contexts, with our various visions and projects, do better this time?
Hannah Arendt experienced Germany’s transition from a fledgling democracy to a totalitarian regime within a matter of years. She barely escaped the Nazis and spent a good portion of her life stateless. Years later, when she tried to explain how Adolph Eichmann, the mastermind behind The Holocaust, was able to do what he did, she found that he possessed the “thoughtlessness” of a bureaucrat. He pulled the levers and pushed the buttons in a cold tautly bound system. He didn’t really think about what he was doing. The source of his cruelty was uncaring lack of attention to the impact of his decisions. The “othering” of the targeted people along with the bureaucratic distance between decisions and their impact made his unthinkingness easier, of course.
“Unthinking men,” wrote Arendt, “are like sleepwalkers.”[xv] She grounded her thinking on thinking in the human wonder over existence, over being alive and self-aware. For her, such thinking is integrated with feeling and emerges from the depths of being. In tracing various paths from this initial contemplation of existence and self-hood, she expanded on the practice, the process, of thinking as an internal dialogue with oneself that extends outward to others.
When she turned to a model for thinking, she contrasted Plato and his intellectual descendants with Socrates. Where Plato offered “Truth” with a capital “T,” a blueprint, an action plan, a set of prearranged categories, for the good society, Socrates asked questions. He was, said Arendt, a “gadfly,” a “midwife,” an “electric ray.” She pointed out that he did not claim access to the truth or wisdom. He was not a philosopher for “he teaches nothing and has nothing to teach.” Instead, he devoted himself to getting a relatively small circle of men in ancient Athens to get into the practice of thinking — to wake up.
People who are awake won’t be swayed easily by efforts to control them. Once they have real practice thinking, the likelihood is that they will keep thinking. Thinking will become part of who they are. Like Socrates, they will get out of the cave and into the community. Like Socrates, they will engage in dialogue in the public square.
To strengthen the capacity for thinking means getting uncomfortable and disturbing what was previously taken for granted. It means education that is open-ended, not a predetermined step in an organizing strategy. Such practices of thinking require dialogue with oneself and with “the other.” They take attention, commitment, and constant practice. They are practices of self-care and freedom.xvi
An organization built around dialogue and community cannot thrive or reach its potential if it constantly alienates people who gave their hearts to it. Talking together, feeling together, thinking together, engaging with one another across lines of radical difference, is not the end of anything. But it is a start.
The kind of work that I’ve been talking about grows from trust and commitment. Success depends upon the freely chosen commitment of people over time — on a continuity, a deepening, an enlargement, of relationships. This practice of dialogue, of “peace-building,” of “conflict transformation,” of “transformative education,” of “dialogue based experiential education,” of “the moral imagination,” of freedom itself, starts with self-care and the self in community and moves outward toward increasingly distant “others.” It is based on a faith that, like all faith, remains unproven: if given the opportunity, human beings can learn from one another and grow in ways that surprise even ourselves; that we can be simultaneously rooted and citizens of the world; that given the appropriate conditions, empathy, combined with the force of the better argument, the fuller picture of realities and needs, will, over the longer run, win out.xvii
This kind of work, I believe, is an essential contribution, a service, similar to that which Socrates rendered to his fellow citizens — who eventually sentenced him to death.xvii
Endnotes:
i When I left my position with Seeds of Peace in May of 2021, I signed an agreement with the organization that gave me explicit permission to publicly articulate what I’ve learned through my work. This essay is part of that effort. I dedicate the essay to the wonderful, dedicated, educators, artists, community leaders, and supporters with whom I’ve worked with over these years (those who are named here and those who are not). It’s difficult to find the words to express my gratitude to the members of the 2019 Seeds of Peace “design session” and to my dear friends and colleagues who worked so hard, with kindness and imagination, to build community and create experiences that touched people’s lives: Deb Bicknell, Mohammed Isleem, Meenakshi Chaabra, Pious Ali, Ajay Noronha, Karen Abuzant, Ismail Mukbil, Haya Shapira, Sulaiman Khatib, Oraib Waari, Islam Manasra, Iddo Felsenthal, Steven and Linda Brion-Meisels, Tareq Maassarani, Peggy Smith, Inessa Shishmanyan, Maria Ireland, Doc Miller, Barbara O’Brien, Aaron Shneyer, Ami Yares, Micah Hendler, Mira Awad, Hanoch Piven, Arnon Naor, Nabil Kayali, Steve Schuit, Marsha Greenberg, Helen Sturgis-Bright, Amany Shenouda, Molly Josephs, Yousef Bashir, Jill Diamond, Lisa Santiago, Muzhda Ghulam, James Ford, Nishat Alikhan, Fatma Fouad, Allyson Bachta, Hannah Morin, and Rachel Brophy; for the GATHER team that I loved being a part of during my last years with the organization; for the admin/finance team, for many colleagues across departments whom I deeply appreciate (again, this list is incomplete and inadequate as an expression of my respect and gratitude). I send a special shout out to Margie and Jim Arsham and the home hospitality hosts, to the Bath boaters who welcomed us in Maine each summer session, and to Anne Germanacos, for their deeply appreciated support. I thank Celia Kutz, Deb Bicknell, Ned Lazarus, Kevin Brosnan, and John Summers for reading drafts of this essay and offering critical feedback. Whatever faults remain are mine alone. I thank my family and my old friends who put up so long with my single-minded focus. I look forward to continuing in new ways with family, friends, and colleagues as we “make the road by walking.”
ii See Hannah Arendt. The Life of the Mind: New York: Harcourt, Inc., 1977.
iii In a recent article about Seeds of Peace, Lazarus is quoted as saying: “’We [in the peace field] don’t have illusions that this somehow by itself can end the occupation or end violence — reality is much larger than what we’re able to do,’ he cautioned. “Yet on the individual level, the organization seems to have left a mark.” See Jess Rohan. “All Talk,” Jewish Currents (Spring 2021), p. 21.
iv The American sociologist, C. Wright Mills coined the term “the sociological imagination.” For Lederach’s quotation, see John Paul Lederach. The Moral Imagination: The Art and Soul of Building Peace. Oxford, MA: Oxford University Press, 2005. I’ll include the specific pages for this quotation when I again get my hands on a hard copy of the book.
v I later very much enjoyed working with GATHER because my colleagues and the Fellows were wonderful but my larger point remains. With all that made them wonderful — within a healthier organization, with greater attention to relationships and community, greater coordination and integration with work on the ground, and sustained follow-through, we could have done so much more.
vi Rohan, p. 26.
vii Ibid, pp. 24–25.
viii For what turned out to be the final DL art project, the DL’s left a painting on the wall of a road and people walking with the words: “we make the road by walking.”
ix As the philosopher John Dewey puts it, “. . .the most important factor in the training of good mental habits consists in acquiring the attitude of suspended conclusion, and in mastering the various methods of searching for new materials to corroborate or to refute the first suggestions that occur. To maintain the state of doubt and to carry on systematic and protracted inquiry — these are the essentials of thinking.” See John Dewey. How We Think. Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, 1997 [1910], pp. 12–13.
x In the last years, I have worked with my friend Keren Ketko Ayali, an Israeli teacher, teacher trainer, scholar, and advocate of “activist pedagogy” as she finishes her doctorate on this topic. Working with her raises questions for me about how to approach civic education, how to encourage student engagement and activism without imposing particular political agendas. There is much more to be said here, much more to explore and talk about.
xi See Anand Giridharadas. Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2018.
xii While recently finishing a book about the role of fungi in the complexities of the ecosystems of the planet we call home, I had insight into how much damage human beings do to both the natural and social ecosystems that sustain us. See Merlin Sheldrake. Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures. New York: Random House, 2020.
xiii For example, see Sami Al Jundi and Jen Marlowe. The Hour of Sunlight: One Palestinian’s Journey from Prisoner to Peacemaker. New York: Bold Type Books, 2011. The book covers events that took place before I went full-time with Seeds of Peace, so I know of them second and third hand. But I can recount what I witnessed first-hand where the organization treated staff members in ways similar to how Sami Al Jundi was treated.
xiv For a powerful analysis of the mind-numbing bureaucratic work common today even as so much work is done with machines, see David Graeber. Bullshit Jobs: A Theory. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2018.
xv Arendt, p. 191.
xvi My references to self-care and freedom are references to the work of the twentieth-century thinker Michel Foucault. When I started with Seeds of Peace back in 2004, I was immersed in the work of the German philosopher Jurgen Habermas. I viewed Seeds of Peace as a “Habermasian experiment.” Foucault and Habermas are often seen as opponents. But I’ve come to see how much the later Foucault complements the work of Habermas — particularly Foucault’s writings about “care for the self” and his essay, “What is Enlightenment?”
xvii I find the ideal of “rooted cosmopolitanism,” which I’ve borrowed from the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah to be very helpful when approaching questions of identity. From my perspective, Appiah is one of the most insightful writers on such subjects. For example, see Kwame Anthony Appiah. The Ethics of Identity. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005; Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2010; and The Lies that Bind: Rethinking Identity. New York: Liveright Publishing Company, 2018. I also find the philosopher Martha Nussbaum’s particularly helpful — for her work on the role of the emotions, on the role of the liberal arts and the fine arts, on the critical role of dialogue, and for how she writes about human flourishing. Here’s a recent talk that she gave where she touches on themes at the heart of what I’ve written in this essay. Like Mary, the fictional professor in Homeland Elegies, Nussbaum talks of the “aggressive othering” and “apocalyptic thinking” that has made it increasingly difficult in recent years to engage in dialogue across lines of difference. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-lk7pnoHYk
