Chances are, if you plunk down $24.95 for Jennifer Miller’s book, Inheriting The Holy Land: An American’s Search for Hope in the Middle East, or check it out of a library, or borrow it from a friend, you will eventually find tears clouding your vision: different kinds of tears – tears of anger, sorrow, and, yes, unexpected tears of relief and joy, as every now and then, glimmers of understanding, good will and hopes of peace obliterate the bombs and tanks on the evening news.

Miller was thirteen years old, September 13, 1993, when she stood on the White House South Lawn, too small to see over the heads of the crowd in front of her, where the leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Prime Minister of Israel had just shaken hands.

The handshakes were the symbol of settled negotiations between Israeli and Palestinian officials that had begun the previous year in Oslo, Norway. Israel would return land to the Palestinians and grant them political autonomy in exchange for Palestinian security cooperation and control over terrorism. The dream was shattered into a million pieces with the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, the collapse of the Oslo process, and the renewal of Palestinian violence in the second intifada.

How ironic is it that in the official picture, Miller was impressed, not with the world leaders, including President Bill Clinton, but with the group of teenagers wearing green T-shirts, sitting in the front row: forty-five Israeli, Palestinian, and Egyptian youths from the Seeds of Peace Camp for Conflict Resolution in Maine.

After the first World Trade Center bombing, John Wallach left his job as chief diplomatic correspondent for Hearst newspapers to plan what most people considered impossible: a summer camp where Israelis and Arabs would learn to coexist.

Miller tells us that since 1993, Seeds of Peace has expanded to include eight Middle Eastern countries as well as youth from India, Pakistan, the Balkans, Cyprus, Greece, Turkey, Afghanistan and the United States.

The writer came by her interest in the peace effort through Wallach, a neighbor and close friend of her father, Aaron Miller, who was long involved in Arab-Israeli negotiations at the State Department.

Further, Jennifer’s mother also worked for Middle East peace, meeting with congressmen to procure funds for Wallach’s dream of helping teenagers to work together, turning their hatred and fear into trust and friendship.

Eventually, Jennifer attended the Seeds of Peace International youth conference in Villars, Switzerland, where 130 Seeds alumni engaged in mock negotiations covering the seven Oslo final status issues. She was on the Jerusalem committee and was up every night until three a.m. debating, arguing, sometimes crying and generally fighting to help her group reach agreement.

In Jennifer’s private school, with a 40 percent Jewish student population, the mantra was: “Israel is great and as for the Palestinians – what Palestinians?”

Her safe, smug world was turned upside down in the Seeds of Peace.

Not easy, peace-making. A Jordanian friend once told Jennifer: “To make peace, you have to go to war with yourself.” .

The book is replete with stories of young people in the Seeds of Peace, but for our purpose, it will be sufficient to concentrate on two, a Jewish lad of fifteen named Omri, and Mohammad, a Palestinian, who became the best of friends during their time in the Maine Seeds of Peace camp.

Omri wore the largest Star of David Jennifer had ever seen, which she described as “bling-bling!” The boy, dark, slim, and with large eyes was a second generation Israeli Omri thinks of himself as Israeli and Jewish, not Arab. His family had immigrated to Israel under the Law of Return, which granted full Jewish citizenship to any Jew in the world, resulting in the uprooting of 700,000 Palestinians from their homes to make room for the new Jewish settlers.

What I have never understood is how the Jews, with their history of the Holocaust, from which they were delivered by thousands who gave their lives to make that possible, can turn around and be so cruel to the Palestinians, who have so little, almost nothing, in countless cases.

After Omri returned home, Jennifer visited him in Bat Yam, a lower-middle-class suburb of Tel Aviv. His mother works in a sunglasses store, and his father is a part-time gardener and electronic worker in wealthy Tel Aviv suburbs. The family lives in a modest apartment in a crowded neighborhood. Omri told her the parks are hangouts for local gangs.

When Jennifer had first spoken with Omri back in Maine, he had told her his dream was to wake up one morning to find the Arabs gone. “That’s what I wanted, but I know it’s not going to happen. You can’t just take three million Palestinians and throw them in other countries. But it was like a dream for me.” Apparently, countless Arabs dream they will awaken one morning to see that the Jewish settlements have disappeared.

It couldn’t have been easy for Omri to fly across the world to join the Seeds of Peace camp in Maine. One of his best friends, a boy named Shalom, had been on the way to meet Omri for basketball when a Palestinian on the bus detonated a bomb strapped to his waist. Shalom didn’t survive the blast.

Omri told Jennifer: “You know the Israeli delegation came to camp first, and the counselors asked us to clap when the Palestinians came and to give them a warm welcome. And that was a very hard thing to do. Because we were thinking about how most of them might have contact with terrorists and how their fathers might be in Israeli prisons and how the Palestinians don’t want to live peacefully with the Israelis. And I understand the Israelis because I was exactly like them.”

Jennifer asked Omri if it was difficult for him to have a Palestinian for his best friend.

“I’m not looking at this guy as a Palestinian,” Omri explained. “I don’t call him Mohammad, the Palestinian. I call him Mohammad. I can see his personality from my coexistence group (the daily meeting where kids wrestle – often in tears and anger – with history, politics and identity). I can tell he wants peace. And coex aside, he’s a very nice boy – a nice kid. We always laugh together. We enjoy being together.

“I’m not going to hate Mohammad,” Omri continued. “He still was my friend for three weeks. And hopefully, he’ll be my friend when we go home. But I don’t think I’m going to change my opinions or change my way to peace.”

“What’s your way to peace?” Jennifer asked.

“Okay. That’s politics now. Do you know that in the Palestinian charter in the sixth paragraph, it says that Israel does not exist? How can I make peace with someone who says Israel should be destroyed to make a Palestinian nation?”

Jennifer told Omri that Arafat had removed the articles in the Palestinian charter calling for Israel’s destruction.

“No, no they didn’t.” Omri sounded as certain. “In the Oslo agreement, part of the agreement was to take this clause out. And Arafat says, ‘Ya, I’m going to do it as soon as I can.’ But I’m still waiting.”

In fact, it was taken out, but in 2003, when the mentor and student discussed the subject, the original charter still appeared on the PLO Website.

“And I’m not saying that peace is just on the paper,” Omri continued. “You have to change the minds of people. The Palestinians are not thinking about peace. They are going into the street with Israeli flags burning.”

However, Omri admitted his father had told him that there are good Arabs and bad Arabs. “And if my father is saying this, then probably most of the fathers and most of the families are saying it.”

He explained how the camp had affected him: “I moved a little bit and I didn’t want it to happen. I wanted to stay with my opinions. The same Omri as before. But when you’ve got friends from the other side, it makes you a bit confused.”

The Seeds of Peace camp confused Omri sufficiently to become a best friend to a Palestinian. Think of what thousands of Seeds of Peace camps could do. Would we not then be able to turn tanks into plowshares, defuse the bombs, heal the wounds of hate in young and old alike, and sow the Seeds of Forgiveness and Love?

In our blindness and indifference, we think we have a choice here, that we can continue to provide Israel with bombs and arms that bring death into neighborhood after neighborhood, free of sanctions.

As a nation, we would do well to retreat into a figurative cave, and in the darkness consider that our God is not mocked, that we owe the millions of Omris and Mohammads of this world an example of Christian compassion and leadership, spreading peace and justice.

It is we who should be attending camps of Seeds of Peace before bombs and missiles turn our homes into rubble and our children into the walking wounded, or worse.

Lord, show us the way to peace,
and grant us the strength to work for it,
we beg You.
Amen.

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