On the surface, it looks like a perfectly normal summer school in the Devon countryside: teenagers playing volleyball in the sun, doing arts and crafts, and preparing for the talent show. But beneath the surface, they’re doing something far more radical: talking to each other about their pain, their trauma, and their shared humanity. Yes, it’s almost embarrassingly simple.
These are the “seeds” of Seeds of Peace, a camp that brings together teenagers from opposite sides of historical conflicts - Israel and Palestine, India and Pakistan - for three weeks of intensive dialogue. Every day, they spend two hours in dialogue sessions, sharing personal experiences and trying to find common ground. Over three weeks, that’s 32 hours of heavy conversation, which is 32 more hours than most world leaders manage.
“You won’t find them sitting with maps and facts and books,” said Eva Armour, the executive director. “They’re talking about their own lived experiences - that’s how the learning is happening. You can’t debate someone else’s lived experience the way that you might debate what happened in the war.” She added, with a hint of exasperation, “We need to invest in this work even a fraction of what we’re investing in the aftermath of war.”
This year marks the camp’s 30th anniversary, but it’s the first time it’s been held in Britain. Founded in 1993 by American journalist John Wallach, it usually sets up shop in the US, but political uncertainty made the UK seem like a safer bet. As Qasim Aslam, the global youth programme lead, put it, “Picking a country to host this is one of the enormous challenges. There are very few countries where all parents from all eight countries would be comfortable sending their kids, and where we can get visas for all participants.”
For the campers - known as “seeds” - the experience is challenging but life-changing. Mika, a 17-year-old from Israel, admitted she hadn’t come closer to answering her questions about peace. “Now I’m thinking, did I really expect three weeks to fix it all?” she said. “Facing someone who is supposed to be my enemy, but she’s just a girl like me - it’s difficult. I could just not know about it and go and have fun in another summer camp and it would be way easier. But I prefer knowing it and starting to work through it for what I believe.”
Hala, a 16-year-old Palestinian from Jerusalem, said it was the first time she had met Israelis “outside of checkpoints, raids and IDF uniforms.” She confessed, “It was hard at first, I thought I was betraying something deep down inside of me. But when I got to know these people, I realised they have very different views about their government. And we like the same movie.”
Even those from outside the main conflict zones found it enlightening. Esther, a 17-year-old from Belfast, said, “I have never had the chance to speak to people from different countries like Israel and Palestine before - you never know how the media censors stuff so it’s really powerful to hear from people themselves. I feel like I’ll be much less quick to judge people now.”
For some, attending is fraught with difficulty. Ahmad, a 26-year-old Palestinian camp counsellor who attended as a teenager, said he won’t be telling people back home about his summer trip. “For some people, it feels like you’re betraying your country, because you’re trying to make peace with the people who are killing you at the same time.”
Naturally, there are limits to this noble experiment. You need English language skills, which, as organisers admit, limits accessibility. And it costs $9,000 (£6,700) to attend, though many receive scholarships. In some countries, there’s a competitive application process. As Aslam said, “We’re trying to identify young people that could be influencers in their respective communities in the future.”
Past attendees have gone on to become politicians, ambassadors, and business leaders, presumably spreading the gospel of “talk to your enemies” wherever they go. Over the past three decades, the organisers have worked in the Balkans, Cyprus, Greece, Turkey, and Afghanistan, tailoring camps to geopolitical events. They also do year-round work.
Armour noted that it’s getting harder for people to talk across differences. “After 7 October [attacks on Israel by Hamas], we actually got a lot of calls from schools and institutions saying we don’t really know how to talk to each other about this, can you help?”
Joud, a 17-year-old from Jordan attending for the second year, said the camp enabled her to have healthy debate with her family for the first time, and she became good friends with a Jewish girl from the US, which she “never expected.” She said, “Our social identities are complete opposites. But we connected in many different ways, and I learned how to listen and understand, not just respond.”
So, in a world where leaders can’t seem to sit down and talk, these teenagers are doing it for them - one two-hour dialogue session at a time. It’s almost embarrassingly simple.