At Camp, Arab and Israeli Teens Trade Hugs and Poems
BY CARLYLE MURPHY | OTISFIELD, MAINE After two suicide bombers blew up a Jerusalem market last month, killing 16 people, the epicenter of Middle East strife plunged anew into an inferno of mutilated bodies, demolished homes, closed borders, curses and recriminations. But here in the woods of southern Maine, something quite different happened after news of the bombing reached a camp of Arab and Israeli teenagers.
The attack drew tears, apologies, hugs and condolences. It moved a 14-year-old Egyptian to pen a poem, “Hurricane and the Dream.” It led a 15-year-old Israeli to compose a song called “Pain.” And Dan Moskona, an Israeli of “14 and a half” years, saw something he’d never even imagined.
“I saw a couple of Palestinians just sit, hug and cry about the bomb attack,” he said last week. “I couldn’t believe it. Palestinians crying about a bomb attack in Jerusalem?”
Afterward, when Arab friends came and said they were sorry, “I said, ‘Why do you say you’re sorry? You’re not the ones who did it.’ ”
If the future can arrive at one place on Earth and later migrate to another part of the world, this pine-scented camp on the shore of Pleasant Lake may hold hope for the tormented Holy Land. It is the site of “Seeds of Peace,” a program that brings together Arab and Israeli teenagers for a month of fun and serious discussions.
This summer, 165 teenagers from six nations—Israel, Egypt, Jordan, Tunisia, Morocco and Qatar—and Palestine, which is struggling to become one, gathered to talk about how they can live together despite their differences. Next Wednesday, they will travel to Washington, where they hope to visit the White House.
Founded by former Hearst foreign editor John Wallach, the camp is in its fifth year. Participants are nominated by their schools after writing an essay on making peace, with finalists chosen by their respective governments.
Since the campers must have a working knowledge of English, most come from middle-class backgrounds and they include a sprinkling of kids well—connected to top politicians.
Aside from swimming and other summer camp activities, the heart of “Seeds of Peace” is a daily, 90-minute discussion known in camp as “coexistence.” Led by professionals trained in group therapy and conflict resolution, the sessions explore such topics as the dynamics of identity, the art of listening, the meaning of such words as “stereotype” and “prejudice” and, sometimes, the redemptive powers of tolerance and compassion.
But many of the sessions center on fear. Israeli teenagers tell of being afraid that someone, anyone, standing next to them might be a suicide bomber. They talk a lot about the Holocaust, which many of their co-campers know little about because it is not taught in most Arab schools.
Palestinians describe being under curfew and not attending school for weeks, watching gun-toting Israeli soldiers in their streets, enduring humiliating roadblocks, seeing their homes bulldozed and, much worse, losing an uncle, brother or father to an Israeli bullet.
Arguments follow—about whether Israelis use rubber or metal bullets; about whether Israelis are “giving” or “returning” land to the Palestinians. The sessions, the teenagers say, are tense, heated and frequently tearful.
“It’s really hard,” said Israeli Diana Naor, 13, who lives in Holon, outside Tel Aviv. “Everyone is shouting and crying.”
“The whole point of it is to let people recognize that the differences are wide, that they are deep, but that it’s up to them to find a way to resolve it,” said Wallach. These children “are the future, and they can’t be mired in the same cycle of violence that their parents and grandparents are mired in.”
Wallach has seen “much more hatred that I ever anticipated in a 13-year-old, a 14-year-old, because their society has already poisoned them … What we’re doing is a detoxification program. We’re trying to get the poison and hatred out of them. In some cases we succeed and in some cases we don’t.”
Seeds of Peace takes no government money, and Wallach said he raises $750,000 each year from individuals and corporations to run it.
Sara Jabari, a 15-year-old Palestinian, said her father, a gas station owner in Hebron, was warned by Hamas, the extremist Palestinian group responsible for the suicide bombings, not to send her to the peace camp. He ignored the warning “because he believes in peace,” Jabari said. But just in case, on the day of her departure, her family left for the airport three hours earlier than planned.
Jabari said she was wary of the Israeli campers at first. “I thought all the Israelis were like the [Israeli] settlers, and the settlers were always killing our people.”
Then she met Dana Naor. “She is my friend. She is so nice and I know [among] the Israelis there is good and there is bad from them. And from the Palestinians, there is good and there is bad too. I really had a new idea of the Israelis from Dana.”
Naor arrived with different apprehensions about Palestinians. “I knew the most extremist would not come to this kind of camp, but I was kind of worried that they won’t be nice or they won’t speak English or that they won’t want to be our friends,” she said. “But all of them are really, really nice.”
It was definitely not love at first sight between Adham Rishmawi, son of a Palestinian medical supplier in Beit Sahour, near Bethlehem, and Edi Shpitz, son of an Israeli airplane engineer in Holon. The two 15-year-olds first spotted each other in the Frankfurt airport en route to Maine.
“When I saw Adham … he had a Palestinian hat and a Palestinian flag [on his chest]. And he looked at me in a strange way, and I looked at him in a strange way and didn’t say anything,” Shpitz said. “But then when we found out we were in the same bunk it was like, ‘Oh, no!’ and we started talking and after the first couple of coexistence [sessions] we understood that each of us has his problems and I understand Adham and his people because he has a right to get a country. But he has to understand us: We waited 2,000 years for that moment.”
Rishmawi, who said he has never had a personal relationship with an Israeli his own age, discovered when he talked to Shpitz that “he is not against Palestinians. It was a great feeling.”
At home, the boys live less than a two-hour drive apart. “But it’s actually a very big distance” from Holon to the “Palestinian Authority,” Shpitz said.
Rishmawi leaned over and whispered in Shpitz’s ear. “He’s telling me he lives in Palestine, not the Palestinian Authority,” explained Shpitz, who laughed and corrected himself.
The day of the July 30 bombing, “we had just finished breakfast and they brought us all into the big hall,” said Saad Shakshir, 14, a Jordanian. “John announced it and there was a lot of sadness and crying. It wasn’t just Israelis who were crying. A lot of Arabs and Palestinians were also crying.”
“We told them we don’t agree to put bombs,” said 15-year-old Mohammed Sager, one of the 10 Palestinians from Gaza at the camp.
The long-term goal of Seeds of Peace is to nurture leadership. So each year about 30 campers are invited back as program leaders, junior counselors and eventually counselors. Some have returned three consecutive years. Coexistence sessions among these older teens are sometimes more acrimonious, and more mature, group leaders said.
“They’re able to talk fairly intimately and deeply” about trust, said Achim Nowak, who runs a coexistence program at the camp with Roya Fahmy-Swartz, a Tokoma Park resident.
Before the recent bombing, the teenagers “were very comfortable with the intellectual arguments and discussions and ‘my history’ and ‘your history,’” said Fahmy-Swartz. But that day “pushed them to anther level of being able to see each other as people rather than as history [or] politics. They started talking about feelings rather than ‘My Torah says,’ ‘My Koran says’ … They’re supreme debaters.”
By this summer’s end, the camp’s alumni will number about 800. Just a drop in the bucket, a cynic might note.
“You have to start somewhere, right?” Wallach said. “I mean, you know, one of these kids could become a president or a prime minister.”