OTISFIELD | Before they traveled from the Gaza Strip to Maine this week, the closest the two Palestinian boys had ever come to speaking with an Israeli was at a military checkpoint, where soldiers shouted at them through megaphones.
With the slight easing of tensions between Israelis and Palestinians in recent months, Basel Abu Shamala and Mohammad Albashedi, both 15, are the first young people from Gaza to attend Seeds of Peace camp in Otisfield since the outbreak of the Intifada in 2000. For the next three weeks, they will share meals and viewpoints with people they have previously known only as enemies.
The boys' journey was longer than it had to be. But their difficulties help illustrates what Seeds of Peace, now in its 13th season, seeks to accomplish by bringing together youths from hostile nations each summer at a lakeside camp in Maine.
Earlier this week, Shamala and Albashedi set out with 42 other Palestinian teenagers for Tel Aviv, where they were all to begin their journey to Maine. But the group was delayed for seven hours at the Israeli border, with soldiers finally turning the two Gaza youths back and allowing the others to pass.
Shamala and Albashedi did manage to make it in time for the camp's opening ceremonies on Thursday, but only after packing 15 people into a small car and driving to Cairo to catch a different flight. In the upcoming session, which brings almost 200 campers together from Middle Eastern countries, the boys from Gaza said they would recount this experience and others to try to convey to Israelis the difficulty of their lives.
"We want to tell them about everything. About the difficulty caused by the roadblocks and checkpoints. We want to tell about the shooting and the martyrs and the shelling," said Shamala, speaking through an interpreter. And the boys will also be expected to listen to what their Israeli counterparts have to say.
At Thursday's opening ceremony, Seeds of Peace president Aaron Miller told campers they would each be asked to take on a new identity in addition to the one on their passports.
"That's the Seeds identity," he said. "It means listening and treating those you may have been taught to hate or not to like with ... respect."
A small group of campers who were returning to the camp for a second year explained what the experience had meant to them.
"If I hadn't gone to Seeds of Peace I would have used all my reserves to fight the enemy," said 17-year-old Sherif Afdel Messih from Cairo. "Today I still fight and struggle but I do it beside the ones I used to call the enemy."
Messih, who will attend the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the fall, said he arrived at the camp in the summer of 2003 with a great deal of anger toward Israelis, though he had never met one in person, because of what he perceived as mistreatment of Palestinians.
"I always thought my first encounter with an Israeli would be a brutal one because I was so angry with what was going on," he said. Instead, Messih said he discovered he could not easily distinguish between Arabs and Jews, since they often looked the same and had many foods and cultural traits in common. To his surprise, he said he found himself sharing laughs with his Israeli bunkmate, which made him rethink his ideas of how Arabs and Jews can coexist.
"Not only can you live in neighboring countries. You can live in the same home," he said.
The hostilities Seeds of Peace seeks to bridge are profound, of course, and sometimes those teens who cannot make it to Maine are the ones who might benefit most from the experience. The camp has hosted Iraqi teens in the past, but camp officials said it was not possible this year because of the danger they would face in traveling to the United States.