Arabs, Israelis Go to Summer Camp on Neutral Ground
BY MATTHEW HAY BROWN | KENT When Hilly Hirt first learned her bunkmates at her American sleepover camp would include Palestinians, the Israeli youth worried she wouldnt survive the first night.
“We live so close together back home, but there’s no contact,” said Hirt, a bright-eyed 15-year-old from Arad. “You’re kind of hanging on the images in the media: Palestinians as terrorists, the bombing and the hatred. Before my first year here, I was shaking in my boots.”
Ramzi Abujazar, a gangly youth from Jordan at camp for the first time, had similar misgivings about meeting Israelis.
“Before I came to camp, I thought they were going to be a bunch of racists,” said Abujazar, 16, from Zarqa.
But that was before working, playing and talking with the erstwhile enemy at Seeds of Peace. The privately funded program, recipient of the 1997 UNESCO Peace Prize, has brought 85 Arab and Israeli teenagers—some of whom live just minutes from each other in the Middle East, but never would meet—to neutral ground here in the bucolic woodlands of Connecticut. The youngsters share chores, team up for sports and talk out their differences in hopes of changing an atmosphere of enmity back home.
“I thought it was going to be rough, but I was absolutely wrong,” Abujazar said Sunday, a week into the program at Kenmont/Kenwood Camp in Kent. “Here we are all friends. From the moment we arrived, it has felt like home. It has changed my idea of Israelis.”
Organizers opened the camp to outsiders Sunday, allowing New York-area donors and international news media to meet with the youngsters selected by their governments to represent their peoples. The mood was joyful, with campers hugging and snapping photos, giggling in small groups and shouting great gang chants.
Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, a longtime supporter of the program who has a home in Kent, said it could help create the climate in which leaders could complete the Middle Eats peace process.
“Right now we are at a moment when peace can be made, and I think it will be made,” Kissinger, who sheparded early negotiations between Arabs and Israelis in the 1970s, told the youngsters. “I’m glad to see you all here together, because you’re the ones who will have to live together.”
Journalist John Wallach planted Seeds of Peace in 1993, selling his house to start a program he hoped would have a greater impact than what he called a “sing-a song, plant a-tree-and-call-it-peace camp.”
“The idea was to get kids who could not otherwise meet to sit down together and begin to break barriers,” said Wallach, who covered Kissinger as Washington editor for Hearst Newspapers. “This is work that is not being done by governments. People want to make peace. Governments can sign treaties, but treaties dont change anything on the ground. They dont mean anything unless people meet and learn about each other.”
A Seeds of Peace Session looks and sounds much like any other American camp. The Arab and Israeli youngsters sleep in cabins and eat in dining halls, play soccer and baseball, swim and make crafts.
But there are hints from the participants; some Muslim girls cover their heads and wear long pants and long sleeves. Some Jewish boys wear yarmulkes. Food is Kosher; there are Islamic and Jewish religious services. And there are coexistence sessions, the centerpiece of the Seeds of Peace process. Discussion groups bring together a dozen teenagers of differing backgrounds to discuss the thorniest problems of the peace process: are armed Palestinians freedom fighters or terrorists? To whom does Jerusalem belong? What can be done to create a lasting peace?
“When kids first come into the coexistence process, the first thing is, ‘Now I finally get a chance to tell the other side how it really is,'” said Larry Malm, co-head counselor for Seeds of Peace. “They think they’re going to win the argument. But everyone feels that way, so nobody can win, it’s a crisis. Everyone is butting up against each other.”
Malm could speak for Yael Rakover.
“I thought I was going to have the final word,” said Rakover, a dark-haired 15-year-old from Afula in Israel. “I was carrying such a big load of history and pain, and I thought I was going to unload it. One of the most important things I learned was that Palestinians and Jordanians have the same load. Its not about having the last word. Its about listening to each other.”
Rakover has learned the Seeds of Peace message.
“These are very difficult, painful issues,” Wallach said. “We’re not trying to get them to agree. We want to bring them to agreeing to disagree, with listening, empathy and compassion. These are the skills they are going to need to coexist.”
Since 1993, Seeds of Peace has brought hundreds of youngsters from the Middle East to its permanent base in Otisfield, Maine. A computer conflict-resolution program based on the Seeds of Peace process is to be introduced to Arab and Israeli schools this fall. The organization is about to open a permanent center in East Jerusalem, in a building that straddles the old border between Arab and Jewish sectors, where the youngsters in the region may take classes and join activities together.
But organizers may be proudest of the commitment some graduates of the program have shown in keeping in touch with each other, by telephone and e-mail, or by visits once thought unthinkable.
“There are kids who come out of here friends for life,” said Malm, the co-head counselor. “No question, it’s very difficult, they have to make the commitment.”
“The idea of being friends its a revolution,” Wallach said. “These are kids who have grown up believing war is the only option, and now they have a sense that peace is possible.”
Hilly Hirt, the Israeli girl who was so afraid of her Palestinian bunkmates before her first Seeds of Peace session two years ago, was able to solve her problem. She made one of them “her best friend in the whole world.”
“We’ve been in touch ever since,” Hirt gushed. “We get together whenever theres a bombing, the first thing I do is call her to make sure everyone’s all right. I’ve met her friends, and you can feel it spreading. What we’re doing is showing the whole world what’s possible.”