ROBERT SIEGEL, host: The newspaper man John Wallach died Wednesday of lung cancer. John left behind, in addition to his wife and children, his ongoing experiment in idealism. It’s called Seeds of Peace, a summer camp he started in Maine in 1993 that was originally for Israeli, Palestinian and Egyptian teenagers. It was later expanded to children from several countries plagued by war and violence. Even in this summer of fear and despair in the Middle East, there are still Palestinian and Israeli kids at John Wallach’s summer camp.
Today we checked back with two former campers to take the pulse of Wallach’s dream. Bushra Jawabri is a Palestinian, a 20-year-old student at Manhattanville College in New York, who first took part in the Seeds of Peace program when she was 13.
Ms. BUSHRA JAWABRI (Former Camper): One of my best friends is an Israeli. And since the intifada started we’ve been in touch. And honestly what actually kept faith and what’s kept me going and kept faith inside me is exchanging e-mails and phone calls with Noah(ph). And it’s been very important for me to know that Noah, as an Israeli, condemns inhumane actions done by anyone towards innocent civilians. Like at many incidents when my sister was in danger or my family was in danger, she would always call condemning the actions of those soldiers. And also, like for me, when a suicide bomb happens, I believe it’s important for Noah as well to know that I totally condemn that.
SIEGEL: Do you recall some particular moment, some incident at Seeds of Peace …
Ms. JAWABRI: Yeah.
SIEGEL: … that changed you?
Ms. JAWABRI: Even though I was fearful and hesitated at the first day of camp and was afraid of the fact that I’d be staying with Israelis in the same bunk and the fact that I woke up the next morning and realizing that I had spent the night with Israelis, with people from the other side, and nothing happened to me, nothing happened to them made us realize the human side of the other side.
SIEGEL: That’s Palestinian Bushra Jawabri.
Kobi Sadan is an Israeli. He’s 21 years old, and he’s a counselor at Seeds of Peace. And like Bushra he started out as a camper there when he was 13.
Kobi, do you find that the experience of the camp has been able to, in some way, survive with you despite the violence of the past couple years?
Mr. KOBI SADAN (Former Camper): Yes. Most definitely. Even though I first went to Seeds of Peace in 1994, and the peace process was right at its peak, the Oslo Peace Accord was just signed and there was a lot of optimism—even today, after two years of fighting, our personal relationships are maintained. It’s so easy to hate. It’s so easy to go back to what you’ve learned when you were little, to what the media says, but having a friend from the other side negates that.
SIEGEL: Do you recall any one particular moment–I asked this of Bushra a few moments ago. Do you recall a single incident your first summer at Seeds of Peace…
Mr. SADAN: Mm-hmm.
SIEGEL: … that was somehow life changing for you?
Mr. SADAN: I remember one time a friend of mine from Hebron showed me a picture–a few pictures, actually–of his home and his school and his friends. And what I saw in those pictures were him and his friends in Hebron, but around them there were a few Israeli soldiers. And I realized although those Israeli soldiers for me symbolize security, for them they were symbolizing the occupation. And for the first time in my life, after seeing it in a picture, I realized what those soldiers meant for them.
SIEGEL: Well, Kobi, thank you very much for talking with us.
Mr. SADAN: Thank you very much, Robert.
SIEGEL: Kobi Sadan is an Israeli. He recently completed his military service and will begin his freshman year at Yale this fall.
It can be argued that personal friendship in the face of national hostility achieves little. War can make enemies out of soul mates and new allies out of old foes. But more than a thousand kids who’ve been in the Seeds of Peace program at least had the chance to replace demonized images of `the others’ with real people, people much like themselves. As one supporter of the program put it here some years ago, `Now when these kids think of the people their parents call enemies, the enemies will have faces.’ For that gift they owe John Wallach, who died Wednesday at the age of 59.
Listen to Robert Siegel’s All Things Considered interview on NPR »