Summer camp in Maine isn’t so unusual. Unless of course the campers are Middle East ‘rivals’—Israelis and Palestinians—and politics is all part of the program.

BY ABBY ZIMET | OTISFIELD Flags flutter, multi-hued. Clusters of dark-haired kids stand, heads high, voices rising, each singing their ardent anthem before their flag: Israel’s blue and white, Palestine’s red, black and green.

The flag of Israel, notes a grave John Wallach, rests between Jordan and Palestine. “You are neighbors,” he stresses. “Geographically, strategically and most importantly, as human beings.”

The kids proclaim their inchoate dreams: To “live the hope,” to “make one future together,” to “take every day like a jewel.”

Then, arm in arm, they enter the Seeds of Peace camp. Inside, only one flag flies: the green Seeds flag, its three small figures holding hands, burgeoning forth from an olive branch.

“Once you come in,” Wallach says, “we’re a new nation.”

In the face of ancient, grievous hatreds, symbols matter, profoundly. Flags are one part of the intricate methodology of Seeds of Peace, the summer camp Wallach founded in 1993 as an exercise in “the politics of the possible.”

This year, its sixth and perhaps most difficult, Seeds faces new challenges and yet boasts new strengths. With the peace processes in the Middle East at an impasse, the political climate—and the mood of some kids who emerge from it—is charged, even bellicose. At the same time, this year’s kids are veterans of both war and peace, with the staunch skills to prove it.

Here, historic enemies who had once never met “the other guy” will meet again and again, unavoidably, usually amicably, sometimes not. They will play Frisbee, tennis, volleyball. They will swim together, eat together, sleep together. In daily facilitation sessions, they will debate Jerusalem or the West Bank and have to reach détente, even if only agreeing to disagree.

They will do all this within Seeds’ painstaking, multi-layered framework, which leaves nothing to chance. Their beds will be staggered: Arab, Israeli, Arab. They will wear T-shirts that make them all look the same. They will play the team-building Color Games, which in most camps is Color Wars.

Slowly, it is hoped, they will come to constitute Wallach’s vision of “a kids’ U.N.—a network of building blocks toward a peaceful future.”

They will come to compromise. To coexist. And, despite centuries of enmity, to hug. Often.

Noa Epstein, an Israeli, is one of many alumni who have made Seeds part of their lives. At home, Noa visits and calls Palestinian friends. They come to her house.

She and her Palestinian friend Abdasallam once went on a sort of pilgrimage in Jerusalem: He took her to the Dome of the Rock, she took him to the Wailing Wall, where they placed a plea for peace in three languages.

“That is what Seeds is about—getting to know a person as a person, not an Israeli or Palestinian,” she says. “It’s building something, unstoppable, for the future.”

This summer, Seeds is hosting delegations from Qatar, Egypt, Morocco, Jordan, Palestine, Israel, the United States and Cyprus. Two thirds of the campers are either Israeli or Palestinian.

While the kids must all speak English and show leadership qualities, they otherwise represent an ethnic and political cross-section. There are Jews from settlements, Palestinians from refugee camps, Israeli Arabs. Families contribute part of the $2,500 tuition. The rest is paid by scholarships.

The summer’s first session was devoted to almost all Seeds alumni and activists.

At home, with the help of a Seeds office in Jerusalem, the kids visit across borders, produce a quarterly newspaper with editors and subscribers in four countries, and have an Internet site. In May they held a week-long Middle East youth summit in Switzerland. Later this month, they will lead a group trip to Jordan, Haifa and Palestine.

The task of bridging centuries-old chasms is a tough one. Notes one camper, “If you want peace, you must forget everything.”

Maine, safe and green, is where they start. After years of roving the state, Seeds has a 10-year lease at the former Powhatan Camp on Pleasant Lake.

It is summer-camp timeless: leafy grounds, stacked canoes, glistening lake. In the screened bunks, shampoo and bug dope sit on window sills. Placid and still, it is what an Israeli boy calls “a utopia that we can make like our lives.”

Seeds, says Noa Epstein, “changed my life.”

Cogent and eloquent, she can argue in her musical English the fine points of the 1993 Oslo peace accord or the Palestinian Intifada.

She has met Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and lit candles at the funeral of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. She has none of the self-consciousness of pubescence; there is no flipping of hair. She seems her age—newly 15—only when a large bug crawls on her, at which point she shrieks.

Ice-skating in Portland the week before, she dislocated a shoulder. Now she sits on her bed in Bunk 10, stuck in a sling. Mona, a Palestinian friend from the West Bank, makes Noa’s ponytail for her.

Back home, Noa had Mona to her birthday party. She also visited a Palestinian friend in Aroub, one of the gritty refugee camps that have given rise to the most radical Palestinian elements. Noa’s father, who fought in the Yom Kippur War, couldn’t bear to go. “Every person has their own limits,” she says mildly. Her mother took her.

“I owed it to myself and my friend,” she explains. “I don’t have the right to talk about the refugees if I haven’t seen what’s going on. Otherwise, how am I gonna make her life better, and my life better?”

Before Seeds, had she ever met a Palestinian, a regular kid, like her?

“None,” she says with passion. “Never. No. No way.”

Camp forces coexistence

Utopia begins here with smalltime all-American pleasures; baseball, Ping Pong, swimming, street hockey. With cross-cultural e-mail in mind, there is also a computer lab with eight computers and two in-house computer gurus.

Each day the kids have six activity periods and one facilitation session, says Jerry Smith, head counselor, “though I prefer to think of it all as facilitation.” Smith is the kind of intricate mix common among staff: a burly, drawling, good old boy and thoughtful, tough-talking lawyer. His pediatrician wife is camp doctor.

Says Smith flatly, “Everything, including the table where they sit, is planned. It forces them to coexist, whether they like it or not.”

He runs a tight ship: He put the boys to bed early the night before for “too much horseplay.” When he walked the bunks, he heard them talking—not of girls, but of occupied territories. He left them to it. They had work to do.

“This year we’re asking them to go to another level,” he explains. “It was feeling like, ‘I know where you stand, you know where I stand. Let’s leave it at that and play soccer all summer.’ But they are not just here for the country club. We have to convince them they can make a difference in their own lives. That’s the truth of Seeds. If we can make one Israeli and one Palestinian not hate each other, it’s a start.”

Andy Arsham, 25, echoes the take-what-you-can-get approach: “Even if they’re yelling, it’s good, as long as they’re listening.”

A graduate student in genetics, Arsham heads the baseball staff, which is him and two other happy guys in baseball caps. One is Michael Gaies, a Harvard Medical School student, who notes that the kids are savvy, but still kids.

“You forget they’re 15-year-old kids who get homesick because they’re half a world away from home,” he says. “They’re well-versed in politics, but they’re still normal teenagers who put shaving cream on sleeping bags and get goofy with the opposite sex.”

Nearby, girls string beads at a long table, swaying, Jew and Arab alike, to Palestinian music. They bend over their unsober work, intent. They also paint each other’s faces with markers, squealing: “Oh this is so cool!” Are the markers washable? One shrugs, laughs: “We take risks at Seeds of Peace.”

Sara Al-Jabari strings tiny red, blue and purple beads. A 15-year-old Palestinian who lives in Hebron, she knew no Jews until she came here last summer: “Before, I only see soldiers. Then I meet the people from Seeds. Now I love the Israelis. Noa is the best.”

Sara’s father ran a “petrol station” that the Israelis closed because it was near a mosque that was bombed. Her mother teaches. When Noa asked Sara to her house, Sara’s father, uneasy, insisted Noa would have to visit first.

Noa made the hour’s drive to Hebron. She brought Sara flowers, saw her room, met her parents.

Then Sara went to Noa’s birthday party in Jerusalem. At first, she was afraid: “Israeli house, Jewish people.” But it was great. She runs to get snapshots: she and Noa, two teenage girls, hugging, grinning, full of joy.

“It was a very good step,” she smiles. “It feels like I did something for my country. It was saying we have to do this with each other.”

Learning to compromise

The beads are a break from more rigorous, collaborative art projects—this year, a tough task. In one, kids had to draw a 360-degree landscape, relying on the vision of those on either side of them.

In another, they assembled group books portraying their hopes. Suzy Sureck, a New York City sculptor who runs the art program, says consensus has been so hard to achieve that one group of Israelis and Palestinians made four books: Book of Love and Friendship, Book of Reality and Dreams, Book of Dreams Coming True, Book of Future and Forgiveness.

This year, says Sureck, there is “more attitude … the hard truth of the difficulty of compromise.

“They come and it’s all peace and love and you’re my friend,” she says. “And then it’s hard, it’s you killed my father and my people have suffered more than yours and the Holocaust and lots of tears. Then, hopefully, they come together.”

Before lunch, they come together for lineup and announcements: soccer, baseball, dance rehearsal. The sea of green T-shirts flows to the packed dining room. They pause for a carefully inclusive grace: “For friendship, health, love and opportunity, we are thankful.” Lunch is a raucous, sandwich-scarfing, table-pounding affair, with kids veering and bouncing.

Noa, a vegetarian, attacks a mountain of salad. Next to her sits her thick biography of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, background reading for an ongoing debate with her friend Abdasallam.

This year, says Noa, the process of conciliation feels arduous, “like another step on a staircase.” She knows it is not simple, this complex weighing of outrage and faithful hope. She is full of hard-headed reality.

On life in Israel: “It’s a small country—you always know someone who’s been killed.” On a recent bombing in Jerusalem that killed three girls her age: “It’s so scary but you can’t stop living because you’re afraid.”

After the bombing, her Palestinian friends phoned her “all day, ALL DAY.” She and Sara talk in Arabic, which Noa is learning. She still wants to visit Gaza, hotbed of Palestinian discontent. All of it, she insists, can bring change.

“If two people from camp become leaders of their country,” she says, “imagine what that could do…”

Building on experience

To forget about the past and build a future, camp organizers teach kids to say “I” not “we,” to argue from experience, not history. It is sound advice for born-to-war children of opposing sides who at some point, says one, “realized we both had studied history in order to hate.”

The undoing of history is not always weighty. Near the ping-pong tables, rock’n’roll wafts from WSOP, a Seeds radio station that Palestinian Mohammed Yanez has set up. It offers profiles of peacemakers and historic analyses as well as shows on Rod Stewart, Billy Holiday and a range of rockers.

More music drifts under the trees, where women practice a cappella. They are working on a song Noa wrote: “A watchful eye, a listening ear, and a loving heart/ Are what makes two people come together, not drift apart…”

Then they practice “The Rose,” their sweet voices floating: “I say love, it is a flower, and you it’s only seed.” They struggle to pull the harmony together.

“Remember,” says one, “we are one voice.”

At home, says Sara Al-Jabari, whenever she has to do a school project, she does it about Seeds. She talks to Noa “every week, always.” But it is sometimes difficult to explain to Palestinian friends that she has Israeli friends.

They have not, after all, experienced Seeds: “They are living the reality, I don’t blame them.”

It is inevitable, Sara says, that she and Noa sometimes shout at each other in political arguments. But when they say goodbye at the airport, tears flow.

“Sometimes I feel like Noa is my sister,” she says. “If you are at Seeds, you change your thinking about the other side.”

Making dreams come true

Before supper, another lineup. The sweaty soccer players rush to jump in the lake. The rest of the kids surge toward supper. More slam-bang table-thumping.

The evening coexistence session is a circle of chairs in an empty bunk. Four Israelis, two Palestinians. Sara moves her chair across to Noa, who puts her arm around her. They are all asked to share their goals.

To try not to shout, says one. To agree about something, says one. They decide to discuss Jerusalem, a thorny issue. An Israeli boy wants to divide it. With a wall? With soldiers? They poke at the idea.

“Jerusalem is one city,” Noa protests. “It’s where I grew up. It’s a place of beauty, created for peace.”

Tremulous, Sara tells of visiting a mosque where a bomb had killed her uncle, and how frightened she was: “This is a dream, but that was the reality.” Noa, her arm still around Sara, speaks sharply to her.

“It’s your job to make it a reality,” she says. “You have to work at it.”

For an hour, the tension ebbs and flows. They decide to set up committees and issue a report. They end, agreeing it was a good session.

“I feel like everything inside me goes off,” says Sara. “I opened my heart.”

She and Noa drift off to the evening concert. Arm in arm, chattering, a fervent, newborn world unto themselves.