BY LESLIE CHESS FELLER | There are laughter and tears, playful roughhousing and intense debate-just as you would find in any group of teens enjoying summer sports and heart-to-heart camaraderie—only these kids are the sons and daughters of enemies—and the future may lie in their hands.
“My daughter attended an Israeli-Palestinian peace camp last year in Maine,” Saeb Erekat, senior Palestinian negotiator, told the Wall Street Journal in January 1998. Erekat added that when floods hit his home town of Jericho, none of his Israeli counterparts called to ask how his family was doing, but 21 Israeli kids immediately contacted his daughter. “Every single one of the kids from that camp called Dalal to see if she was O.K. This is the future.”
For the past seven summers Israelis and Arabs, ages 13 to 17, have come to the Maine woods “to make peace with the enemy” at the Seeds of Peace International Camp in Otisfield. After a three-week period, the young people and their delegation leaders emerge uplifted from the often difficult process. They arrived separated by allegiance and religion, but sharing the bond of growing up shadowed by war. They leave united in their determination to build a better future.
At first glance, it looks like any other summer camp. Under towering pines, shrieks of laughter mix with birdsong and a bugle announces lunch. The dining hall resounds with syncopated table-thumping as green-shirted campers express their disdain for the blue “bug juice” and mystery meat du jour. The uproar ceases briefly while grace is said: “For friendship, health, love and opportunity, we are thankful.” The carefully worded prayer sets the stage for the difficult work ahead.
Later that afternoon, Anna Tunkel, an Israeli Jew from Ashdod, listens while Nizar Al-Wasir, a Palestinian from Gaza, describes the death of his uncle, Khalil, a leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization, killed by Israeli commandos in 1988. “I was six and I woke up and heard my mother screaming,” he says, pain in his voice. “My mother’s never talked to an Israeli … but she wants me to.”
“We’re friends even though we see certain things differently,” Tunkel says. She pointed out that Al-Wasir’s mother, who works for the ministry of education in Gaza as director general of students, made sure he was selected to come to Seeds of Peace. “She put her feelings aside because she wants her son to have a different life.” “We must stop the killing,” Al-Wasir says. “Now I think, ‘it could be my friend Anna on that bus.'”
After the World Trade Center bombing in 1993, John Wallach, former foreign editor for Hearst Newspapers and son of Holocaust survivors, felt compelled to wage peace. “I went to leaders I’d come to know while covering the Middle East,” Wallach explains. “I asked them to trust me with their children, to help me give the next generation a chance to escape the poison.” The late Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, PLO chairman Yasser Arafat and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak all responded. Forty-five English-speaking Arab and Israeli teenagers attended Seeds of Peace that year.
In 1999, the program welcomed 435 campers for three sessions. The third, sponsored by a chapter of the Jewish federation and held in Kent, Connecticut, was an experiment to see if the program could be run in a different location. In an environment that lets them see the enemy has a face, campers learn to listen even if they don’t like what’s being said. “Our idea of winning is to see them able to take the other side’s point of view and argue it effectively,” says facilitator Linda Carole Pierce, one of a hand-picked and ethnically diverse team of conflict-resolution experts. In daily and often tumultuous “coexistence” sessions, confrontation and the sharing of pain soon lead to empathy and friendships with the potential to affect the course of history. Delegations come from Israel, the Palestine National Authority, Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Qatar, Tunisia, Cyprus, Greece and the United States. Each formally represents its government. The program, which received a UNESCO Peace Prize in 1996 and was the subject of a CBS 60 Minutes segment, has graduated nearly 1,500 “seeds” and more than 70 delegation leaders.
The latter, whose program parallels that of the campers, are already in positions of leadership, usually in ministries of education. “I arrived not knowing what to expect,” says Ron Zohar, an Israeli who is head of Scouts in Afula. “I am now feeling very hopeful.” Zohar and Hanaa Herzalla, a Palestinian delegation leader who is principal of a girls’ elementary school near Jenin, left camp planning on working together to spread the message. “Afula and Jenin are only 20 miles apart,” says Zohar. “We’re arranging meetings between the kids and their families.” “They will come to us and we will welcome them,” says Herzalla, adding that this was the first time she had ever met Israelis face to face.
“My name is Ibrahim and I am ice,” says a 15-year-old Palestinian at his first coexistence session. It didn’t take long for the ice to melt. “I thought Israelis are enemies of Palestinians so I had to be ice and not get upset,” he explains a week later, flashing the easy smile that made him a leader of the Kent session. Arm in arm with Israeli Eitan Moss, one of his closest friends, Ibrahim’s smile vanishes as he describes his anger three years ago when a relative was shot by Israeli soldiers. “At first, I just wanted to kill the guy who did that; then I thought, we will all go on murdering each other and what good will that do?” (Ibrahim’s family name is being withheld for security reasons.) “I have three older brothers,” says 15-year-old Moss, whose parents settled in Sinai and then were forced to leave. “My family is very right wing, but not because of religion. It’s about defense. My father fought in two wars. There are things he cannot forget. I always had a brother in the army. We worried all the time and my mother would cry when anyone got killed.” In the last election, though, his father voted for Ehud Barak. “Before I come to camp,” Moss says, “even my father tells me to go make peace.”
The two hadn’t spoken to each other on the plane, nor on the bus coming to camp-even though they had to sit next to each other. Then they found themselves at the same table in the dining hall, in the same coexistence group and bunk. “We stayed up late at night talking,” Ibrahim recalls, “emotional, personal stuff…you just go deep and you feel so close.” The two agreed they have to face the facts and find a compromise.
“These are extraordinary young people, tomorrow’s presidents and prime ministers,” asserts Wallach, an inspirational presence whether shouting “Good morning, Seeds!” at the 7:30 prebreakfast lineup or singing 60’s peace songs at evening campfire. “Every morning I say, ‘Go out and make just one friend from the other side.’ I have faith in these kids. They have the power to wake up the world.”
Arabs and Israelis, some initially terrified to sleep in the same room, soon share everything from toothpaste to bunk chores. “We don’t serve pork,” explains camp director Tim Wilson, “because both Jews and Muslims don’t eat it.” Meals can be kosher if required. Although everyone wears the Seeds of Peace green T-shirt with its olive-branch logo, the religious might choose a long-sleeved shirt and jeans instead of shorts. Some Muslim girls wear a head covering called a hejab, some Jewish boys the traditional skullcap.
Romance is forbidden, but hugs are encouraged. Historic enemies attend each other’s religious services, compose camp songs and whisper to each other after lights-out. On a steep climbing wall, a Palestinian holds the rope for an Israeli and vice versa. They play tennis, baseball and soccer as teammates. Competition reaches fever pitch during color games, instead of the usual color “war.” The winning team gets to jump in the lake first, their victory even sweeter for being immediately shared by the other side.
When violence erupts in the Middle East, campers and staff struggle through the aftermath. With the guidance of skilled facilitators, painful incidents can trigger the sort of catharsis that heals. In July 1997, a Hamas bomb attack on a Jerusalem market killed 15 Israelis and threw camp into turmoil. “It was terrible,” says Reem Kaldowy, a Palestinian who lives in Israel, “but in a strange way that bomb united us.” As Israelis cried and raced for the phones to make sure their families were okay, Arab friends stood behind them, equally shaken, trying to offer reassurance. Recalling how she ran to find her best friend, Mira Knyazhitsky, Kaldowy says, “We cried together.”
When two Jewish students were murdered in Megiddo last summer, an Israeli girl left her coexistence group distraught. “It breaks my heart,” says Tamar Bukaya, “so I go to cry by myself and then Rima from Jordan came to find me. She say everyone feels bad like I do.”
“There are tears,” Wallach says, “but they are perhaps the most hopeful sign of all. To be unafraid to cry in front of each other, to be so vulnerable and so human, that’s what draws them together.”
At one session, a coexistence group exploded in reaction to plastic world globes used unwittingly as table centerpieces at a dinner following former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s visit to the camp. The globes showed Palestine as a nation bordering Israel. “It is not a state yet,” says Mor Lankry, an Israeli from Moshav Devora, trying to explain her delegation’s anger. “It will be when peace is negotiated. But for now the world does not recognize a country called Palestine-which makes the globes wrong.” Her best friend Asmaa Maloul, a Palestinian from Jenin, led the chorus of furious replies. “Palestine was existing for hundreds of years before the Israelis came! It was our homeland always!” The verbal battle raged for an hour until interrupted by the facilitator who initiated an exercise to show how to argue successfully. As in all activities, Israeli is partnered with Arab. Lankry and Maloul sit side by side, engaged in intense but no longer hostile discussion. They leave the session together, still talking.
After the governments negotiate a treaty, the two girls agreed, real peace will depend on people from both sides realizing they are all human beings. “At camp, I met the enemy,” Lankry says. “Her name is Asmaa and now she is my friend. She is just like me. We’re teenagers. We like the same music and sports. We love our families. We all want peace.”
The girls intend to continue their friendship back home. “What happens after camp is so important,” says Sami Al-Jundi, an Israeli Arab from East Jerusalem who is a Seeds of Peace regional coordinator. “We are very careful, but it’s worth it when you see Israeli and Palestinian families welcome each other to their homes.” This past October more than 500 graduates joined diplomats from around the world to celebrate the opening of a year-round Seeds of Peace Center in East Jerusalem. The building was chosen because it straddles the old border between Arab and Jewish sectors. Israeli and Palestinian teenagers can now meet on home turf to publish The Olive Branch, a quarterly newspaper; participate in coexistence sessions; and take classes in subjects ranging from culture to computers. “What we did at camp, it changes you so deep,” says Asel Asleh, an Israeli Arab from the Galilee, “to believe maybe we can make a difference. It’s like music to my spirit and food to my mind.”
In May 1998, Dalal Erekat was one of 75 16-year-old Seeds who participated in the world’s first Middle East Youth Summit held in Villars, Switzerland. At the end of an intense week, the teenagers produced and endorsed a peace accord that addressed all the major issues. The Charter of Villars was formally presented to each of the leaders in the region by United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan.
When Saeb Erekat was his daughter’s age, he says, he was “throwing stones at Israeli vehicles, demonstrating and fighting.” With her friends from Seeds of Peace, Dalal Erekat is working to create a different future.
Leslie Chess Feller, a freelance writer living in Weston, Connecticut, is a recent National Federation of Press Women award winner.