Arab, Israeli boys meet, talk, play
BY DENISE GOODMAN | OTISFIELD, MAINE Forty-six Israeli and Arab boys here are pursuing a goal here that has eluded their forebearers for decades—peace.
John Wallach, Hearst newspapers foreign editor, said he launched this Seeds of Peace project just four months ago following the World Trade Center bombing in New York.
“Something had to be done to respond to that kind of hate and terrorism,” he said. It made sense, he said, to work with youths aged 11 to 14 “before they were poisoned by the climate of their own region.”
The youngsters were selected by their respective governments and members of the Palestinian negotiating team to the Mideast peace talks.
Help from an airline and Camp Powhatan and $85,000 in foundation and individual contributions helped finance the program, Wallach said.
Early in their three-week stay at the camp, leaders modified the program recognizing that while youngsters may be more resilient than their elders, the and resentment they’ve already absorbed makes even youthful peace-making difficult.
In initial “coexistence” discussions aimed at helping the boys explore their feelings, raw wounds of age-old antagonisms quickly were exposed. (Because that session was so emotional, leaders asked that participants’ real names not be used.)
Moshe, an Israeli, spoke out in reaction to a swastika-like doodle on a drawing of another Israeli camper. “The people that carried that symbol. They killed my family,” he said.
And when other Israeli youngsters talked about the six million Jews killed in the Holocaust, Abdul, a Palestinian teenager, shot back, “the numbers you have are wrong.” His subsequent plea—that Israeli boys understand that “you are missing your families from 50 years ago” while his relatives are being killed today—was lost in the Israelis’ anger and frustration at Abdul’s denial of the extent of the Holocaust.
“I told John to back off for a few days, I want them to begin to care about each other,” Camp Powhatan owner Joel Bloom said later. Bloom, who earned the first doctorate in education focusing on camping from Columbia Teachers College 47 years ago, said the approach was too confrontational.
“Just relax and let kids do what they do best,” agreed Dr. Stan Walzer, a Boston child psychologist. Camp here, as he watched—shortly after the outburst—Palestinian and Israeli youngsters together on a ball diamond, learning the fine points of fielding and throwing.
Bloom told facilitators to put a positive spin on discussions and quickly eased back into the sessions.
“That was the cathartic moment,” Wallach said of Tuesday’s emotional encounter. “After that, everybody opened up. And the biggest change is in those who came with the most anger.”
By week’s end, Wallach said, Abdul was poring over a book on the Holocaust, sometimes in tears.
When Joshua, an Israeli boy, encountered the Egyptian youth whose swastika-like doodle touched off Tuesday’s stormy session, the Egyptian boy said he “didn’t mean anything by it, and I forgave him,” Joshua said. And, leaders said, politics and history took a back seat to team loyalty as ethnically mixed bunkmates competed, cabin against cabin, in baseball, basketball, and soccer.
“There are three agendas here,” noted Barbara Gottschalk, Seeds of Peace associate director.
Bloom and camp co-director Tim Wilson want the youngsters to enjoy the camp and get to know each other, she said. Co-existence leaders, who run similar programs for Arab and Israeli youngsters in Israel, want the kids to understand each other’s pain and find paths to peace.
Striking the right balance among the three goals required some fine-tuning, leaders and campers acknowledged last week.
“We’ve got state departments that can’t control number 2 (peace making),” Wilson said. “All I can do is hope one kid will look at another and say, ‘Hey, he’s not bad.’”
Still, “We want to find real peace, not just camping,” offered Aboud, an Arab Israeli of the Druze faith, who quickly became friends with Dror, a Jewish Israeli.
As in the real world of Middle East diplomacy, Wallach said, some of the Egyptian youths have taken on the role of mediator here. Mahmoud, a 13-year-old Egyptian, attributed the early tensions to what the boys have learned from their parents. “The Israelis tell their children, ‘This is your land.’ Palestinians tell their children, ‘This is your land.’” “Before the camp, they told us we’re not coming here to talk about the past. All the countries are having war now because they talk about their past,” Mahmoud added.
Sari, a 15-year-old Palestinian from Jerusalem, acknowledged that before he joined the Seeds of Peace delegation, “I hated Israelis. I even hated Israeli girls.” That has changed, he said, since he found “there are many kids who treat me like a human being.”
A few minutes later he gave a high-five greeting to Assaf, a Jewish Israeli teenager whose father was killed a decade ago by terrorists.
Assaf said he is not bitter, although he said it will be hard to convince his Jewish friends at home “that it’s easy to make friends (with Palestinians). I tried and they didn’t, so there’s no reason they’ll want to believe me,” he said.
Most of the youths here seemed to agree with Nidal, a 14-year-old Israeli, who said, “If we live together here, we will show our leaders that we can live together.”