Seeds of Peace grads carry on
BY BRUCE KATZ | On Friday night, the people who gathered for Shabbat services at Kensington’s Temple Emanuel, a Reform Congregation, heard something they hadn’t heard in a very long time: reasons to be hopeful about the future of the Middle East.
In a voice filled with passion and conviction, guest speaker Bobbie Gottschalk, executive vice-president of Seeds of Peace, told them about Israeli and Arab teenagers getting to know and understand each other as people instead of as “the enemy.”
This is no mean feat, Gottschalk reminded her audience. “More people in the Middle East—on all sides—are being trained for war than for peace. Generations of Arabs and Israelis have grown up knowing nothing but fear, mistrust, and hatred of each other.”
How does one begin to break this cycle? First, she said, you try to influence the shape of the future by talking to those who will inhabit it—the children. Second, you limit your objectives to what is possible: “our goal is not to make peace, but to get the teens to really listen to each other.”
This summer, the fifth since Seeds of Peace was formed, provided powerful evidence of how challenging these goals are, given the current situation in the Middle East. It also showed that the effort is worth every second of doubt, anxiety and tears.
Seeds of Peace brings teens from the Middle East to rural Maine where they spend several weeks living together, engaging in sports, theatre and Internet instruction, and learning “co-existence” skills. The boys and girls come from diverse backgrounds: Israel, Palestinian controlled territories, Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Qatar; they are Jews, Muslims, Christians, Druze; Russian immigrants; they are religious and secular, their homes rich and powerful, settlements and refugee camps.
For most of the kids, Gottschalk said, the experience of being face to face with “the enemy” is like being on an emotional roller coaster. There is a day or so of normal wariness at the beginning, after which everything feels very easy. The teens have fun together, become teammates, sing, dance—in short, they do what teenagers everywhere do, and they find themselves wondering why peace seems to be so difficult for their parents to achieve.
At this point, when the kids start to become comfortable with each other, life at camp suddenly gets very hard, Gottschalk said. “This is when the kids begin to really open up to one another, and what they have to say is not always very pleasant. They talk about family members and friends who have been maimed or killed. They talk about the lessons they’ve been learning all their lives about how terrible the other side is and how none of them can be trusted. It is at this stage that the stereotypes and preconceptions begin to crack and real communication begins.”
The breakthroughs made in Maine seem to survive the trip back home. Most of the teens who have attended the Seeds of Peace camp (they call themselves “graduates”) continue to stay in touch with each other via e-mail, regular mail, phone calls and even visits.
This past summer, however, tested the program in an entirely new way. Ten days into the session, a bomb went off in an open market in Jerusalem. Never before had there been a terrorist incident while the camp was in session. The counselors had to let the campers know what had happened, of course, but how would the kids respond? Would everything fall apart?
News of the bombing brought shock and tears from the Israeli children who feared family members or friends might have been casualties. The Palestinian teens, for their part, were stunned, knowing that Hamas had claimed responsibility for the blast. The counselors feared the worst. But then the Palestinians made the first move. Spontaneously, they crossed the room to hug the Israelis and express their feelings of sorrow and guilt. The Israelis in turn accepted their friends’ sympathy, reassuring them that it was not their friends’ fault. The rest of the day, Gottschalk said, was spent with the kids supporting each other.
The summer session ended well, Gottschalk told the people at Temple Emanuel, with the kids expressing their feelings through music, poetry, art, and sculpture. But her story didn’t end there, for within a few weeks of the children’s return to the Middle East, another bomb went off in Jerusalem, this time in a place well-known as a hangout for Israeli teenagers. Immediately, Gottschalk said, e-mail went flying back and forth among the camp graduates and Arab campers wrote to see if their Jewish friends were hurt and to condemn the outrage. She read excerpts from the letters to the congregants.
In language that made many in the audience grow teary-eyed, Israeli and Arab children talked about how hard it was to be back home, how frustrated and confused they felt at the continued violence and the friends who refused to listen to their stories about their experiences in Maine. But they also talked about the successes they’ve had in opening up other people’s minds and the hope they still feel.
“I’m optimistic about these kids,” Gottschalk said. “No one will ever again be able to tell them that all Israelis hate us and that all Palestinians are bad. But most kids there have never known peace …”
She paused. “My hope is that one day some of the kids who have been through Seeds of Peace will be the leaders of their countries, and they won’t hesitate when the time comes to shake someone’s hand in peace.”