Children are talking peace in the woods of Maine.
BY JERRY SMITH | At Camp Seeds of Peace, about 20 miles west of Portland, 175 Jewish and Muslim teenagers are living together “as one nation” in a camp under the Seeds of Peace flag. The teens are from Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Morocco, Palestine, Qatar and Tunisia, and unlike many adults in their homelands, they’re finding ways to resolve conflict without bombs, bullets or stones.
I spent more than a week teaching table tennis and listening to the young people at the camp, where my son is head counselor. The teens split their days between recreation and attending what are called “coexistence sessions.”
In the sessions, the Arab and Israeli teens learn skills that they draw upon while they live, play and work together each day.
This is not easy for these young people, who have been taught prejudice by adults and by life experiences, such as the recent bombing in Israel and the offensive paintings on th wall at a Muslim mosque in Palestine.
The camp began five years ago as the embodiment of the vision of John Wallach, who left a 30—year career in journalism to become president of the privately funded Seeds of Peace. During my visit to camp, one morning before breakfast I talked about the program with this ambassador of peace, who told me much about the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict. He was enlightening with dates and events from 1000 B.C. to 1997, ranging from the impact of the Roman Empire, the birth of Mohammad in 636 A.D., British and French control after World War I, the effects of World War II and the Holocaust, the United Nations land treaty in 1948, the Arab and Israeli wars, and the ongoing initiatives by Arabs and Israelis for peace.
At the flag—raising ceremony on the opening day of the camp, I listened as Wallach told the assembly, “This is the first day you are standing together. No where else in the world are your people standing together in peace this way. You are here to show your people that there is a better way.”
At another meeting he told campers, whose ranks included a nephew of Palestinian president Yassar Arafat and a cousin of Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netan Yahu, “You are here to think for yourself. You are not here to represent your government.”
At a news conference with the Maine press, Wallach told reporters about the focus of Seeds of Peace: “It’s a sensitizing process here for the kids. We teach them how to listen, how to respect one another. It is back to the basics, almost like a detoxification process.”
Returning home from the peace camp, where several days earlier I witnessed Arab and Israeli teenagers walking with their arms around each other, I was broken-hearted to hear about the bombing in Jerusalem.
The suffering and loss that the children had talked about in the coexistence sessions seemed more real now. It was easier to understand what the teens meant when they said that they distrusted compromise but feared the no—compromise attitude of conservative elements from both sides.
I empathize with the teenagers. They hardly have time to be children before they must face the cultural, political and ethnic conflicts in their homeland.
I went to Maine to teach table tennis to children from the Middle East and to spend time with my eldest son. Thanks to a tip from a Moroccan teenager, I am a better table tennis player; however, my greatest satisfaction is that those Arab and Israeli children will take seeds of peace planted in America and transplant them to Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Morocco, Palestine, Qatar, Tunisia and other countries in the Middle East.
One day these seeds will bear the fruits of peace in the land where Elijah, Mohammad and Christ once walked. Then the people of that land will walk as the children did at camp—with their arms around one another.