JERUSALEM | When Yona Kaplan met Palestinian Hiba Eweiwi at a summer camp in Maine last year, the 15-year-old Israeli beamed at the prospect of making a cross-border friend.
Her goal for attending the two-week camp, sponsored by Seeds of Peace, a high-powered philanthropy that brings teens from war-torn regions together, was to put political differences aside and sow friendships across the Israeli-Palestinian divide. Eweiwi, a bouncy Christian with a British accent, seemed the perfect pal.
But since the girls returned home—Kaplan to Jerusalem, Eweiwi to Bethlehem in the West Bank—they have not seen each other once, though they live a mere 30-minute drive apart. For eight months, they have watched the bombs and gun battles of the Palestinian uprising from opposing sides.
“I call her on the phone sometimes,” said Kaplan, a bubbly girl with brown pigtails tied in white elastic bands. “She tells me, `Today I heard an explosion’ or, `There were gunshots today.’ ”
Separated at home, the two girls will not meet at camp this summer either.
Despite a shaky cease-fire worked out last week by CIA director George Tenet, the Seeds of Peace program has become a casualty of the violence. Both Israeli and Palestinian officials say the atmosphere is too acrimonious to bother with peace initiatives, and both sides have refused to send their teen-agers to the camp.
“It’s a protest against the Israeli aggression against our people,” said Numan Sharif of the Palestinian Ministry of Education who oversees Palestinian participation in the program.
He added, “It’s difficult to send our kids when it’s like a war here. How can we participate when Israel is killing our people and causing us to suffer?”
Hadara Rosenblum, an Israeli Ministry of Education official who directs her country’s participation in the program, said, “We got a lot of negative feelings about going to the camp.”
She added, “Some of the parents and some of the kids and some of the teachers say, `How can we trust the Palestinians?’ Until the atmosphere becomes a little bit more positive, we are not sending the kids.”
Founded by John Wallach, an American author and journalist, the Seeds of Peace program has been bringing Israeli and Arab youths from 10 countries in the Middle East to summer camps in Portland, Maine, since 1993.
The teen-agers play field hockey and learn archery. Some water ski and put on plays. All sleep in wood cabins and participate in “dialogues” on coexistence where they discuss how they see the conflict and the “enemy” on the other side.
Over the years, young people from other troubled regions around the globe—including the Balkans, India and Pakistan, and the divided island of Cyprus—have joined in, and the program has received praise from world leaders and strong backing from the White House, particularly during the years of Bill Clinton’s presidency.
“The experience definitely does change opinions,” said Adam Shapiro, the Seeds for Peace director in Jerusalem who worked with teens at the camp in 1998. “Simply living at camp with someone who is supposed to be your enemy—afraid to go to sleep at night because you think they might stab you—it certainly breaks down stereotypes.”
But Shapiro admits that the Middle East program has hit troubled times.
Before the Israeli Ministry of Education pulled its support, it sent out 200 letters to teens who had been to the camp asking whether they would be interested in returning. Only 58 responded, according to Rosenblum. Fifty-two showed up for interviews.
“Dialogue programs are not popular right now or seen as very useful,” Shapiro said. “With the violence going on, they’re just not seen in a favorable light.”
With no official Israeli support, Shapiro said the program decided to independently sponsor teen-agers who had been to the Maine camp and who were willing to participate again. No first-time campers were considered. So far, about 40 Israelis have signed up to go.
Kaplan is one of them.
Despite the government’s reservations, she feels her experience has had a positive effect on her and her classmates. She has even persuaded some of her friends that the Palestinians have a valid point of view.
“Some of them didn’t take it very well. They said, `Look at what the Palestinians are doing,’ ” she said. “I try to tell them that not all of them are bad.
“I can understand the anger that Palestinians have.”
Since the Palestinian uprising erupted last September, Tamer Shabaneh, a 16-year-old Palestinian, has spent many days huddled in a room in his West Bank home listening to the boom of Israeli tank fire echoing through the hills outside.
On safer days, he takes a small video recorder to a nearby Israeli army post or to the center of Hebron, where stone-throwing clashes often erupt between Palestinians and Israeli soldiers, and films the scene.
One day, he hopes to show the footage to his Israeli friend, Sergei Kazanovich, whom Shabaneh met at a Seeds for Peace camp last year.
So far, he hasn’t had the chance.
One Israeli military order forbids Israelis from entering Palestinian-ruled towns in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Another one requires Palestinians to obtain a military permit, which Shabaneh doesn’t have, to enter Israel.
It would be easier, Shabaneh says, for the two friends to meet in Maine than in the Middle East. But like all Palestinians, Shabaneh does not plan to return to the camp this year.
“It was a very good opportunity to know the other face of Israelis,” he said. “But in this political situation, I truly can’t go. I just can’t disrespect how people feel about having contact with Israelis.”
Kaplan said she is disappointed that Palestinians won’t participate. For her, meeting people from the West Bank and Gaza helped break down barriers.
“I didn’t see Arabs as people,” she said. “Now I can see their point of view.”
Now more than ever, she said, young people should meet.
“I don’t think it is contradictory to go to camp when the violence is happening,” Kaplan said. “I think especially in times like these, we need to have the camp.”
Read Deborah Horan’s article at The Houston Chronicle »