BY ANIL DHARKER | The American summer camp is a great institution. In their school vacations, parents send their children to these camps all over the United States where they literally camp out (in tents and things) in the Great Outdoors. In this way parents solve the problem of how to channelise their kids’ inexhaustible energy when not at school. The kids, on the other hand, learn things like living with children they don’t know, they learn self-sufficiency, they learn to adjust—basically they learn to cope.
One American adult, perhaps looking back on his own Summer Camp days, zeroed in on one phrase in the above litany of virtues: children learning to live with children they don’t know.
The adult is John Wallach, a journalist with first-hand experience of reporting the Arab-Israeli conflict. He had this radical idea: why not bring Arab and Israeli children together in an American camp? Thus was born Seeds of Peace in 1993.
This appropriately named programme began with a camp of 50 Arab-Israeli children that year in the Maine woods; seven years later the number has grown to over 400, and the regional representation at the camps has increased: Israeli, Palestinian, Egyptian, Jordanian, Moroccan, Tunisian, Qatari, Yemeni, Cypriot, Greek, Turkish and Balkan.
That’s taking in a lot of the world’s conflicts, with one notable exception.
No wonder the programme now has the support of the United Nations and world leaders like Israeli PM Ehud Barak, Yasser Arafat, President Clinton and others. This extract from a People Magazine story on Seeds of Peace conveys the flavour of what happens in these camps:
“Yasmin Mousa was frightened on her first day of camp in the Maine woods …Who could blame her, given the unfamiliar surroundings and the new faces … ? But Mousa’s worries ran deeper than the typical new camper’s. In all her life, the 15-year-old child of Palestinian refugees from Gaza had never socialised with Israelis. Even before her grandmother was killed by an Israeli solder, her Palestinian family had regarded Israelis as mortal enemies. But now, Mousa was about to share a bunkhouse—not just for a night, but for three weeks—with people she feared. ‘How can I sleep next to an Israeli girl?’ She asked herself. ‘She’s going to kill me!'”
Mousa, of course, wasn’t killed. In fact, she and her Israeli tent-mate became friends, playing games, comparing ideas on their religion, taking part in the formal conflict-resolution exercises organised by the camps where they discussed, and then discarded, their prejudices.
That, of course, is the key: the discarding of prejudices. It doesn’t always work so smoothly: recently Israelis, against camp rules, displayed their flag in a cultural presentation; Palestinians retaliated by raising their own flag. Slogans followed: in other words, the adult world of West Asia was replicated by their children in a forest in America.
But, then, who said prejudices die easily? They don’t. People die easily; and they die easily because of prejudice.
Seeds of Peace tries to get rid of the misconceptions that divide people: What an Israeli teenager finally sees is that the Arab is also a teenager like him. And if someone in the Israeli’s family has been a victim of Arab violence, someone in his new-found Arab friend’s family has been a victim of Israeli violence as well.
Why isn’t there a Seeds of Peace programme for India and Pakistan?
As it happens, as people Indians and Pakistanis are far closer to each other than other neighbours. It’s only politics and politicians who have made them feel like enemies, especially the political parties, both in India and Pakistan which thrive on hate and whose one point programme is to demonise the country across the border. These parties have been able to stop, almost completely, any non-political exchanges between the two countries: whether it’s in the field of the arts, literature, music and entertainment, or even in the field of sports, including cricket.
Luckily, satellite television jumps easily over borders, so we do get to keep in touch through our remote. What an appropriate word ‘remote’ is in the context!
And that’s something we’ve got to change through exchanges, and through programmes like Seeds of Peace. We have to do this not just for “goody-goody” reasons, but for reasons of sheer pragmatism: India’s military budget escalates every year and takes away allocations to what should be essentials, but are regarded by our planners as expendables: healthcare, education, public support programmes for the poor. Every new military boot steps on the stomach of the weak and the infirm. Every new gun takes away a class-room. Every new plane wipes away complete health care units.
That’s why we have to plant the ‘Seeds of Peace.’ And when that ‘we’ includes us and our neighbours those seeds will grow very rapidly into strong and nourishing trees.