BY LINI S. KADABA | OTISFIELD, MAINE The big news at the Seeds of Peace camp, tucked deep in the towering pines, had been the raucous pillow fight a few days earlier.
Then details of violence half a world away hit this placid spot. A young Palestinian furniture salesman on a suicide attack had rammed his car into hitchhiking Israeli soldiers, injuring 11 before police shot him to death.
In Maine, the campers—Israeli and Arab teenagers—listened. Then something astonishing—and unthinkable back home—happened.
Adi Blutner, 14, an Israeli, embraced Dena Jaber, 15, a Palestinian. To an outsider, the magnitude of the gesture, repeated throughout the camp one day last week, might be lost, but the campers understood.
“If it had been at the beginning of camp,” Adi said, “I would have gone to my Israeli friends and said, ‘See. See. Why are we even here?’ But the person that it felt right to go to was Dena.”
Adi and Dena are two of the 172 fresh-faced Israeli and Arab teenagers who have traveled 6,000 miles to the unusual Seeds of Peace camp to make friends with those who live only yards away back home. Today, as the teenagers prepared to return to the Middle East after a tour of Washington, they promised to stay in touch with enemies-turned-friends.
“They come with preconceived ideas. They have their facts ready,” said Linda Carole Pierce, a former North Philadelphia native who directs the daily rap sessions that are the heart of Seeds. “Then they find out they like the same music. They’re teenagers … You watch them grow past the fears.”
John Wallach, a former Middle East correspondent with Hearst Newspapers tired of the endless carnage, founded in 1993 the nonprofit camp, which for fiscal year 1998 had a cobbled-together budget of $1.9 million. The camp brings together teenagers from the troubled Middle East, and occasionally other conflict areas, for three weeks of bonding in the woods of Maine. (Private donations cover the $2,500 per-camper cost.)
This could never happen in the Middle East. It takes an idyllic and neutral location. It takes this haven on Pleasant Lake near Portland, the old boyhood camp—Powhatan—of real-estate developer Bob Toll, who bought the place a few years ago with his wife, Jane, a board member of Seeds, to save it from development.
“It’s the old NIMBY business—not in my backyard,” laughingly said Bob Toll, who built himself a home along the lake.
In 1997, the Tolls of Solebury, in Bucks County, agreed to lease the camp property, rent-free for now, to Seeds, which was looking for a long-term home for its camp. The Tolls also raise funds for the camp.
“Here you have people who are brought up to intensely dislike someone else,” the chairman of Toll Brothers Inc., the Huntingdon Valley real estate company, said. “Now you bring them into an environment [where] … you’re playing football, baseball, soccer, and all of a sudden it becomes more important to live with that person.”
Such moments happen often once the campers, who must sleep, eat and do just about everything in mixed nationality groups, clear the initial hurdles of prejudice, distrust, even hatred. Sure, they come wanting peace, these mostly middle-class children picked by their governments to fill the 450 prized slots in the Seeds programs. But peace, it turns out, means many things.
“Our history books don’t say the same thing,” one camper said.
Jane Toll, who often bikes over from the lake house, has learned that lesson.
“I used to try to figure out an answer—who’s right and who’s wrong,” she said recently. “They’re both right.”
Of course, it is one thing to reach that spot intellectually, and it is quite another to sleep in a bunk next to someone known as the enemy of your people for generations.
“We don’t try to divorce them from the real world here,” Wallach said. “What we’re trying to do is get individuals, human beings, to begin to care for each other … to have some compassion for each other.”
Wallach, who is Jewish, has written with his wife, Janet, a biography of Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat.
“It’s all about the enemy has a face,” he said. “It’s all about breaking the barriers of fear.”
That’s why a hug between an Israeli and a Palestinian is such a big deal. That’s why every camp activity carries enormous meaning, whether it is climbing a wall and trusting your safety to the other side, or building a sculpture that reflects both sides’ suffering, or competing in that camp ritual, the color wars—recast here as the color games, for obvious reasons—or even sharing a tube of toothpaste with a bunkmate.
“Maybe I can’t see the side of Palestinians because I’m Israeli,” Adi said at one rap session. “But I tried to,” she said in English, the language of the camp. “If I was Palestinian—and this is so hard for me to say because I feel I’m betraying my country—but I’d probably do the same.”
She sat in an uneasy circle with nine other Arab and Israeli 14- and 15-year-olds in the Nature Hut. All around the camp, groups of teens gathered for 90 minute coexistence sessions, the frank, often-heated discussion of the very issues stymieing peace negotiators back home.
Typically, when the Israelis and Arabs begin, they are at odds over, you name it, the West Bank, water rights, Israeli settlements, each side practically competing over who has suffered more. Imprisonment. Bombs. The intifadah. The Holocaust. But by the end, the teens shake hands over real agreements.
“All of us had this thing in ourselves, to make friends with the other side, to achieve something that our leaders could not,” said Shirin Hanafieh, 18, of Jordan, who has returned for a third summer, this time as a peer leader. “The way it works here, you wish this was the real world.”
But even here, peace isn’t always so neat. Adi’s group, Group G, has struggled from the start. Old disputes that have plagued the Middle East for decades continue to simmer, and sessions have ended with mean words, even tears. Some of the hurt spills over into late-night conversations. That’s why facilitators walk the bunk lines.
This evening was no different. Group G grappled with the suicide attack. One moment, Adi conceded much—just the type of compassion that Seeds hopes to sow. The next, the gulf between Israeli and Arab loomed as wide as Pleasant Lake.
The violence, she said, “makes me want peace, to stop the terrorist acts.”
That offended the Arab campers.
“That is not called a terrorist act,” shouted Mofeed Ismail, 15, a Palestinian whose cousin was killed by Israeli soldiers. To the Arabs, the suicide attacker was a freedom fighter whose own family had suffered at Israeli hands.
“I’m very sad about today, but he was not from Hamas,” Mofeed said, “and he had his reasons.”
That offended the Israelis.
“OK, he was a freedom fighter. But you know … soldiers were injured. They could be my friends,” said Israeli Alexandra Koganov, 15.
The firestorm blazed, until facilitator Liat Marcus Gross, an Israeli working with Palestinian facilitator Farhat Agbaria, tried to put it out.
“You said earlier what happened made you want to make peace,” she said, calmly. “You are not making peace right now.”
If camp seems hard, the return home is harder. There the struggle for peace begins with friends and parents. Many encounter taunts of traitor, or worse, because they have befriended the other side.
Palestinian Zeina Jallad, 16, on her second visit to Seeds, describes a most ordinary, but extraordinary, friendship. Since the last camp session, she had invited her best camp friend, an Israeli girl, to her home. But in the Middle East, all that has happened before weighs very heavily, and Zeina’s family was wary at first.
“It was very hard to have the enemy in your house,” said Zeina, who has seen her father imprisoned, and uncles and cousins, and who has had three relatives “martyred.”
“But, we are accepting it,” she said of the successful visit. “I want to go forward, without forgetting what happened.”
To that end, Seeds of Peace gives campers an e-mail address that allows what has sprouted here to bloom there despite the harsh words, the checkpoints and borders. Often camp friendships grow to include families and schoolmates. Middle East camp alumni also report and edit the English-language newspaper the Olive Branch, and last year a youth summit was held in Villars, Switzerland. This fall, Seeds will open a center in Jerusalem, where alumni—more than 1,400 Israelis and Arabs—will gather.
Back at the Nature Hut, Group G had fallen apart. To cool down, the group divided into Arabs and Israelis—the Arabs speaking Arabic, the Israelis speaking Hebrew. After 30 minutes, they came together.
Said Adi: “Now, I understand the goals of Seeds of Peace. It’s not to make peace between us, politically. It’s to make friends. We leave this place as true friends.”
Said Mofeed: “I agree.”