The Israeli and Palestinian teen-agers looked slightly dazed as they boarded buses at Kennedy International Airport, heading for Kent, Conn. They had just spent 12 hours on an airplane, jammed elbow-to-elbow in coach seats. Despite different allegiances, languages and religions, all shared the bond of growing up with terrorism, their daily lives shadowed by the threat of war.
For the first time since it started in 1993, Seeds of Peace, recipient of a 1997 UNESCO Peace Prize, has left its base camp in Otisfield, Me. to hold a two-week session in Connecticut. Last Sunday, 64 Arab and Israeli teen-agers, ages 14 to 17, arrived at Kenmont/Kenwood Camp to participate in the Partnership 2000 Summer Peace Camp.
Partnership 2000 links the region of Afula-Gilboa in Israel to nine Connecticut Jewish Federations. The Kent campers come from Afula-Gilboa, the Palestinian village of Jenin and the Jordanian town of Salt.
“These kids live less than 20 miles apart, but are separated by a chasm of mutual mistrust and fear,” said Rob Zwang, executive director of the Jewish Federation of Greater Waterbury and Northwestern Connecticut, which is sponsoring the camp.
John Wallach, the founder of Seeds of Peace and a resident of Washington Depot, is a former journalist and author of books on the Middle East. After the World Trade Center bombing in 1993, Mr. Wallach said he felt compelled to wage peace as vigorously as other people wage war.
“Seeds of Peace is a serious conflict-resolution program, not a sing-a-song, plant-a-tree-and-call-it-peace camp,” he said.
The camp provides an environment that helps kids see that the other side has a face.
“When you live together, you learn you have so much in common,” said Hilly Hirt, 16, an Israeli whose “best friend for life” is a Palestinian she met at her first Seeds of Peace session in 1996. “I don’t think of her as a Palestinian anymore,” Ms. Hirt said. “We are like sisters.”
Arabs and Israelis share bunk chores and tables in the dining hall, play fierce Frisbee games and compete in soccer, baseball and basketball as teammates. On a steep climbing wall, a Palestinian holds the rope for an Israeli and vice versa. They attend each other’s religious services, compose camp songs and whisper after lights-out. They might even short-sheet a bed or two. Camp life becomes the glue that, along with conflict resolution sessions, cements friendships.
Asel Asleh, 16, a Seeds of Peace graduate in 1997 from the Galilee, calls himself “an ex-Palestinian, currently an Arab Israeli.” Mr. Asleh described feeling like a stranger in his own land.
“My father was in political prison for five years and I have lost many friends,” he said, adding that it is an Arab Israeli’s duty to be involved, “to go out to riots, to talk, to argue.”
Still, Mr. Asleh said camp opened his eyes. “I see that person playing baseball against me. He is not an enemy. His people maybe did many mistakes, but he is my friend and that’s what is important.”
The Arab and Israeli delegations are chosen by their governments and composed of English-speaking teen-agers who often arrive with strongly held opinions. “It’s so much more important to turn kids like that around,” Mr. Wallach said. “These are extraordinary young people, tomorrow’s leaders. I tell them, I don’t care what you think, but I want the ideas to be your own. I want you to listen to the other side and realize they are human beings, too.”
David Sermer, 14, of Watertown is one of 10 Connecticut teen-agers chosen to be a host-delegate. “I’m ready to listen to both sides,” he said.
“The job of the Americans is to be neutral, a buffer, which is what the United States is supposed to be in foreign policy,” said the camp director, Timothy Wilson, who was once a school teacher and football coach. Mr. Wilson’s ethnically diverse team of counselors leads campers step-by-step through confrontation and the sharing of pain to empathy, reconciliation and friendship.
At camp, Arab sleeps next to Israeli, a reality that makes the first night difficult. Heba Kwaik, a 15 year-old Palestinian from Gaza, said she was petrified. “I didn’t realize Israeli girls would be sleeping in the same room. I was sure I’d be dead in the morning.”
Dr. Stanley Walzer, 70, the camp psychiatrist and the campers’ unofficial grandfather, said, “The kids arrive frightened, many of them very homesick.”
Campers gradually relax in an environment sensitive to individual and cultural needs. Meals are kosher. Everyone wears the Seeds of Peace green T-shirt with its olive branch logo. The religious, either Muslim or Jewish, might choose a long-sleeved shirt and jeans instead of shorts. Some Muslim girls wear head coverings, religious Jewish boys the yarmulke. “Most kids wear the same stuff Americans do,” Mr. Wilson said, “the drop-down pants, the caps turned sideways.”
Although romance at the camp is forbidden, hugs are encouraged as confirmation of friendship. Whenever campers hear that an Arab or Israeli is killed as a result of the Middle East conflict, campers and staff share a minute of silence.
“There are tears, but they are perhaps the most hopeful sign of all,” Mr. Wallach said. “To be unafraid to cry in front of each other, to be so vulnerable and so human, that’s ultimately what draws them together.”
Carole Naggar, an Egyptian Jew and artist-in-residence for the Kent session, pointed to a stack of Middle Eastern newspapers brought from home by the campers at her request. “We’re going to grind all the negative headlines into a pulp,” she said. “The kids are going to destroy all the bad images: the Palestinians throwing stones, the Israelis shooting Arabs and make clean, new paper.”
The campers use the pulp to make the new paper and a very long scroll is emerging day by day. By next Saturday, the end of the session, every camper will have contributed a drawing, poem, photograph from home, handprint or other artifact. The finished scroll will be displayed at the new year-round Seeds of Peace center in East Jerusalem, which opens this September in a building chosen because it straddles the old border between Arab and Jewish sectors.
“We’re excited to finally have a place to offer a year-round program,” Mr. Wallach said. “It’s been very challenging to help more than 1,000 kids maintain camp friendships back home where visiting is difficult, even dangerous. And, of course, we are trying to reach as many other children as possible.”
An interactive compact computer disk called “Teaching Peace” replicates the Seeds of Peace conflict resolution process and will soon be introduced into Israeli, Palestinian and Jordanian school curriculums, Mr. Wallach said.
Through good times and bad, Mr. Asleh keeps in touch with almost 300 Seeds of Peace friends through E-mail. “What we are doing at camp, it changes you so deep,” he said. “To believe that maybe we can make a difference is like music to my spirit and food to my mind.”
Correction: September 12, 1999, Sunday Because of an editing error, an article on Aug. 29 about the Seeds of Peace camp in Kent for Israeli and Palestinian teen-agers described the food incorrectly. Kosher meals are available at the camp, but only on request.
Read Leslie Chess Feller’s article in The New York Times »